Showing results by narrator "Kevin OBrien" in All Categories

The promise of eternal life has been a clarion call to the saints for centuries, rousing them to action and heroic virtue. They knew that, compared with eternity, this life is but a shadow. We must seek the same destination as the saints in the midst of a world filled with amusements and vanities that constantly threaten our journey to Heaven.

Stephen LaPointe believed in Jesus. For him, the Bible was the only sufficient, firm foundation for his life. He wanted to obey God in all things, and had given up a career to become an ordained minister. He loved to preach the Word and knew that one day he would stand before God, accountable for everything he preached.

In A Year with the Popes, award-winning author Fr. Jeffrey Kirby gives an original exposition of the nobility and enduring power of the papacy. This manual feels like an engaging parade through the history of the papacy, showing its biblical foundations in Sacred Scripture and providing portions of Saint Peter’s own letters from the New Testament, before pivoting to recount the twists and turns of the papal ministry and the various men who have served as successors of Saint Peter.

Authored by renowned Scottish Archbishop George Hay (1729–1811), this work, pulled from Bishop Hay’s The Devout Christian, examines our three chief enemies - the flesh, the world, and the devil - and how they conspire together to threaten our salvation. In this succinct text, Bishop Hay provides a field map to knowing your enemies, and learning how to defeat them.

There's a multitude of Lenten meditation books but only one that's packed with the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas. Journey through Lent with the Church's greatest philosopher-theologian. This unrivaled spiritual master will guide you in encountering Our Lord and experiencing the type of fruitful Lent that he often experienced. You will relish this magnificent treasury of sixty-three of Aquinas's Scripture-based sermons specially selected for the holy season.

Selections from St. Alphonsus' writings covering virtually every aspect of Hell. This book shows it exists, describes its torments, proves it is eternal, demonstrates it is not unjust, and answers a host of questions. Best short antidote for today's irreligion that we know.

On October 13, 1917, just before the great "Miracle of the Sun" was manifested to some 70,000 spectators at Fatima, Portugal, there appeared to the three child-visionaries an unusual scene. To the right of the sun, they saw the Blessed Virgin Mary robed in white with a blue mantle. Standing to the left of the sun was St. Joseph holding the Child Jesus, both blessing the world.

Father de Caussade offers the one sure solution to any spiritual difficulty: abandon yourself entirely to God by embracing the duties of your station in life. With wisdom and gentleness he teaches how to practice complete submission to the will of God in every situation, whether we are beginners or seasoned travelers on the way of perfection. True abandonment, he explains, is a trusting, peaceful, and childlike surrender to the guidance of grace.

Amidst the backdrop of World War II, the great Fulton Sheen wrote Preface to Religion, his first book published after the war ended. As the world was recovering from death, destruction, and despair, Sheen’s timely work tackles the most salient questions pertaining to happiness and sanity.

St. Joseph obtains favors of any kind, but particularly in family problems, financial needs, purity, dangers, work, housing and a happy death. He is the universal patron - whatever our petition is, you can pray to St. Joseph with confidence. He was the foster father of Jesus Christ on earth, and Jesus still obeys his requests in heaven! God chose St. Joseph over all other men to represent the fatherhood of God himself in the Holy Family.

After nearly losing his life to an assassin, Stephen LaPointe resigned from his pastorate as a Congregational minister. He made this radical decision as the result of a crisis of truth. This decision had many immediate ramifications for his vocation, his career, and most significantly for his marriage and family. Now, a year later, no one knows where he is. He has disappeared. Out of love, as well as remorse, several people - an old friend, his estranged wife, and a potential enemy - set out separately to find him.

Joseph M. Scheidler has fought for the unborn since the Supreme Court allowed abortion on demand with its 1973 Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton rulings. He was the target of a lawsuit brought by the National Organization for Women under federal racketeering laws. Found guilty in 1998, Scheidler triumphed twice in appeals before the Supreme Court in 2003 and again in 2006.

The sacrament of Matrimony is under diabolical attack. While it is easy to blame the outside world for the demise of marriage, we must look at what has been happening inside the Church. The number of marriages have dwindled over the past five decades and annulments have skyrocketed. Many in Church leadership have been indifferent to these alarming trends and to marriage itself. Matrimony is rarely referenced during homilies, pre-Cana programs are often disastrous, and seminaries spend little time studying the sacrament of Matrimony.

In these 15 moving essays, LA Times bestselling author Greg Olear explores how the literary wisdom of George Orwell, Charles Dickens, Milan Kundera, Dorothy Thompson, and other poets, novelists, screenwriters, journalists, critics, and historians can help us live through the Trump Redux, without sacrificing joy or losing hope.

The Catholic Church today finds itself in the midst of a crisis. The flock is scattering, and while some shepherds bravely set off in search of those lost and wandering sheep, others drive them, and many more, further from the fold.

The Blessed Sacrament is the great "open secret" of the Catholic Church—the great truth that Jesus Christ is in the Tabernacle and is accessible to all who believe in Him. But this truth is not immediately obvious, and thus it is not really appreciated as it should be. The Blessed Sacrament: God with Us is a call to all Catholics to appreciate and love Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, for in that perpetual miracle is all the wealth of His love, and our "Heaven" on Earth.

A historical fiction based in the 1920s. The protagonist, named Eugene "Jack" Brewer, is a mulatto man who had an unfortunate mishap with a white sheriff, during which a woman was killed in the crossfire. Jack fled north to Chicago and was labeled a fugitive in Mississippi. Once in Chicago he was able to pass himself off as white, but he always had the fear of being caught. Jack was also related to the ex-governor of Mississippi, Earl Leroy Brewer.

In The Synodal Pope: The True Story of the Theology and Politics of Pope Francis, Jean-Pierre Moreau traces the history and theological development of Pope Francis from his upbringing in Argentina and formation by the liberationist Jesuits. Moreau, a keen observer of liberation theology, many of whose leading figures he personally met when he was a special correspondent for the Figaro-Magazine in the 1980s, has made a close study of the personal and intellectual itinerary of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, described by his closest supporters as professing the “theology of the people.”

Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the few options open to nineteenth-century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of millions of her contemporaries. Uncle Tom's Cabin paints pictures of three plantations, each worse than the other, where even the best plantation leaves a slave at the mercy of fate or debt. Her questions remain penetrating even today: "Can man ever be trusted with wholly irresponsible power?"

Chaos seems to be everywhere in and around the kingdom of Coloré. Talk of strange men and insane beasts occupies the speech from silver-tongued bard's tales to the gossip and banter in local pubs. Animals seem spooked, livestock is left mutilated, people are missing, and an overall ill omen hovers in the air. Yet, despite that, all seems so normal for Ephraim and Jules Ravenwood amid the mundane chores and predictable daily grind of being the oldest son and daughter of a farming family near the sleepy town of Crestfalls.