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Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9781594489969
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Kathleen Norris's masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.
Author: Jean-Charles Nault
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2015-11-11
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 1681496879
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The noonday devil is the demon of acedia, the vice also known as sloth. The word “sloth”, however, can be misleading, for acedia is not laziness; in fact it can manifest as busyness or activism. Rather, acedia is a gloomy combination of weariness, sadness, and a lack of purposefulness. It robs a person of his capacity for joy and leaves him feeling empty, or void of meaning Abbot Nault says that acedia is the most oppressive of demons. Although its name harkens back to antiquity and the Middle Ages, and seems to have been largely forgotten, acedia is experienced by countless modern people who describe their condition as depression, melancholy, burn-out, or even mid-life crisis. He begins his study of acedia by tracing the wisdom of the Church on the subject from the Desert Fathers to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He shows how acedia afflicts persons in all states of life— priests, religious, and married or single laymen. He details not only the symptoms and effects of acedia, but also remedies for it.
Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2008-09-16
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 1440629609
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The extraordinary New York Times bestselling masterpiece from "one of the most eloquent yet earthbound spiritual writers of our time" (San Francisco Chronicle). Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn't drag herself out of bed in the morning, couldn't summon the energy for her daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia, a word she had discovered in early Church text years earlier. Fascinated by this "noonday demon", so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris knew she must restore this forgotten but important concept to the modern world's vernacular. An examination of acedia in the light of psychology, spirituality, the healing powers of religious practice, and Norris's own experience, Acedia & Me is both intimate and historically sweeping, brimming with exasperation and reverence, sometimes funny, often provocative, and always insightful.
Author: Gay Talese
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2007-07-10
Total Pages: 450
ISBN-13: 0812977289
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons). How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor’s were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man’s life, and of writing itself.
Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: HMH
Published: 2001-04-06
Total Pages: 255
ISBN-13: 054752756X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book” about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk (The New York Times Book Review). “With humor and lyrical grace,” Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth (San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.
Author: Kathleen Norris
Publisher: Paulist Press
Published: 1998
Total Pages: 108
ISBN-13: 9780809138012
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"In this insightful and deeply personal work, Kathleen Norris, an award-winning poet and author of both Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and The Cloister Walk, draws on her life experiences, her poetry and her love of the Benedictine tradition to discuss the mysterious way that the daily or "quotidian" can open us to the transforming presence of God." "This volume is the text of the 1998 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality, sponsored by the Center for Spirituality at Saint Mary's College, Notre Dame, Indiana."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: R. J. Snell
Publisher:
Published: 2015-04-20
Total Pages: 144
ISBN-13: 9781621382010
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →While the term acedia may be unfamiliar, the vice, usually translated as sloth, is all too common. Sloth is not mere laziness, however, but a disgust with reality, a loathing of our call to be friends with God, and a spiteful hatred of place and life itself. As described by Josef Pieper, the slothful person does not "want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally is." Sloth is a hellish despair. Our own culture is deeply infected, choosing a destructive freedom rather than the good work for which God created us. Acedia and Its Discontents resists despair, calling us to reconfigure our imaginations and practices in deep love of the life and work given by God. By feasting, keeping sabbath, and working well, we learn to see the world as enchanting, beautiful, and good--just as God sees it. "In the arid wasteland that is academic writing, amid the wider desert that is modern secular thought, R. J. Snell's book on acedia is an oasis of flowers and fruit and fresh water. Professor Snell reminds us that man must never be made subordinate to work, nor even to the empty 'vacations' that are but interruptions in work. Like his great predecessors Josef Pieper, Jacques Maritain, Max Picard, Romano Guardini, and Pope John Paul II, he diagnoses the besetting disease of our time--spiritual torpor--and prescribes as a remedy the joyful celebration of the Sabbath. A stupendous book, filled with the happiness of wonder."--ANTHONY ESOLEN, author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child "A whole book about just one vice, 'sloth'? Ah, but this book is different-and devastating. It exposes a deeply hidden and deeply destructive fundamental attitude that pervades our culture, an attitude that comes not just from the flesh (laziness) or from the world (world-weariness, cynicism), but from the Devil: disgust and rebellion toward Being itself, natural as well as supernatural. This is the 'noonday devil' that great saints have labelled 'sloth.' Know your enemy. Read this book!"--PETER KREEFT, author of Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas "Acedia--the sin of sloth, so often confused with laziness--is the most overlooked but widespread illness of the modern age; the emptiness under the mask of the world's frantic activity. R.J. Snell helps us see why this is so and what Christians can do about it with elegant, penetrating insight. This is a terrific book about a badly misunderstood 'deadly sin' and its antidotes."--CHARLES J. CHAPUT, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia "Our modern Empire of Desire manufactures endless appetite while simultaneously denying that anything is objectively good, beautiful, or desirable. The result is not great yearning or passion, but acedia or sloth, a pervasive 'noonday demon' which prowls about our culture like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. In this learned study, R.J. Snell draws on the vast spiritual and intellectual resources of the Christian tradition to diagnose the deep structure of our contemporary nihilism, exposing this demon and its far-reaching effects with elegance and profundity and thereby providing the weapons necessary to slay it. This is a timely and important book."--MICHAEL HANBY, author of No God, No Science: Theology, Cosmology, Biology R. J. SNELL is professor of philosophy at Eastern University in St. Davids, PA, and executive director of the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. His recent books include Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone) and The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode. He and his wife have four young children.
Author: Emily Stimpson Chapman
Publisher: Emmaus Road Publishing
Published: 2021-06-24
Total Pages: 231
ISBN-13: 1645851346
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →If you could talk to your younger self, what would you tell her? If you could equip her for the challenges she would face today, with the Church plagued by scandal and the culture on the verge of collapse, what would you say? In Letters to Myself from the End of the World, Emily Stimpson Chapman answers those questions, weaving Catholic theology, biblical wisdom, and her own life experience into forty-five “letters” to her twenty-five-year-old self. Both personal and practical, Chapman’s letters reflect upon sin and grace, the Church’s sacraments and saints, scandals and injustice, social media and prayer, suffering, adoption, motherhood, and much more. Written in real time, during the summer and fall of 2020, while pandemics and riots filled the news and as Chapman and her husband prepared to adopt a second child, Letters to Myself from the End of the World is a faithful guide for pursuing holiness and spiritual maturity in a world broken by sin. It’s also a testimony to the power of grace to heal our hearts, renew our minds, and transform our lives.
Author: L. Roger Owens
Publisher: Church Publishing
Published: 2019-01-17
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 1640650504
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →• Thoughtful exploration of midlife spirituality through the prism of nature walks • Study questions for each section Roger Owens, facing a “dark night of the soul” as he turned forty and entered midlife, was encouraged by his spiritual director to think of it instead as a “threshold of discovery.” Rather than go on a grand adventure like walking the Appalachian Trail or the Camino de Santiago, he decided to mark his fortieth year by taking forty walks in a nearby nature preserve. With patience and attention, he explored the concerns rising within him: the inevitability of death, his boredom with life, and the reality of his changing faith, changing images of God, and changing sense of self. The result is forty short chapters that weave together insightful stories of his walks with accessible history and practices of Christian spirituality and the lives of saints. This field guide to the spirituality of midlife facilitates readers’ personal journeys through questions of faith, purpose, and relationships. It is not solely a memoir, but a work of wisdom literature that uses engaging first-person narratives to explore universal themes and spiritual inquiry. Wise and imaginative, and with study questions for each section, Threshold of Discovery is the companion guide for a thoughtful Christian journey.
Author: Halee Gray Scott
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2023-04-25
Total Pages: 241
ISBN-13: 0310106737
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Is America the next missionary graveyard? Or is it ripe for spiritual revolution? The statistics seem grim. Every year, the decline of Christianity continues at a rapid pace, especially among young adults. Churches across the country are closing their doors, dying, or are being "adopted" by nearby larger churches. What is the story church leaders hear? We've lost the next generation. But this decline in religious affiliation has not made us less spiritual. Young adults are still asking questions that only faith (or religion) can fully answer. Questions are like seeds buried in the rich, dark soil of our hearts. Nurtured with oxygen and water, they unfold into that which they were meant to become. Absent these conditions, they wither in the dark. Those most resistant to Christianity are those whose questions did not receive oxygen in their faith communities while they were children and teenagers. Not a Hopeless Case is the story of questions, the questions of young adults about faith and spirituality--young adults who are lost and want to be found--and the questions of pastors who seek to find them.
