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The King's Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Wolsey
By Peter J Gwyn. 1990
Proud, greedy, corrupt and driven by overwhelming personal ambition. Such is the traditional image of Thomas Wolsey, Lord Chancellor, Archbishop…
of York, Bishop of Winchester, Abbot of St. Albans, Bishop if Tournai and Papal Legate. It is an image which Peter Gwyn examines, challenges and decisively overturns in this remarkable book.From exceedingly humble beginnings Wolsey rose to a pinnacle of power unsurpassed by any other British commoner. Peter Gwyn explores every aspect of the Cardinal's career - not least his relationship with Henry VIII - and sets it firmly in a vividly recreated Tudor world. The Wolsey who emerges is a man of prodigious energy and ability, a tireless dispenser of justice, an enlightened reformer wholly dedicated to his king and country - a man who has been consistently misrepresented and maligned for four-and-a-half centuries.Journey: A Spiritual Odyssey
By Peter France. 1998
Peter France looks at the various stages of his own spiritual odyssey and talks intimately of his long search for…
knowledge and enlightenment. Warm, lucid, humorous, Journey is grounded in France's own life and experience. He takes us from the beginning of his journey in a small Methodist chapel in Yorkshire, and his first perception of Christianity, through Oxford where he rejected Christianity and became a humanist and a career as a colonial administrative officer in Fiji, to his later position as an investigative reporter for BBC religious television. Finally-and movingly-he writes about his conversion to the Greek Orthodox Church, and describes his baptism at the age of 57 on the Greek island of Patmos by total immersion in a 44 gallon oil drum of lukewarm water. Illuminated by personal anecdote and information by a broad knowledge of different religions and religious experiences, Journey is both immensely engaging, and studded with powerful spiritual insight.Healing Quest: A Journey of Transformation
By Marie Herbert. 1996
When her two daughters were approaching the finish of their education Marie Herbert felt the need to mark the end…
of the child-rearing phase of her life by a rite of passage, a way to find herself a new place in the grand scheme of things. Long drawn to the Native American spiritual tradition, she planned a visit to the United States and an extraordinary journey of personal transformation under the guidance of Native American Healers. However, the end of her time of motherhood coincided tragically with the sudden death of one of her daughters and so her odyssey was to become far sadder and more urgent than she could have imagined. HEALING QUEST is the fascinating description of Marie Herbert's inner and outer journey of the heart. Vivid portraits of the people she met along the way are combined with honest accounts of the change in her feelings - together with ideas about how the readers, too, may learn from what she experienced and so gain insights into his or own life, whether in practical, emotional or spiritual terms.A Hermit in the Himalayas: The Classic Work of Mystical Quest
By Paul Brunton. 1983
'The introductory account of Mr. Brunton's pony-back journey up the mountainside has real charm. One of his most interesting chapters…
gives a practical-minded consideration to the probable future of Tibet.' New York TimesPaul Brunton was one of a very small number of his generation to travel in India and Tibet so extensively at a time when very few were doing so with such insight and discernment. His journalistic skills produced magnificent descriptions of the snowy peaks and high-desert landscapes of the Himalayan region, but it was the lessons he learned from the holy men he met on his journey that transformed him into one of the great interpreters of the East. In this magnificent spirituality classic, he explains that we all need 'oases of calm in a world of storm', no matter what era we are living in, and that to retreat from our everyday lives for a while is not weakness but strength. By taking the trouble to discover the deep silence within us we will find the benefits of being linked to an 'infinite power, an infinite wisdom, an infinite goodness'. A Hermit In The Himalayas is a fascinating blend of travel writing and profound spiritual experience. As we accompany the author on his journey through the vast Himalayas ranges towards Mount Kailas in Tibet, he also shows us an even more remarkable - and timeless - inner path which will help us cope with the ups and downs of our contemporary world.Composed and published while John Bunyan (1628-1688) was in prison for his religious principles, Grace Abounding is an extraordinary spiritual…
autobiography. It was written in an age when religious radicalism was regarded as socially subversive, and is a haunting, often harrowing and ultimately inspiring account of his inner life: his long struggle with and eventual triumph over doubt and despair, his spiritual regeneration and his subsequent emergence as a preacher and writer of great imaginative power. God and Satan are the chief protagonists in Bunyan's drama, existing not as theological concepts but as terrifyingly immediate adversaries in the competition for his soul. Yet he finds his spiritual defences in the Bible, and Grace Abounding charts his passionate and imaginative involvement with this ultimate source of wisdom.Confessions
By Saint Augustine. 1961
'Give me chastity and continence, but not yet'The son of a pagan father and a Christian mother, Saint Augustine spent…
his early years torn between conflicting world-views. The Confessions, written when he was in his forties, recounts how, slowly and painfully, he came to turn away from his youthful ideas and licentious lifestyle to become one of Christianity's most influential thinkers. A remarkably honest spiritual autobiography, the Confessions also addresses fundamental issues of Christian doctrine, and many of the prayers and meditations it includes are still an integral part of the practice of the faith today.Translated with an Introduction by R. S. PINE-COFFINAquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker
By F. Copleston. 1955
Aquinas (1224-74) lived at a time when the Christian West was opening up to a wealth of Greek and Islamic…
philosophical speculation. An embodiment of the thirteenth-century ideal of a unified interpretation of reality (in which philosophy and theology work together in harmony), Aquinas was remarkable for the way in which he used and developed this legacy of ancient thought—an achievement which led his contemporaries to regard him as an advanced thinker. Father Copleston's lucid and stimulating book examines this extraordinary man—whose influence is perhaps greater today than in his own lifetime—and his thought, relating his ideas wherever possible to problems as they are discussed today.My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah: A Memoir
By Denis Hirson. 2022
A &“beautifully written, funny and deeply moving&” memoir about a son&’s reckoning with his father&’s political idealism, set against the…
menacing backdrop of apartheid-era South Africa (Finuala Dowling, author of The Man Who Loved Crocodile Tamers)A bestselling South African writer known for tackling history and memory finally makes his American debutWitty and deeply poignant, My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah is a breathtaking account of one man being confronted by his past and, ultimately, how his daughter proved to be the key in understanding his own father.Recreating 1960s Johannesburg through his adolescent eyes, bestselling South African author Denis Hirson gradually reveals the details of his extraordinary 13th birthday as he explores the familial and political divisions in Apartheid South Africa that weighed on him and his developing consciousness of his Jewish heritage.My Thirty-Minute Bar Mitzvah is a gem of a book about becoming a man. It&’s also a valuable account of a forgotten time of white, Jewish activists, their families, their community, and most importantly, their children, who had to stumble through life in the aftermath of their commitment to racial justice.Set in 1980s Birmingham, England, a piercing memoir about the liberating power of a scientific view of the world. Tracy…
King was raised in a house of contradictions—her family was happy and creative, yet shadowed by debt, phobias, her father’s alcoholism, and the illusory promises of a born-again Christian church. The uneasy balance of the King household was irrevocably upended on a rainy spring night in 1988, when her father was killed by teenagers just blocks from their public housing estate. Her mother’s dysfunctional reliance on the church deepened following the tragedy, and King, suffering from undiagnosed anxiety, stopped attending school. The account of her father’s death remained hazy, made worse by the fact that four of the accused teenagers—neighborhood boys she could not avoid—were never charged. What could have triggered such an act of aggression? Clinging to hearsay and what little information she had from the police, King allowed her imagination to fill in the rest. Over the years, in a bid to balm her grief and gaps in formal education, King journeyed through multiple belief systems: she distanced herself from fundamentalism, searching for clarity instead in the occult, paranormal beliefs, and conspiracy theories. Amid the chaos of her coming of age, she stumbled upon a copy of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World on the shelves of a Birmingham bookshop —a discovery that proved transformative. Sagan’s sage caveat, “But I could be wrong,” became King’s guiding light, empowering her to confront her demons. An eloquently written and often sharply funny account that is ever sensitive to the fallibility of memory and the nuances of truth, Learning to Think is a resounding battle cry for the value of education and the freedom to think critically, imaginatively, and for oneself.A Ministry of Risk: Writings on Peace and Nonviolence
By Philip Berrigan. 2024
Experience the powerful legacy of Philip Berrigan’s nonviolent resistance to war and empireFrom the battlefields of World War II to…
the front lines of peace activism, Philip Berrigan evolved from soldier to scholar, priest to political prisoner. Confronting the fundamental nature of America’s military-focused culture, Berrigan took an unyielding stance against societal evils—war, systemic racism, unchecked materialism, and the baleful presence of nuclear weapons. Imprisoned by his government and ostracized by his Church, Berrigan’s life is a courageous example of nonviolent resistance and liberation in the face of overwhelming odds.A Ministry of Risk is the definitive collection of Philip Berrigan’s writings. Authorized by the Berrigan family and arranged chronologically, these writings depict the transformation of one revolutionary soul while also providing a firsthand account of a nation grappling with its martial obsessions.Threading the vibrant fabric of history with autobiographical insights, introspective theology, and a clarion call to activism, A Ministry of Risk offers both a living manifesto of nonviolent resistance and a journal of spiritual reflection by one of the 20th century’s most prophetic voices.El Barco de los Milagros
By Brian O'Hare. 2018
NO CREERÁS LO QUE ESTÁS LEYENDO, PERO DE LA PRIMERA A LA ÚLTIMA DE LAS PALABRAS SON REALES ¿Crees en…
los milagros? ¿Crees en la posesión demoníaca? ¿Crees en los exorcismos? Dos médicos declararo que una niña con daños cerebrales irreparables estaba muerta. A día de hoy, es una adolescente sana. Un joven al que un camión le había aplastado la columna quedó en un estado de parálisis irreparable. Ahora, juega al fútbol con sus amigos. La ruptura de una maldición que había perseguido a más de cinco generaciones de una familia. Personas tormentadas por demonios que se han librado de su yugo. ¿Cómo se producían estos milagros? ¿Qué tienen en común? Tienen a John Gillespie en común. ¿Quién es? ¿Cómo ha obtenido ese extraordinario don? El barco de los milagros cuenta la historia de John. Pero hace mucho más que eso. Sí, el libro esencialmente se enfoca en los milagros. Sí, contiene muchas historias extraordinarias de sanación y liberación. Sí, se enfoca fuertemente en la guerra espiritual en la que tantos cristianos participan sin tener conciencia de sus peligros. Pero el libro va al corazón mismo de lo que se necesita para encontrar la curación y la liberación. Habla de los obstáculos y dificultades que se interponen en el camino de la verdadera oración de curación. Revela las muchas trampas que acechan en prácticas de curación aparentemente inocentes. Explica en detalle los serios peligros que sustentan muchas terapias New Age aparentemente beneficiosas. Y ofrece muchos ejemplos de los tipos de oraciones y estilos de vida que pueden brindar sanación al cuerpo y a la mente. Incluso puede cambiar vidas que se están cayendo a pedazos Este relato verdadero de la vida de John Gillespie, de los milagros y liberaciones que siguen a sus oraciones, te sorprenderá. Millones de personas aman escuchar y leer sobre milagros. El libro de la hermana Briege McKenna Miracles Do Happen seCloistered: My Years as a Nun
By Catherine Coldstream. 2024
"A profoundly moving memoir which gripped me . . . It’s about spirituality and asceticism and silence and sisterhood, but…
also about how flawed human beings can abuse power and how hermetically sealed communities, which should care for and protect their members, can be dangerously vulnerable to threats from inside their walls.” - Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The Porpoise and othersAn astonishing memoir of twelve years as a contemplative nun in a silent monastery.Cloistered takes the reader deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery as it approaches the third Millennium and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty silent women, believing she is trusting herself to God. As the beauty and mystery of an ancient way of life enfold her, she surrenders herself wholly to its power, quite unaware of the complexity and dangers that lie ahead.Cut off from the wider world for decades, the community has managed to evade accountability to any authority beyond itself. When Sister Catherine realises that a mesmerising cult of the personality, with the distortions it entails, has replaced the ancient ideal of religious obedience, she is faced with a dilemma. Will she submit to this, or will she be forced to speak out?An exploration of the limits of trust, Cloistered shows us how far youthful idealism can take us along the road of self-surrender, and of how much harm is done when institutional flaws go unacknowledged. Catherine’s honest account of her time in the monastery – and her dramatic flight from it – is both a love song to a lost community and an exploration of what is most compelling, yet most potentially destructive when closed human groups become laws unto themselves.Rescued from ISIS: The Gripping True Story of How a Father Saved His Son
By Dimitri Bontinck. 2017
Rescued from ISIS is the inspiring and terrifying tale of one man's journey to the Middle East to save his…
child from radical Islam, and its surprising worldwide repercussions.Dimitri Bontinck lived every parent's worst nightmare. His teenage son, introduced to Islam by his girlfriend, fell into the clutches of a radical mosque. Dimitri watched helplessly as his son, Jay, transformed from a gentle boy to a soldier in training, wearing traditional robes and following a strict diet. Completely brainwashed, Jay snuck out of the house and traveled to Syria, all but vanishing. Too late, Dimitri learned that their country, Belgium, was the leading hotbed of Islamic radicalization. Large numbers of teenagers were being lured into this world and expertly indoctrinated into radical Islam. One by one, they disappeared into the Middle East, most never to be seen again.With no one to help him, Dimitri--a white, Christian-raised atheist--set off on his own to save his son. Using only his military training, a lot of courage, and a little luck, he gradually embedded himself deeper and deeper into the Middle East. After months of searching and several close calls—including being thrown in a jail cell and beaten—he was able to find his son and bring him home. The world was shocked at his unprecedented success, and he started receiving pleas from families around the world, asking that he rescue their children, as well. Increasingly fearful for his own life but unable to ignore these cries for help, Dimitri accepted his newfound role as The Jihadi Hunter.The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow
By Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner. 2008
True story from the major motion picture "In Darkness," official 2012 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film.In 1943,…
with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of Polish Jews daringly sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, shares one of the most intimate, harrowing and ultimately triumphant tales of survival to emerge from the Holocaust. The Girl in the Green Sweater is Chiger's harrowing first-person account of the fourteen months she spent with her family in the fetid, underground sewers of Lvov.The Girl in the Green Sweater is also the story of Leopold Socha, the group's unlikely savior. A Polish Catholic and former thief, Socha risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food, medicine, and supplies. A moving memoir of a desperate escape and life under unimaginable circumstances, The Girl in the Green Sweater is ultimately a tale of intimate survival, friendship, and redemption.The Universe Is Calling You: Connecting with Essence to Live with Positive Energy, Love, and Power
By Char Margolis, Victoria St. George. 2020
In The Universe is Calling You: Connecting with Essence to Live with Positive Energy, Love, and Power, America’s beloved psychic,…
Char Margolis, introduces readers to the vital energy of Essence. Essence is the fundamental, universal, loving energy that connects the entire universe and all its living things. This universal loving goodness binds us all together in an intimate and powerful way. Char shows readers how to tap into the power of Essence and draw strength and wisdom from these deep, fundamental connections. Using the universal presence of the Essence, readers will learn: - The truth about living and dying - The 5 sources of power and how to manifest them - About spirits and angels and how to benefit from their aide - How to help departed loved ones find peace - Ways to ward off negative and harmful energies - And much more… With Char as a guide, readers will explore the vast and connected world of Essence and delve into their own inherent spiritual awareness.Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
By Natalie Zemon Davis. 2006
An engrossing study of Leo Africanus and his famous book, which introduced Africa to European readersAl-Hasan al-Wazzan--born in Granada to…
a Muslim family that in 1492 went to Morocco, where he traveled extensively on behalf of the sultan of Fez--is known to historians as Leo Africanus, author of the first geography of Africa to be published in Europe (in 1550). He had been captured by Christian pirates in the Mediterranean and imprisoned by the pope, then released, baptized, and allowed a European life of scholarship as the Christian writer Giovanni Leone. In this fascinating new book, the distinguished historian Natalie Zemon Davis offers a virtuoso study of the fragmentary, partial, and often contradictory traces that al-Hasan al-Wazzan left behind him, and a superb interpretation of his extraordinary life and work. In Trickster Travels, Davis describes all the sectors of her hero's life in rich detail, scrutinizing the evidence of al-Hasan's movement between cultural worlds; the Islamic and Arab traditions, genres, and ideas available to him; and his adventures with Christians and Jews in a European community of learned men and powerful church leaders. In depicting the life of this adventurous border-crosser, Davis suggests the many ways cultural barriers are negotiated and diverging traditions are fused.Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood
By Barbara Wilson. 1997
From Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christian Science, to Deepak Chopra, Americans have struggled with the…
connection between health and happiness. Barbara Wilson was taught by her Christian Scientist family that there was no sickness or evil, and that by maintaining this belief she would be protected. But such beliefs were challenged when Wilson's own mother died of breast cancer after deciding not to seek medical attention, having been driven mad by the contradiction between her religion and her reality. In this perceptive and textured memoir Blue Windows, Wilson surveys the complex history of Christian Science and the role of women in religion and healing.Spiritual writer Thomas Merton is the most influential American Catholic author of the twentieth century. Despite appearances to the contrary,…
in 1966 he was a troubled, lonely monk. Only when the suffering Merton fell madly in love with a student nurse, a forbidden, erotic affair condemned by the Catholic Church, would he discover whether his devotion to God was stronger than his dedication to the woman he called "a miracle in my life." Truly an inspirational story based on Merton's personal journals, new information and sources such as fellow monks, Beneath the Mask of Holiness presents a unique portrayal of the famous man, one never revealed in its entirety before.Sex and Shopping: An Autobiography
By Judith Krantz. 2000
Dear Reader, As I was about to start my eleventh novel, I abruptly realized that I was making a huge…
mistake. On the verge of launching into the imagined world of a twenty-eight-year-old, I felt an intense need to tell another story, the story of a woman I know through and through...a woman with more wealth of experience, a woman who's seen more real glamour, known more fascinating people, lived in a world of more sophistication, and arrived at more hard-won maturity than that twenty-eight-year-old could hope for---in short, my own story. I've tried to remain as unknowable as possible, the better to let my heroines hold the stage, but now I was ready to tell the truth about myself, with no holding back. I've had a different life from that of the majority of women of my generation and background. While I seemed like another "nice Jewish girl," underneath that convenient cover I'd traveled my own, inner-directed path and had many a spicy and secret adventure. I grew up in a complicated tangle of privilege, family problems, and tormented teenaged sexuality. After a riotous education at Wellesley, my life was turned upside down by a glorious year in Paris, marked by an intense but ill-starred romance. I spent the next half-decade in New York, sowing lighthearted wild oats until I finally met my true love, to whom I've been married for forty-six years.When I was fifty I had an utterly unexpected, almost unbelievable success as a number-one bestselling novelist that has continued for book after book. Challenging, lucky, exciting, and often devastatingly askew, my life seems to have been lived under a wild and antic star.I've had as much amazing fun as my heroines, and here's the book to prove it. Judith KrantzForager: Field Notes for Surviving a Family Cult: a Memoir
By Michelle Dowd. 2023
A moving, heartbreaking, and inspiring true story of the author&’s escape from an apocalyptic cult—and the deep understanding of the…
natural world that helped her find freedom. My family prepared me for the end of the world, but I know how to survive on what the earth yields. Michelle Dowd grew up on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest, born into an ultra-religious cult—the Field, as members called it—run by her grandfather, who believed that his chosen followers must prepare themselves to survive doomsday. Bound by the group&’s patriarchal rules and literal interpretation of the Bible, Michelle and her siblings lived a life of deprivation, isolated from Outsiders and starved for both love and food. She was forced to learn the skills necessary to battle hunger, thirst, and cold; she learned to trust animals more than humans; and most important, she learned how to survive by foraging for what she needed. And as Michelle got older, she realized she had the strength to break free. Focus on what will sustain, not satiate you, she would tell herself. Use everything. Waste nothing. Get to know the intricacies of the land like the intricacies of your body. And so she did. With haunting and stark language, and illustrations of edible plants and their uses opening each chapter, Forager is a fierce and empowering coming-of-age story and a timely meditation on the ways in which harnessing nature&’s gifts can lead to our freedom.