The Pieta prayer book is a timeless masterpiece of traditional Catholic prayers - a wonderful little compendium of prayers and devotions including those of St. Bridget of Sweden and the 15 Miraculous prayers given to her, prayers to St. Michael, prayers said for the dying, spiritual communion, for souls in purgatory, and many more.Also known as The Little Blue Prayer Book, this prayer book is an effort to present the beautiful truths and devotions of our Roman Catholic Faith, in order that those who use these prayers devoutly may obtain greater grace to better serve God. The book draws particularly on that gigantic source of God's goodness and mercy - a source which is virtually untapped. Furthermore, there are utilized some texts that come from private revelations which also can spur us on to receive available graces by emphasizing even a deeper devotion to God.Prayers include:The 15 St. Bridget Prayers, Ave Maris Stella, Prayer to St. Joseph over 1900 yrs. old, Hail Mary of Gold, Three Very Beautiful Prayers, Prayer to the Infant of Prague, Prayers after Mass and Communion, The Rosary and Scapular, Short Way of The CrossPrayer to the Shoulder Wound of ChristThe Spiritual CommunionPrayer or Blessing Against StormsThe AngelusChaplet of St. MichaelSalve ReginaSt. ThereseThe Golden ArrowThe MagnificatLitany of HumilityEfficacious Novena to Sacred Heartand many, many more!

As Albert Camus's famous dictum has it, the only truly important philosophical question is suicide, or whether or not life is worth living. Now, in Pieta, his latest collection of essays, George Klein -- distinguished biologist, writer, Holocaust survivor, and humanist -- faces this question head on, in a series of meditations on subjects ranging from the misuses of science to the vital importance of art, music, and literature to surviving catastrophes like the Holocaust and AIDS. Pieta is a passionate book of scientific and personal ethics, inspired by tragic events that resonate in the consciousness of each of us.Klein examines the thoughts of a number of people both famous and obscure -- whose lives may provide some sort of answer to Camus's philosophical question. One essay, for example, deals with the tormented and unstable Atilla Jozsef, one of Hungary's greatest poets and now a national hero. Other figures from the past appear, too: fellow Holocaust survivor Rudolf Vrba, one of the first people to escape from Auschwitz; Simon Srebnik, a teenaged Pole who survived the Nazis by working on their riverboats, singing sentimental ballads for them; the geneticist Benno Multler-Hill, whose meeting with Klein leads to a fascinating discussion of the role of German scientists in preparing the conceptual underpinnings of the Nazi genocide.Klein moves on to a more general elaboration of the misuses of science, from CIA-sponsored LSD experiments to medical experimentation by the Japanese in Manchuria, and ultimately to a thoughtful reconsideration of his own role and responsibility as a scientist. He uses his extensive medical background to present a discussion of the processes of the biology of individuality, concluding with an extended and impassioned look at AIDS, as both a biological problem and a situation that will require the utmost pieta from each of us.Born in prewar Hungary, George Klein was raised in Budapest in an intellectually prominent Jewish family. He has led the Department of Tumor Biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm for more than three decades.

These are the last days of 1999. At St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as the world waits for the new millennium, Lucy, a young Australian woman looks up at Michelangelo’s Pietà behind its pane of bullet-proof glass; a red kabbalah string circles her wrist. She has come with the mysterious parcel her recently deceased mother asked her to bring to the box marked POSTE VATICANE. But before Rome there is Saint-Cloud. Here, on the outskirts of Paris, Lucy works as an au pair for Jean-Claude and his wife Mathilde. When Mathilde leaves for Central Australia to research the Aboriginal artist Kumanjayi, Lucy’s circle of contacts becomes smaller and strangely intimate: Jean-Claude, the baby Felix for whom she cares, and the couple’s charismatic friend Sébastien, a marble restorer. Yet Lucy’s homesickness for Australia and its vastness haunts her world, surfacing in the memories of her mother, the Australian garden at Empress Joséphine’s Malmaison, and Mathilde’s letters from Alice Springs. Lucy’s mother, Jude, who was a nun in the 1970s, once warned her daughter ‘to be careful what she wished for’. It is a caution that marks but rarely alters the choices these characters make. With lushness and tenderness, and revelation, Fitzgerald’s unforgettable novel Pietà exquisitely captures the glorious and imperfect relationships between parents and children, between art and life. ‘Vivid, clever and moving: Pietà is a timely meditation on art icons, iconoclasm and the mysteries of love and time.’ — Gail Jones, award-winning author of Our Shadows

Pieta`: Song of the Blessed Virgin is the culminating volume of a master poet, who has charted his own truth and passage through the thicket of lesser work, of a host of contemporaries with limited pith and vision, venal ambition, a dogged tendency to measure themselves against peers and seldom the truly great. Witness here some sample rejections: "Your work has great power and mounting intensity but takes us further than we care to follow." "We can't publish this, but I'd like to meet you." "Your poem ['The Hitler Sonata'] would seep through the adjacent pages of our magazine and set fire to them." "Your work is too ambitious for our purposes." "Peaks and valleys merge; the mind feels blitzed." "I question that you'd dedicate this poem to a human being, let alone a woman." "I must reject this. My question to myself is whether I would have dared publish this even if it were Milton's." "We do not publish poetry [in response to 'Still Falls the Rain, ' a novel]." The full scope of this poet cannot easily be assessed, for he has spent 34 years not simply healing himself through his work but surviving [he is 68] as well. Aside from abundant skill, his paramount strength is an ability to stare directly into what most of us avoid at all cost, the very dark, the cauldron of existence. There are few, perhaps none, like him. Should they exist, they "also stand and wait." In the end, should the English language hold, time will assuredly be on their side. If there is greatness, it is, in fact, patience before the Fact.

This book offers a fresh perspective on Michelangelo’s well-known masterpiece, the Vatican Pietà, by tracing the shifting meaning of the work of art over time. Lisa M. Rafanelli chronicles the object history of the Vatican Pietà and the active role played by its many reproductions. The sculpture has been on continuous view for over 500 years, during which time its cultural, theological, and artistic significance has shifted. Equally important is the fact that over its long life it has been relocated numerous times and has also been reproduced in images and objects produced both during Michelangelo’s lifetime and long after, described here as artistic progeny: large-scale, unique sculpted variants, smaller-scale statuettes, plaster and bronze casts, and engraved prints. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, early modern studies, religion, Christianity, and theology.

The image of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ in her lap caught the popular imagination in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Forsyth, Curator Emeritus of Medieval Art at The Metropolitan Museum, surveys 167 Pieta sculptures, examining the image's rise, spread, and significance and focusing on the intriguingly diverse depictions of the Virgin's emotional state, as well as other distinctive regional variations. In addition, written sources of the Pieta image and its references in mystical writings are discussed. A catalogue provides summary information about some 1,250 Pietas. Includes 200 bandw illustrations and five maps. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Discover why mercy is the mission of everyone in the Church! This is the handbook that has introduced millions of souls to the life-changing message that brings hope to a hurting world. It covers every aspect of the authentic Divine Mercy message and devotion - from the Feast and Hour of Great Mercy to the Chaplet and Novena, as well as selected prayers from the Diary of Saint Faustina.

One man's search for the Holy Grail, and his deepening involvement with an ancient society whose web reaches into every corner of society. His quest takes him into and beyond the practises of witchcraft, into ancient crypts and finally on a hunt for the very tomb of Adam.

The twelfth volume of poems in the Walt McDonald First-Book Series, Gregory Fraser's Strange Pietà is a compelling exploration of illness and family life, memory and desire, friendship and loss. A major focus of the collection is the poet's relationship to his brother Jonathan, who was born with spina bifida, a disease that rendered him both physically and mentally disabled. In rich and often wrenching detail, Fraser describes the emotional turmoil, familiar dysfunction, and complex social responses arising from the birth of a handicapped child.The book examines cultural standards of normalcy, and uncovers those aspects of the self and others that are often considered freakish, unnatural, or "monstrous." What emerges is a poetry of poignancy and intellectual rigor, of private discoveries and larger philosophical questions about faith, beauty, and the redemptive power of art.The various other poems in the volume frequently take up disturbing subjects from domestic abuse to violent global conflict, from the death of a parent to the breakup of a close friend's marriage. By turns urgent, tender, skeptical, and wry, Fraser's work displays a complexity of thought with a clarity of language and imagery.A two-time finalist for the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Strange Pietà is, according to Robert Phillips, "an important debut." Phillips also writes, "This book, from beginning to end, shows the hand of one who has mastered his craft and lived long enough to have something to say." James Olney of The Southern Review describes Strange Pietà as "a resounding triumph of strictly ordered emotion."

The main character gets entangled into a world of corporate scheming and greed, sinking ever deeper into Faustian deals. Nadia is his long lost love, Croatia his lost homeland; Paris a symbol of his expired youth and a graveyard of his sentimental expectations. Disoriented and alone he looks for solutions in numbers and symmetries only to realize that 'nothing is real and duality is within.' This autobiographical novel takes place mainly in France, but it also takes us to Warszaw, Casablanca, Rome, Zagreb, Shanghai, Dallas, Strasbourg. The satanic culmination takes place in the global capital of fakery, Las Vegas.