Church History
Showing all 7 results
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Catholic Watershed : The Chicago Ordination Class Of 1969 And How They Help
$21.95Add to cartA truly extraordinary look at how the Catholic Church has changed since the Second Vatican Council told through the experiences of six priests in a series of in-depth interviews about their seminary training, assignments, triumphs and disappointments as well as their relationships with their communities, leaders, and each other.
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Fishermans Tomb : The True Story Of The Vaticans Secret Search
$25.95Add to cartA Texas oilman. A brilliant female archaeologist. An unknown world underneath the Vatican.
In 1939, a team of workers beneath the Vatican unearthed an early Christian grave. This surprising discovery launched a secret quest that would last decades a quest to discover the long-lost burial place of the Apostle Peter.
From earliest times, Christian tradition held that Peter a lowly fisherman from Galilee, whom Christ made leader of his Church was executed in Rome by Emperor Nero and buried on Vatican Hill. But his tomb had been lost to history. Now, funded anonymously by a wealthy American, a small army of workers embarked on the dig of a lifetime.
The incredible, sometimes shocking, story of the 75-year search and its key players has never been fully told until now. The quest would pit one of the 20th century’s most talented archaeologists a woman against top Vatican insiders. The Fisherman’s Tomb is a story of the triumph of faith and genius against all odds.
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Rabbles Riots And Ruins
$17.95Add to cartJerusalem, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Ephesus, Carthage, Edessa . . . These were some of the ancient cities that once raged against the Gospel and persecuted the Church but later came to admirable faith. Each city had its own unique commerce, culture, and institutions. Each city was different from all the others, and each became more perfectly itself through the influence of Jesus Christ.
In the pages of this book, you’ll climb the hills of these cities, sail into their harbors, look up in awe at their titanic public works, walk their streets, push your way through their bustling markets. And you’ll see how all those things shaped the expression, practice, and history of the Christianity we know today.
This is your imaginative entry into the world of the Church Fathers, the saints, and sages who converted the world to Christ. During their era–and in their hostile cities–the Church grew at a steady rate of 40 percent per decade, and practices such as abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia went from commonplace to unthinkable. The Fathers have something important to teach the modern Church about evangelization.
Among Mike Aquilina’s many works about the Church Fathers, this is his most complete and compelling overview of the Fathers’ amazing achievements.
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Revelations Of Divine Love
$16.99Add to cartJulian of Norwich, the famous fourteenth-century anchoress, was seriously ill and preparing for death when she received a series of 16 visions of the passion of Christ. As a result of these visions, she dedicated the rest of her life to solitary prayer, and wrote down the content of the visions, which became the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. The first vision includes her famous meditation on the hazelnut, which for her becomes an image of God’s love because God made it, loves it and keeps it.”The most original and revolutionary reading of Christ’s gospel since that of St Paul.’ (A. N. Wilson, from the Introduction)
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Unbelief Its Causes And Cure
$12.95Add to cartOriginally published under title: Why men do not believe, 1869.
In this classic work praised by Pope Pius IX himself, Fr. Nicolas J. Laforet lays out the spiritual causes of unbelief, and shows the antidotes necessary to remedy each of those failings.
Noting that unbelief is not a particularly modern phenomenon (after all, many people refused to believe in Jesus even after having witnessed his miracles), Fr. Laforet uncovers the common roots of unbelief as well as the sure remedies that finally bring men and women to have faith in God.
Fr. Laforet shows that although many think otherwise, unbelief is not merely a matter of the intellect; on the contrary, where unbelief prevails we almost invariably find bad will: souls who have either not seriously considered the claims of Christianity or who simply refuse to admit truths that are evident to anyone who inquires with an open mind. -
Work Play Love
$12.99Add to cart“Christians make the Mass, and the Mass makes Christians.” So said the Martyrs of Abitina, North Africa, in A.D. 304. The Mass was the reality most essential to the life of believers, and it deeply affected everything they did. In Work Play Love popular author Mike Aquilina shows how the Eucharist shaped three basic dimensions of life for the early Christians.
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Work. Christians brought the fruits of their labor to the altar–not only bread and wine, but also cheese, olives, honey, dried fish, and freshly pressed oil. As they worshiped, they consecrated the world itself to God. In turn, this affected the way they approached their work. It was not just toil. It was an act of love, undertaken for the Father. They labored in imitation of Jesus the laborer. Made one with Christians in the Eucharist, Jesus worked through them and in them.
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Play. The Mass was a leisurely, contemplative act, but it was celebrated on a normal workday in the Roman world. It was useless by the standards of the city. And yet it called forth–gently, gradually–the most creative responses. The Mass inspired new forms of music, poetry, architecture, and painting. At liturgy Christians stood back and reconsidered the cosmos from God’s perspective. They saw their lives as part of a profoundly new and different narrative. This made for new and different art.
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Love. Christian ritual demanded personal and communal acts of charity. The earliest descriptions of the Mass show the importance of the collection and its distribution to the poor, the imprisoned, and the home-bound sick. Deacons and deaconesses were dismissed to take Communion to the same people in need. The fruits of the Mass extended beyond the time of liturgy–and the bounds of Christian community. Christians took care even of their persecutors. This led to the establishment of institutions of universal charity, a first in human history.The story of the Mass is not simply a rehearsal of ancient texts. It’s a drama of personal and societal transformation. This book tells the story as much as possible in the lively words of the early Christians and draws from the most exciting discoveries of recent archaeology. It is a powerful imaginative encounter with the first generations of our Christian ancestry.
