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Meet Dr. Susan Huffman: wife to chancery court judge Samuel Ellison, mother to adorable Ian, and college professor on track for tenure. She’s a woman who has always lived by her mind, with a plan and a purpose. Then new-in-town Lorraine Davis accepts an invitation to Susan and Samuel’s home, and the mysterious visions begin. Is God warning Susan about this newcomer? And if so, how can she protect her circle of friends, her family, and her life as she knows it? The Book of Susan is the recounting of a journey—from derailment, to diagnosis, to the discovery of a lifetime.

 Originally written for monks, the principles in the Rule of St. Benedict may be applied by anyone — and in today’s hectic, changing world, following its principles offers a rich spiritual connection to the stability and wisdom of monastic life. This essential guide explains how people who live and work in “the world” are still invited to balance work with prayer, cultivate interdependence with others, practice hospitality, and otherwise practice their spirituality like monks. 

What is a monastery? A monastery is a place set apart - a place to learn the blessings of powerlessness, and that time is not ours but God’s. Our home and our duties can, just like a monastery, teach us those things. The vocation of monastic men and women is to physically withdraw from the world. But the principle is equally valid for those of us who cannot go off to monasteries. Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation, and provide a desert for reflection.

This is what happens when a writer, preacher, and lover of words encounters some of creation’s wisest theologians: horses. First, she argues with them. They are, after all, horses. What could they possibly know about life and God that theologians haven’t already written? But slowly, she engages their language and listens to their holy wisdom, attending to how they express their being, actions, and relationships. She allows horses to draw her out of the faith of intellect and into a deeper faith of emotion, body, and soul.

Open a window each day of Advent onto the natural world. The author reads 25 descriptions of wild animals of the northern hemisphere ingeniously adapting when darkness and cold descend. All of them reveal the ancient wisdom of Advent: The dark is not an end but a door, the way a new beginning comes. These short, daily reflections paint vivid, poetic images of familiar animals.

A young writer is drawn to a small New England town in search of meaning for her life. Soon, she encounters kindness, romance, and is pulled into a mystery centered on an old, abandoned church and the death of a special girl. Are the images that only she can see in the church's stained-glass windows a warning, or is someone trying to reach her, to help heal this broken community?  

Following the runaway success of her first novel, Chase Harrington is hiding in Manhattan. Assuming the visions from her past are behind her, Chase takes an assignment that lands her in the center of a new mystery surrounding a mansion known as Briarcliff Manor and deceased millionaire Sebastian Winthrop.

Biographies will only take you so far. It's impossible to truly understand Francis of Assisi without hearing his own words. A scholar and lover of Francis, Sweeney has added six writings to his best-selling compilation, additional texts that we're most certain came from Francis himself. Now, short writings such as The Form of Life He Wished for Clare, The Sermon to the Birds, and The Source of True Joy combine with Francis's rules, letters, messages, songs, praises, canticles, and final spiritual testament in a most ideal introduction to the saint.

When you have an experience and tell the story of that experience to someone, something sacred happens inside of you. That experience doesn’t have to be an extravagant moment, but it can be beautiful, nonetheless. And as you store up all those stories and share them, you grow your world’s boundaries. You build community and remind yourself that every moment of your life counts for something holy, good, and glorious.

Emotional depression leading to suicide can work the same way. Sometimes, a person can be treated so that, in effect, they are cured; sometimes, they can’t ever really be cured but can be treated in a way that they can live with the disease for their whole life. And sometimes, just as with certain kinds of cancer, the disease is untreatable, unstoppable, and no intervention by anyone or anything can halt its advance. It eventually kills the person, and there is nothing anyone can do. Thus, Ronald Rolheiser begins this small, powerful book.

 From the snake in the Garden of Eden to the lost sheep in Luke’s parable, stories about fish and birds, rams and goats abound. We learn about them, but they have no voice of their own. Here we allow the raven and the dove on Noah’s ark, the big fish that swallowed Jonah, and the donkey on which Balaam rode to be the narrators of their own stories, to inform us and help us to re-imagine our stories. We learn something about the intrinsic value of all living beings, and something about ourselves. 

Pangolins and polar bears, olms, lemurs, and leopards. We share this beautiful blue-green globe with creatures magnificent, delicate, intricate - and now vanishing at a faster rate than at any other time in Earth’s history. Spend Lent with 25 of these wild ones. Vivid descriptions of their lives will fill listeners with wonder - and grief at what they suffer on a planet shaped by human choices. Their stories thaw our stiff hearts and wake us to greater compassion - which is what Lent, meaning “springtime”, has always been for.

 Laurie Brock, Episcopal priest, messy Christian, and horse lover, shares the experiences of love, grief, humility, joy, and deep wisdom that she discovers day to day with horses. From barely-there trails in the Grand Tetons to muddy fields in the Kentucky Bluegrass, God is revealed in the simple ways of these magnificent creatures. For anyone feeling doubtful, distracted, or anxious in these challenging times, Laurie brings us back to center, reminding us to breathe, get back on the saddle, and move beyond the familiar into the freedom of something new. 

In This Child of Faith, mother and son writing team Sophfronia Scott and Tain Gregory share stories, experiences, and ideas to help parents get to the heart of the question: How do you help a child have faith - real faith that they own - in the challenging world we live in today? This is a fascinating look at the journey of three souls, Tain’s and his parents’, that began with Tain enrolling in Sunday School and led to a strong life of faith for all of them.

How much time is enough to be with God? While it could be the 40 days, or years, used so often in the Bible, it’s also possible that simply stealing a few minutes, from the busyness of each day, is enough time to be in Kairos, “God time”. The same is true for the space needed to find God. Whether it be in a deserted place or one filled with activity, whatever space we can carve out to find God - or to make enough room to be found - is enough space. 

There is no sure route through grieving. Jerusha McCormack provides, instead, a series of signposts by which we may find our own path to a new life. “We are all amateurs at grief,” she writes, “it comes to us all; we must all go through it.

A daily devotional/study for Lent on the subject and the experience of temptation. Daily reflections on the hard school of temptation, based on scriptures, inspired by the Lenten experience of a Benedictine monastic community. Each day’s reflection includes a quotation taken from two works of the German pastor and theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 - 1945): A series of lectures given on the creation and fall of Adam and Eve.

On the lovely spring afternoon of April 20, 2018, a backyard tree cracked, and a heavy limb fell. Twelve-year-old Evelyn suffered a devastating blow to her head as she shielded her puppy. A significant, compressed skull fracture required emergency neurosurgery. This freak, life-threatening event shook the Overlease family to the core, and an unbelievable experience was instantly set in motion that may take a lifetime to fully understand.

Do you long to live the abundant life that Jesus promised his followers? If so, then you will want to weave the threads of beauty, truth, life, and love into the tapestry of your life. When these essentials are each present in some measure in our relationships, ministries, vocations, and life choices, then we are more likely to find ourselves living a good and abundant life with God.

Clare of Assisi is generally known as “the female friend” of Saint Francis of Assisi and for centuries her legacy has remained obscured by his shadow. Yet Clare’s life and story ought to shine in its own light and on its own terms (her name, after all, means “light”). She is a figure of true heroism, tenacity, beatitude and grit who plotted her improbable course in the context of the raucous and explosive period of the Middle Ages.