Religious Books

Each day contains a specific Scripture quotation, reflection, and prayer to encourage joyous participation in the Christian life. Illustrated and printed in two colors. Includes ribbon marker.

When Luke Larson and his wife Evie embarked on a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain, their purpose was to experience walking as a way of keeping company with Jesus and his companions, of both earth and heaven, such as Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Keeping Company is filled with personal, luminously candid, and often amusing stories of the couple's experiences along the Way of Saint James. More than anything, this book invites you to step off the treadmill of self-effort in your quest to experience God more intimately through the spiritual practice of walking, literally, with God.

Lent is the ideal time to identify and address "spiritual blind spots"--unacknowledged emotional wounds and false ideas that hinder your prayer life and worship.

During each week of Lent, Ken Kniepmann of the John Paul II Healing Center breaks open one of the seven deadly sins (pride, lust, gluttony, sloth, anger, envy, and greed) and its corresponding virtue (humility, chastity, abstinence, diligence, patience, kindness, and liberality). You'll start by learning about the sin and how it manifests itself in daily life and thought patterns. Then you'll move into reflection and prayer exercises that guide you through the process of renouncing that week's sin and resolving to adopt that week's virtue.

Fasting, the practice of giving up pleasures or comforts, allows us to grow in holiness by putting our desires to a kind of death. Obvious examples include giving up a habit such as a favorite food, sleeping in, or late-night TV--but what happens when you try to give up your sins while recognizing the deeper reasons you commit them in the first place? By seeing those connections and praying specifically for God's insight, healing, and revelation, you'll be able to experience God's mercy and love to a greater capacity.

Kniepmann helps you see how the depth of Catholic teaching is connected to your daily life. Sin isn't just an activity; it is a place of the heart (the interior life) and the movement of the heart (toward or away from sin) as related to thoughts, beliefs, and emotions. By the time Easter arrives, you'll possess a deeper understanding of sin and emotional wounds as impediments to intimacy with God and come away with tangible, practical tools for addressing those impediments in your life.

First published in 1997 and now back in print, Let There Be Light is an excellent prayer companion for busy people who want to root their spiritual practice in the solid ground of St. Hildegard of Bingen's timeless and timely teachings on living in the light of God. Hildegard (1098-1179) was a renowned Benedictine abbess and a popular preacher, teacher, and healer who has been venerated by Christians for centuries. She was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in May of 2012 and in October of that same year was elevated as a Doctor of the Church.

Rather than a mystic who wrote out of an intense personal experience of God, St. Hildegard is more properly seen as a visionary and a prophet who provides complex images in her writing that are ripe for interpretation. As you reflect on the images offered to her by God, Hildegard offers you a path to live in the light of God each moment of the day.

All titles in the 30 Days with a Great Spiritual Teacher series contain a brief and accessible morning meditation drawn from the author's writings, a simple mantra for use throughout the day, and a night prayer to focus your thoughts as the day ends.

In keeping with At the Still Point: A Literary Guide to Prayer in Ordinary Time ("a thing of beauty" and "a literary treasure trove and devotional feast," two reviewers called it) this collection contains daily and weekly inspirational readings to help the reader prayerfully experience God through the liturgical seasons of winter. Well-loved classics by Andersen, Dickens, and Eliot join contemporary works by Frederick Buechner and Gary Schmidt. Poems by Donne, Herbert, and Rossetti are paired with newer voices: Scott Cairns, Benjamín Alire Sáenz, Susanna Childress, and Amit Majmudar. Readers are invited to experience Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany in its raw strangeness, stripped of sentiment, and to turn toward Emmanuel.