Prayers and Rituals for the Home
“I am well aware that the material in this book is only a smattering of what family prayer can entail,” says Kathy Hendricks in the closing pages of her book: “Some of it will fit your family while other parts…
Category Book Recommendations
Prepare for Christmas: Books for the Advent Season
Daylight comes late and ends early in November. The cooling temperatures and shorter days are harbingers of the looming winter, but also of the spiritual season of Advent. This pre-Christmas period is a time of preparation, of “making straight” the…
Friday Favourites: A Year with Pope Francis
At the time this was written, Friday of last week, my coworkers and I were attending When Faith Meets Pedagogy up at the International Plaza Hotel in Toronto. It’s a very big and very busy religious education conference, with over…
Greening Your Church
In 1930, an Englishman named Edmond K. Blyth was driving home from a visit to Liverpool Cathedral. He’d been a soldier in the First World War, and three of his friends from when he was a cadet—John Bennett, Arthur Bailey…
Friday Favourites: Peace: The Prayer of St. Francis
The Internet has failed me. To be fair, the Internet fails me on a regular basis. Today, though, the Internet has failed me in a professional sense: I can’t find the clip on YouTube I was looking for. I’m not…
Friday Favourites: Signs: Seven Words of Hope
On Wednesday night a group of us from Novalis were invited to a film screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, hosted by the Jesuit community in Toronto. There was good wine, beef and shrimp sliders (for us), popcorn (not for…
Friday Favourites: Faith and Literature Matters
I had a lot of opportunity to get acquainted with our newest book Faith and Literature Matters this past week. We have review copies of all our books to be sent out, to newspapers and online blogs. It could be more accurately…
Friday Favourites: Prayer: Our Deepest Longing
Reading this book was like sitting down and having coffee with a priest. It was simple and casual—no big words, no endless Bible quotes, no tedious sermons. I felt perfectly at home. Fr. Rolheiser is the author of seven previous…
Friday Favourites: Do Monkeys Go to Heaven?
“Uh-oh,” I thought, looking at the cover of Do Monkeys Go to Heaven? It shows a monkey with a halo above its head, sitting and looking unimpressed with the reader, along with the title and the author’s name. I hadn’t…
Experiencing Perfect Freedom: Augustine’s Lesson to Us
I first encountered St. Augustine’s Confessions as an 18-year-old university student. My professor, a kind and gentle priest from China, Fr. Peter Wong, extolled the work’s place in Christian history and its relevance for us today. Sadly, my friends and I were…