Extraordinary marriages don't just happen. They flow from grace-filled, faithful, and fruitful covenants of love. Every marriage, and even preparation for marriage, has its ups and downs. In a world and culture that seems to isolate and criticize, authors Ryan and Mary-Rose Verret proclaim: you are not alone! In these pages the Verrets offer the married and soon-to-be married a program for profound and transformative discipleship. Witness to Love gives married couples the tools and encouragement to share the grace, struggles, joys, and blessings of their marriage with young couples in desperate need of mentors. In Witness to Love, the Verrets issue a challenge to us all. Share your lives, share your heart, share your love. Make disciples!

Messy Beautiful Love delivers an incredible testimony of grace that offers hope for today’s marriages and a spark for rekindling love. Love gets messy. Financial problems, sickness, aging parents, a chronically unhappy spouse . . . trials will inevitably come that threaten your marriage. No matter how long you’ve been married or how strong your relationship is, sooner or later you are going to have a mess to clean up. Messy Beautiful Love is about cleaning up messes God’s way, exchanging your ideas for His, and being prepared for both the best and the worst that marriage has to offer. When you surrender your relationship to God, then and only then will you experience the blessing of marriage as He intended. This is the blessing of obedience. Messy Beautiful Love is an invitation to that obedience. The cynical world says marriages don’t last, but God knows better. Tune out the world and tune in to Him. When you do that, a beautiful marriage is not only possible, it’s inevitable.

A liturgically-based pastoral and practical resource for couples preparing for marriage. It will help them discuss important issues related to communication, finances, reconciliation, sex, spirituality and prayer, and discipleship. It will help ground a couples formation through the lens of the Marriage rite and provide tools for discussion.

Do you feel like hiding when Jehovah’s Witnesses ring your doorbell? Have you tried to convey your faith to them...and gotten nowhere? It’s proven and practical guide which includes questions, answers, conversation starters and other great witnessing tools that will help you speak to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

"Rooted in the lessons of history and the saints and woven together with prayer, Archbishop Emeritus Hughes calls present and future ministers of the Church back to the transformative basics of the priesthood." —From the foreword by Bishop Robert Barron Clerical sexual abuse, COVID-19, declining parishes, and racial unrest—these are some of the many challenges facing Catholic priests and bishops today. Where can they find the wisdom they need to address these and other daunting difficulties? Archbishop Emeritus Hughes draws on the some of the greatest spiritual guides the Church has ever known to offer a vision for contemporary priestly life—Ignatius of Antioch, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and beyond. He also turns to the timeless advice found in great conciliar documents. What emerges from his survey of the past is the understanding that the Catholic priesthood has overcome many trials throughout its history and the confidence that it will do so in our own day by rediscovering the timeless sources of renewal. This book is intended to serve a double purpose. It can be used as a text for seminarians, together with a reader drawn from the cited classics, or as a rich source of spiritual reading for priests and bishops.

Chiara Petrillo was seated in a wheel chair looking lovingly toward Jesus in the tabernacle. Her husband, Enrico, found the courage to ask her a question that he had been holding back. Thinking of Jesus’s phrase, “my yoke is sweet and my burden is light,” he asked: “Is this yoke, this cross, really sweet, as Jesus said?” A smile came across Chiara’s face. She turned to her husband and said in a weak voice: “Yes, Enrico, it is very sweet.” At 28 years old, Chiara passed away, her body ravaged by cancer. The emotional, physical, and spiritual trials of this young Italian mother are not uncommon. It was her joyful and loving response to each that led one cardinal to call her “a saint for our times.” Chiara entrusted her first baby to the blessed Virgin, but felt as though this child was not hers to keep. Soon, it was revealed her daughter had life-threatening abnormalities. Despite universal pressure to abort, Chiara gave birth to a beautiful girl who died within the hour. A year later, the death of her second child came even more quickly. Yet God was preparing their hearts for more—more sorrow and more grace. While pregnant a third time, Chiara developed a malignant tumor. She refused to jeopardize the life of her unborn son by undergoing treatments during the pregnancy. Chiara waited until after Francesco was safely born, and then began the most intense treatments of radiation and chemotherapy, but it was soon clear that the cancer was terminal. Almost immediately after giving birth to Francesco, Chiara’s tumor became terminal and caused her to lose the use of her right eye. Her body was tested, and so was her soul as she suffered through terrible dark nights. She said “yes” to everything God sent her way, becoming a true child of God. And as her days on earth came to an end, Enrico looked down on his wife and said, “If she is going to be with Someone who loves her more than I, why should I be upset?” Each saint has a special charisma, a particular facet of God that is reflected through her. Chiara’s was to be a witness to joy in the face of great adversity, the kind which makes love overflow despite the sorrow from loss and death.

The loving, inclusive life and preaching of Francis of Assisi make him a recognizable and beloved saint across many faith traditions. In the ten-year-anniversary edition of Eager to Love, globally recognized spiritual teacher Richard Rohr, OFM, provides for spiritual seekers a pathway to the inclusivity, freedom, and beauty found in the Christian mystical tradition. As an integrative thinker, Rohr expertly weaves psychological insights and literary and artistic references with Franciscan theology, showing that the rich theological contributions of St. Francis, St. Clare, St. Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus are guiding lights for sincere spiritual seekers.

This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Many sincere, Bible-believing Christians are Calvinists only by default. Thinking that the only choice is between Calvinism (with its presumed doctrine of eternal security) and Arminianism (with its teaching that salvation can be lost), and confident of Christ's promise to keep eternally those who believe in Him, they therefore consider themselves to be Calvinists. It takes only a few simple questions to discover that most Christians are largely unaware of what John Calvin and his early followers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries actually believed and practiced. Nor do they fully understand what most of today's leading Calvinists believe. Although there are disputed variations of the Calvinist doctrine, among its chief proponents (whom we quote extensively in context) there is general agreement on certain core beliefs. Many evangelicals who think they are Calvinists will be surprised to learn of Calvin's belief in salvation through infant baptism and of his grossly un-Christian behavior, at times, as the "Protestant Pope" of Geneva, Switzerland. Most shocking of all, however, is Calvinism's misrepresentation of God, who "is love." It is our prayer that this volume will enable readers to examine more carefully the vital issues involved and to follow God's holy Word­--not man's teachings. "The first edition of this book was greeted by fervent opposition and criticism from Calvinists. In this enlarged and revised edition I have endeavored to respond to the critics." --Dave Hunt

The work of women poets is often overlooked in anthologies, and collections of love poetry are no exception. This delightful and highly original collection shows that on the subject of romantic and sexual love, women can be just as eloquent as men -- if not more so. Here, the bitter and the sweet mingle as women from the last five hundred years write about jealousy, fickleness, exhilaration, the pain of parting, and the transience of love. Revealed is poetry which has been largely invisible since the fifteenth century; surprises from women better known for other things, like Elizabeth I and E. Nesbit; classics old and new from names including Margaret Atwood, Wendy Cope, Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Erica Jong, Amy Lowell, Stevie Smith, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, Adrienne Rich, Katherine Mansfield, George Eliot, and Dorothy Parker.