The Old Priest is a book of transformations. From the cigar-smoke-and-mirrors world of casino life, to the collection's title character morphing into a goat-man before the narrator's eyes, to a family drama upended by a miniature dinosaur in the backyard, Anthony Wallace writes about life-changing events. The characters seek to escape their earthly boundaries through artifice and fantasy, and those boundaries can be as elegant and fragile as a martini glass or as hardscrabble as an Indian reservation. In these eight vividly detailed short stories we encounter cheating husbands, neurotic housewives, out-of-control teenagers, desperate gamblers, deluded alcoholics, and a host of others who would like a chance at something more. Some face the consequences of their actions, while others simply begin to see what they've been missing all along. Through wry, ironic prose—and what feels like firsthand experience—Wallace describes a comic and often misguided search for self-knowledge in the most unlikely locations—like the Emerald City, a low-rent gambling den where a cocktail waitress dressed as an X-rated Dorothy offers gamblers more than a Scotch on the rocks; or the Bastille Hotel-Casino, where a dealer dressed as an eighteenth century footman deals five-dollar blackjack to a reminiscing Holocaust survivor. Occasionally a real demon appears, but the collection is mostly about personal demons and the possibility of exorcising them. The stories in The Old Priest have to do with time and memory, and they convincingly open out beyond ordinary daily time to reveal something else—the present moment, perhaps, but a larger, more mysterious conception of it.

In One Happy Old Priest, Father Thomas Sullivan looks back on his eighty years as a catholic, a life that includes both family and scores of fine seminarians, priests, nuns, and parishioners. With an honest and rollicking writing style, Father Sullivan recreates moments that stand out in his childhood, seminary education, priest training, and life as a foreign missionary and pastor stateside. One Happy Old Priest is one mans look at how the church has cultivated, preserved, and navigated decades of sometimes unwelcome change. The volume includes photographs of family, priests, nuns, and parishioners. An appendix lists Columban Fathers mentioned in the text, a testament of the many who dedicated their lives to the service of the church. The epilogue draws attention to the man Father Sullivan believes represents the best of what the church has to offer, then and now.

When a young priest makes some bad choices, it becomes a blight on his vocation that follows him all his life. Father Bernard made some bad choices. Jennifer was one. Helen, another, although Helen began as an innocent mistake that got out of hand. After twenty years as an assistant pastor at Immaculate Conception Church on the west side of Chicago, Father Bernards vocation has deteriorated, not only because of his moral lapses but also from its lack of substance and value. His duties have become tedious and distressing; the sin, dying, dishonesty, and infidelity drains him. Deepening his distress is his life at a rundown, disintegrating parish, with an outdated liturgy and a pastor, Father McElroy, who is a rude, spiteful, and offensive old man. His attempt to save himself from his cheerless, desolate life leads him down a dangerous path, one that puts him in direct conflict with his vocation. Can he salvage his failing vocation and repair his troubled soul? Can he find the strength to restore the spiritual meaning and substance that once guided him as a priest?

Thrilling action, suspense and mystery abound in this historical novel, inspired by the books of Kings and Chronicles in the Old Testament of the Bible. Highlighting the latter days of King Solomon in the city of Jerusalem in Ancient Israel, the novel is a real page-turner that moves with the speed of an arrow. In addition to the aged King Solomon, Biblical characters include Jeroboam, a former governor in Israel, accused of plotting against Solomon and now exiled in Ancient Egypt; Ahijah, a wandering prophet, a friend and former servant of Jeroboam; Iddo, a blind seer; Rehoboam, Solomon's favorite son and designated heir; Zabud, Solomon's long-time friend; Qoheleth, a fanatical supporter of Jeroboam; Gallim, the mayor of Bethel; Berechiah, captain of the Bethel town guard; Nathan, the prophet; King David and his son, Adonijah; the girl, Abishag; Ethan, the sage; and Azariah, the young and ambitious High Priest.

Truth is stranger than fiction. And nowhere in literature is it so apparent as in this classic work, the Autobiography of a Hunted Priest. This autobiography of a Jesuit priest in Elizabethan England is a most remarkable document and John Gerard, its author, a most remarkable priest in a time when to be a Catholic in England courted imprisonment and torture; to be a priest was treason by act of Parliament. Smuggled into England after his ordination and dumped on a Norfolk beach at night, Fr. Gerard disguised himself as a country gentleman and traveled about the country saying Mass, preaching and ministering to the faithful in secret - always in constant danger. The houses in which he found shelter were frequently raided by "priest hunters"; priest-holes, hide-outs and hair-breadth escapes were part of his daily life. He was finally caught and imprisoned, and later removed to the infamous Tower of London where he was brutally tortured. The stirring account of his escape, by means of a rope thrown across the moat, is a daring and magnificent climax to a true story which, for sheer narrative power and interest, far exceeds any fiction. Here is an accurate and compelling picture of England when Catholics were denied their freedom to worship and endured vicious persecution and often martyrdom. But more than the story of a single priest, the Autobiography of a Hunted Priest epitomizes the constant struggle of all human beings through the ages to maintain their freedom. It is a book of courage and of conviction whose message is most timely for our age. John Gerard, S.J., was a Jesuit missionary priest in Elizabethan England when the Catholic Church was under heavy persecution by the government. The footnotes provided by the translator prove the absolute facts of his account in this book, which is corroborated even by the files of the Elizabethan secret police. "In my early years in the Society of Jesus, I recall that this book was read at my table... On first listening to it, the book also struck me as describing a persecution of Catholics that could not happen here. One is no longer quite so sure. It may, be a very up-to-date book in its own way." -James V. Schall, S.J., from the Foreword

Reprint of the original, first published in 1837.

Father John is the parish priest of Our Lady of Sorrows in Westonville, but when the ordered tranquillity of his life is shattered by a stranger walking into the confessional on Ash Wednesday, he finds himself on a Lenten journey of increasing dread and horror. And when he is confronted with memories of his historic abuse, John discovers that what he thought to be forgiven and forgotten still lurks deep in his memory. A pattern of murders unveils terrifying associations between the stranger’s appearances, John’s own past, and the murders. Could the stranger be the cardinal who abused him during his time in Rome, and who is rumoured to have died in the 9/11 attacks? Is he a ghost emanating from the same world as Sarah, the ghost of a little girl whose benign appearances are a protective presence in John’s life? Or is the man in the confessional not really dead? Through the increasing traumas of Lent, John struggles with the temptations and fears that begin to assail him wherever he turns. The Good Priest is a story of faith and doubt, of real and imagined hauntings, of the epic dramas that lurk beneath the surface of an ordinary Catholic parish, and of the devastating power of violence and terror to rip apart relationships, friendships and loyalties. At once a thriller and a theological exploration, the book takes the reader into a world of altered realities where nothing is quite what it seems...

In the book, “THE PRIEST” you will find details of Julia’s SPIRIT JOURNEY from her life as an Ancient Mayan Priest of Chichen Itza. 2000 years old secrets revealed: how he performed ceremonies and rituals on top of the pyramid, the Spirit world, sacrifices, symbols and the life of the ancient Maya people in Chichen Itza – a Message from them to the present-day civilization passed on to us. Meeting with God and angels, contacts with ancient Goddesses, Persian Goddesses, new Atharvan images, Zarathustra, ghosts, visiting a real Buddhist temple ... are all in Ancient Priest of Chichen Itza reincarnated by Julia SvadiHatra. http://www.ameliareborn.com/