Download or read book Building the Benedict Option written by Leah Libresco and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building the Benedict Option is a combination spiritual memoir and practical handbook for Christians who want to build communities of prayer, socialization, and evangelization in the places where they live and work. Beginning when the author was a new convert, she desired more communal prayer and fellowship than weekly Mass could provide. She surveyed her friends--busy, young, urban professionals like herself--and created unique enriching or supportive experiences that matched their desires and schedules. The result was a less lonely and more boisterous spiritual and social life. No Catholic Martha Stewart, Libresco is frank about how she plans events that allow her to feed thirty people on a Friday night without feeling exhausted. She is honest about the obstacles to prayer and the challenge to make it inviting and unobtrusive. Above all, she communicates the joy she has experienced since discovering ways to open her home (even when it was only a small studio apartment). The reader will close this book with four or five ideas for events to try over the next few weeks, along with the tools to make them fruitful. From film nights to picnics in the park to resume-writing evenings, there are plenty of ideas to choose from and loads of encouragement to make more room in one's life for others.
Download or read book The Benedict Option written by Rod Dreher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Already the most discussed and most important religious book of the decade." —David Brooks In this controversial bestseller, Rod Dreher calls on American Christians to prepare for the coming Dark Age by embracing an ancient Christian way of life. From the inside, American churches have been hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseudo–Christianity. From the outside, they are beset by challenges to religious liberty in a rapidly secularizing culture. Keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House may have bought a brief reprieve from the state’s assault, but it will not stop the West’s slide into decadence and dissolution. Rod Dreher argues that the way forward is actually the way back—all the way to St. Benedict of Nursia. This sixth-century monk, horrified by the moral chaos following Rome’s fall, retreated to the forest and created a new way of life for Christians. He built enduring communities based on principles of order, hospitality, stability, and prayer. His spiritual centers of hope were strongholds of light throughout the Dark Ages, and saved not just Christianity but Western civilization. Today, a new form of barbarism reigns. Many believers are blind to it, and their churches are too weak to resist. Politics offers little help in this spiritual crisis. What is needed is the Benedict Option, a strategy that draws on the authority of Scripture and the wisdom of the ancient church. The goal: to embrace exile from mainstream culture and construct a resilient counterculture. The Benedict Option is both manifesto and rallying cry for Christians who, if they are not to be conquered, must learn how to fight on culture war battlefields like none the West has seen for fifteen hundred years. It's for all mere Christians—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—who can read the signs of the times. Neither false optimism nor fatalistic despair will do. Only faith, hope, and love, embodied in a renewed church, can sustain believers in the dark age that has overtaken us. These are the days for building strong arks for the long journey across a sea of night.
Download or read book Arriving at Amen written by Leah Libresco and published by Ave Maria Press. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2012, media outlets from CNN to EWTN announced that Leah Libresco, a gifted young intellectual, columnist, and prolific blogger on the Atheist channel on Patheos, was converting to Catholicism. In Arriving at Amen, Libresco uses the rigorous rationality that defined her Atheism to tell the story behind that very personal journey and to describe the seven forms of Catholic prayer that guided her to embrace a joyful life of faith. As a Yale graduate, Libresco launched her writing career by blogging about science, literature, mathematics, and morality from a distinctively secular perspective. Over time, encounters with friends and associates caused her to concede the reasonableness of belief in God in theory, though not yet in practice. In Arriving at Amen, Libresco uniquely describes the second part of her spiritual journey, in which she encountered God through seven classic Catholic forms of prayer—Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina, examen, intercessory prayer, the Rosary, confession, and the Mass. Examining each practice through the intellectual lens of literature, math, and art, Libresco reveals unexpected glimpses of beauty and truth in the Catholic Church that will be appreciated by the curious and convinced alike.
Download or read book Live Not by Lies written by Rod Dreher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of The Benedict Option draws on the wisdom of Christian survivors of Soviet persecution to warn American Christians of approaching dangers. For years, émigrés from the former Soviet bloc have been telling Rod Dreher they see telltale signs of "soft" totalitarianism cropping up in America--something more Brave New World than Nineteen Eighty-Four. Identity politics are beginning to encroach on every aspect of life. Civil liberties are increasingly seen as a threat to "safety". Progressives marginalize conservative, traditional Christians, and other dissenters. Technology and consumerism hasten the possibility of a corporate surveillance state. And the pandemic, having put millions out of work, leaves our country especially vulnerable to demagogic manipulation. In Live Not By Lies, Dreher amplifies the alarm sounded by the brave men and women who fought totalitarianism. He explains how the totalitarianism facing us today is based less on overt violence and more on psychological manipulation. He tells the stories of modern-day dissidents--clergy, laity, martyrs, and confessors from the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Europe--who offer practical advice for how to identify and resist totalitarianism in our time. Following the model offered by a prophetic World War II-era pastor who prepared believers in his Eastern European to endure the coming of communism, Live Not By Lies teaches American Christians a method for resistance: • SEE: Acknowledge the reality of the situation. • JUDGE: Assess reality in the light of what we as Christians know to be true. • ACT: Take action to protect truth. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming totalitarianism can't happen in their country. Many American Christians are making that mistake today, sleepwalking through the erosion of our freedoms. Live Not By Lies will wake them and equip them for the long resistance.
Download or read book Benedictine Options written by Patrick Henry and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You want insights for living? Look to people whose understandings have been practiced for fifteen hundred years. Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, his twin sister, established a flexible pattern that has adopted, adapted, challenged—and outlived—myriad cultures. Their sons and daughters today, who devote their time and talents to the “school for the Lord’s service” launched by the Rule of Benedict, demonstrate a whole range of options that are accessible to anyone. It is a mistake to think that “forsaking the world” is the Benedictine option. Options (plural) are, instead, “for the sake of the world.”
Download or read book The Beer Option written by R. Jared Staudt and published by . This book was released on 2018-10 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beer Option proposes a renewal of Catholic culture by attending to the small things of life and ordering them toward the glory of God and the good of the community. It offers a tour through Catholic history and Benedictine spirituality, illustrating how beer fits within a robustly Catholic culture.
Download or read book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming written by Rod Dreher and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2013-04-09 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie's funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations-Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting. As David Brooks poignantly described Dreher's journey homeward in a recent New York Times column, Dreher and his wife Julie "decided to accept the limitations of small-town life in exchange for the privilege of being part of a community."
Download or read book The Marian Option written by Gress Carrie and published by Tan Books. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This enthralling chronicle of Mary's intercession makes clear that Christ's mother is indeed the most powerful woman in the world, and the answer for how we can save the world and bring us back into her Son's heart. Not only is she keenly interested in assisting Christians, she has the ability to do so, even in the face of the gravest odds. We just have to ask. The Marian Option will leave you with a new perspective on the Blessed Mother and a renewed hope in the future of the Church and the world.
Download or read book Culture Making written by Andy Crouch and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book he unpacks how culture works and gives us tools to partner with God's own making and transforming of culture.
Download or read book Cultural Engagement written by Timothy Keller and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fruitful ministry in the century must embrace the unavoidable reality of the city. A Center Church theological vision affirms that center cities are wonderful, strategic, and underserved places for gospel ministry and recognizes that virtually all ministry contexts are increasingly shared by urban and global forces. Regardless of your particular cultural or geographical context, you will need to consider the city when forming a theological vision that engages the people you are trying to reach. This eBook contains the fifth part of Center Church, “Cultural Engagement.” In it, Keller discusses four models for engaging urban culture, acknowledging that each model has strengths and weaknesses—ways in which it reflects a particular biblical emphasis and other ways in which it reflects an unbiblical imbalance or idol. The Center church model for cultural engagement blends the key insights of each model in a way that we believe is more biblically faithful and also fruitful for reaching urban culture.
Download or read book Lost in Transition written by Christian Smith and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-09 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Lost in Transition, Christian Smith and his collaborators draw on 230 in-depth interviews with a broad cross-section of emerging adults (ages 18-23) to investigate the difficulties young people face today, the underlying causes of those difficulties, and the consequences both for individuals and for American society as a whole. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Books That Build Character written by William Kilpatrick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1994-11 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Kilpatrick's recent book Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong convinced thousands that reading is one of the most effective ways to combat moral illiteracy and build a child's character. This follow-up book--featuring evaluations of more than 300 books for children--will help parents and teachers put his key ideas into practice.
Download or read book Another Life Is Possible written by Clare Stober and published by . This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning photo essay paired with 100 stories of members gives a rare glimpse into an intentional community that has stood the test of time. Yes, it is possible to create a society where there are no rich or poor, where children and elderly are welcome, where everyone has work and no one lives alone. Meet 100 individuals from diverse backgrounds who have ventured everything to build a life together where everyone belongs and everyone can contribute. A cross-section of the Bruderhof community's international and intergenerational membership, they have pooled their income, possessions, talents, and energy to take care of one another and to reach out to others. Defying five generations of naysayers, this is a community that works. As they reflect on 100 years of community, Bruderhof members reveal why they personally have chosen this radical was of life and share insights they have gleaned along the way. With photography by acclaimed British photojournalist Danny Burrows, this book is a celebration of what is possible when people take a leap of faith and dare a change. It's a window into a lived example that will inspire and encourage anyone working to build a more just, peaceful, and sustainable future.
Download or read book Building the Benedict Option written by Ward Davis and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-04-10 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his book The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher issued a timely warning to the church. In an attempt to engage the broader culture with the gospel it had failed to create a distinct Christian culture and instead had been coopted by American consumer culture. The result was an anemic church ill-prepared to face a quickly darkening cultural landscape and civilizational decline. In response, Dreher argued, it was time for the church to develop new ways of “doing” church. It was time to create new institutions and strategies to help it better form disciples, minister to the broader culture, and survive the years ahead. It was time for a “Benedict Option.” This book provides a template for how the leaders in a local church might go about creating their own Benedict Option Community (Ben Op community). It looks specifically at the early Irish monastic movement for principles church leaders today can use to develop their own Ben Op community, or “modern monastic settlement.” In the process, Davis provides the reader a brief introduction to architecture, urban planning, and place-making and explains why an understanding of these disciplines is necessary to create a healthy, effective Ben Op community.
Download or read book Happy are You Poor written by Thomas Dubay and published by Ignatius Press. This book was released on 2009-09-03 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the modern mind, the concept of poverty is often confused with destitution. But destitution emphatically is not the Gospel ideal. A love-filled sharing frugality is the message, and Happy Are You Poor explains the meaning of this beatitude lived and taught by Jesus himself. But isn't simplicity in lifestyle meant only for nuns and priests? Are not all of us to enjoy the goodness and beauties of our magnificent creation? Are parents to be frugal with the children they love so much? The renowned spiritual writer Dubay gives surprising replies to these questions. He explains how material things are like extensions of our persons and thus of our love. If everyone lived this love there would be no destitution. After presenting the richness of the Gospel message, more beautiful than any other world view, he explains how Gospel frugality is lived in each state of life.
Download or read book The Apostles Creed written by R. Albert Mohler, Jr. and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2019-03-26 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I believe. These two words are among the most explosive words any human can utter. The Apostles' Creed has shaped and guided Christian faith for almost two thousand years. Shared by Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox traditions, it is perhaps the most compelling statement of Christian doctrine the world has ever known. But do we know what it really means—and how it applies to us today? In The Apostles' Creed, renowned theologian and pastor R. Albert Mohler Jr. works line-by-line and phrase-by-phrase through each section of the Creed, revealing the rich truths it contains, including: the profound mystery of the Trinity the miracle of the Incarnation the world-shaking truth of the resurrection the hope of Christ's return the theological heritage contained in this ancient statement The Apostles’ Creed is an often-overlooked treasure that contains the power to shape us for vibrant and steadfast living today, equipping believers to live faithfully in a post-Christian culture.
Download or read book Saints Around the World written by Meg Hunter-Kilmer and published by Emmaus Road Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-16 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lives of the Saints are one of the most powerful ways God draws people to himself, showing us the love and the joy we can find in him. But so often, these Saints seem distant—impossibly holy or dull or unlike us in race and age and state in life. In Saints Around the World, you’ll meet over one-hundred Saints from more than sixty countries, including Saints with different disabilities, strengths, and struggles. The beautiful illustrations and captivating storytelling will introduce you and your children to new heavenly friends while also helping you fall more in love with Jesus. Each story in this book is written not only to capture the imagination but also to speak about God’s tremendous love and our call to be saints. There are stories in Saints Around the World for when you feel like life isn’t fair, when people are being unkind to you, when you’ve made a terrible mistake, when you’re struggling at school, when prayer is hard. And there are stories of shouting down Nazis, of fleeing a murderous villain, of making scientific discoveries, of smoking a cigar while enemy soldiers amputate your leg. There are scared Saints, brilliant Saints, weak Saints, adventurous Saints, abused Saints, overjoyed Saints, disabled Saints—and the point of every one of them is the love of God. Whether you’re checking the map to find Saints who look like you or perusing the extensive indices to find Saints with your skills or struggles, you’ll find countless stories in this book that remind you how very possible holiness is.
