Deep Down Things: Essays on Catholic Culture explores common threads that characterize Catholicism. The contributors look successively at: Catholic culture and everyday life of the parish and of work, at Catholic culture and the imaginative life of poets and fiction writers, and at Catholic culture and postmodern life where individual conscience, skepticism, and relativism challenge Church authority and faith itself. They do so while looking for foundational components that persist and com...

The Gospel Of Thomasby Thomas O. Lambdin"The Gospel of Thomas is a New Testament-era apocryphon completely preserved in a papyrus Coptic manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. The book was bound in a method now called Coptic binding. Unlike the four canonical gospels, which combine narrative accounts of the life of Jesus with sayings, Thomas is a "sayings" text, a collection of logia, which takes the less structured form of a collection of sayings attributed to...

What does the Bible really say about homosexuality? The answer may very well surprise you. Did you know: * The Old Testament does not prohibit homosexuality as we see it today. Don't believe it? The Torah never forbids homosexuality when examining original language and historical context; the Hebrew word "Toevah" does not in fact mean "abomination" but rather &qu...

For over half a century, scholars have laboured to show that C. S. Lewis's famed but apparently disorganised Chronicles of Narnia have an underlying symbolic coherence, pointing to such possible unifying themes as the seven sacraments, the seven deadly sins, and the seven books of Spenser's Faerie Queene. None of these explanations has won general acceptance and the structure of Narnia's symbolism has remained a mystery. Michael Ward has finally solved the enigma. In ...

Many laypeople have attempted to read the great spiritual classic, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, but have been frustrated in attempting to apply the lessons of this monastic text to their everyday lives in the world. In Thirty Steps, Archimandrite Vassilios interprets the Ladder for the ordinary Christian without sacrificing any of its beauty and power. Now you too can accept the challenge offered by St. John Climacus to ascend closer to God...

The Collected Letters of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume Two contains Letters from 1578 to 1582 Includes Biographical Sketches and Sources for the Biographical Sketches. This second and final volume of St. Teresa's correspondence begins with the year 1578, a most troubling time for Teresa. A keen observer of the reality around her as well as within, Teresa in these letters focuses light on many of the struggles in both the Carmelite order and the church of sixteenth-century Spa...

THE FIRST SMOKE OF THE BATTLEFIELD. While Miss Cardigan went with her nephew to the door, I remained standing by the fire, which could have witnessed to so much done around it that night. I felt strong, but I remember my cheeks had an odd sensation as if the blood had left them. I did not know Miss Cardigan had come back, till I saw her standing beside me and looking at me anxiously. "Will you go and lie down now, my lamb?" "Oh, no!" I said. "Oh, no - I do not want to lie down. I have not ...

The indiscriminate use of tracts by those whose zeal exceeds their wisdom has led many good people to have a strong prejudice against them. The character of the tracts used has also strengthened this prejudice.Some tracts are so antiquated as to be almost useless in the present age. They were good in their day, but their day has gone by. Others are so lacking in pith, point or power as to be of little value. To use a modern phrase, they do not “get there.” Others still are so offens...

THE book of Esther contains principles of great value at all times, but especially at the present one, when some who delve very little into the word of God are liable to wonder at some of His ways, and grow discouraged in the path of obedience.It is needful therefore, that such, and all of us, should have detailed before us the fact that “obedience is better than sacrifice, and to hearken than the fat of rams.” May God richly bless your effort to bring to the surface what His Spirit...

It happened to fall to us as Canons of Christ Church to succeed each other in residence at the Cathedral in the weeks immediately preceding the Congress for the History of Religions which has just been held in Oxford; and we thought it our duty to do what we could to enable the citizens of Oxford, or such of them as formed the Cathedral congregation, to understand what was going on and to take their bearings as to its relation to their own religious life. And we have been led to think that...

Two names are mentioned in this book, one is a man, Tauler, and the other a volume, Theologia Germanica. Quotations are made from them. Both belong to pre-Reformation times. John Tauler was born in Strasbourg about 1300. He was a Dominican monk and had already achieved honour and reputation as a preacher when a great change occurred in his spiritual outlook. An unknown layman, after hearing him preach, was moved to tell him that he was allowing himself to be “killed by the letter,” and was...

D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1914, 'Primarily I am a passionately religious man, and my novels must be written from the depths of my religious experience.' Although he had broken with the Congregationalist faith of his childhood by his early twenties, Lawrence remained throughout his writing life a passionately religious man. There have been studies in the last twenty years of certain aspects of Lawrence's religious writing, but we lack a survey of the history of his developing religious though...