Here is a collection of great homilies of history addressing troubled times, from great pastors who are now Church Doctors and saints like St. Augustine, St. John Chrysostom, St. John Henry Newman, and others like Jacques-Benigne Bossuet to more contemporary leaders like Pope St. John Paul II, Blessed Jerzy Popieluszko, and then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Reading these pages buoys hope.

This book examines personal stories of grief and offers tools for healing and carrying on with life after losing someone close, with the help of faith.

When the Lusitania was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland in 1915, one of the 1,198 souls who perished with it was Fr. Basil Maturin, who was returning home from a preaching tour of the United States.

Tragically, many have been touched in some way by the suicide of a loved one or acquaintance, and some believe killing oneself automatically condemns one to hell. Some believe that’s what the Catholic Church says. Not so, says Fr. Alar, whose own grandmother committed suicide.

Every battle for truth and justice has its heroes. This book presents portraits of some of our heroes in the defense of life – 56 of them, to be precise: eight in each of seven disciplines or realms including philosophy, medicine, even sports and entertainment.

“The Church can learn from the Church of the past,” declares the title of the first chapter of this marvelous work. Using a keen lens to examine the Church’s role in shaping history, the authors identify seven “revolutions” that took place as Christianity, once targeted for elimination through persecution, transformed and civilized the brutal Roman Empire.

Here’s a book that shows how you can break down into simple-enough language the guiding principles that underlie Catholic moral teaching on issues such as contraception, abortion, divorce, pornography, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, reproductive technologies, and transgender identity.

Are our public schools toxic? Although there remain many good teachers and administrators within the system, they are not the ones calling the shots. Instead, it’s the progressive ideologues who exert the overriding influence on school boards, superintendents, curricula, policies, and hiring practices.

Did America’s founding fathers, nearly all Protestants or Enlightenment Deists, draw inspiration from the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, and Catholic natural law?

Did America’s founding fathers, nearly all Protestants or Enlightenment Deists, draw inspiration from the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, and Catholic natural law?

Living in today’s stressful world, where and how does one find time and space to decompress, to find peace? Recall that even Jesus withdrew from the crowds and took time away to spend time alone in prayer.

“Evangelization” is one word that makes many Catholics glaze over. “Stewardship” is another. Yet as Christians we are called to be good stewards, and we are called to spread the Good News of salvation — to evangelize.

Much is made of the importance of the father-son relationship, but what of the fatherdaughter relationship? Alan Migliorato notes that daughters need their father just as much as sons do.

“Boys will be boys” is an expression sometimes used to excuse bad behavior, but Anthony Esolen has something else in mind here: at the risk of sounding misogynistic and politically incorrect, he proposes that boys need to be in the business of doing what boys are supposed to do – becoming real men, the guardians and protectors of all that is good and true — and that parents should raise and form their sons accordingly.

When Bob Lockwood passed away in March of this year, he left behind a legacy of wisdom reflected in newspaper columns he had written over his long career as an editor and publisher. His musings on his Old Man, his Catholic upbringing, living a mature faith, and the folly of the American League’s designated-hitter rule are timeless and legendary.

The erosion of faith in God as well as the religious practice among believers in today’s world is both evident and measurable. Our secular culture, favoring relativism and subjectivism, presents a formidable challenge in its hostility to religion and objective truth.

The Beatitudes “reveal the character of Christ himself,” Fr. Pertiné writes, and “there can be no holiness in Christ without suffering, without the Cross.”

It is a tragic irony that the so-called “women’s movement” has caused so much harm to women themselves. Lies of empowerment attainable through a “right” to abortion, the sexual revolution, and the breakdown of the family have led not to greater happiness but to confusion and loss of dignity.

The erosion of faith in God as well as the religious practice among believers in today’s world is both evident and measurable. Our secular culture, favoring relativism and subjectivism, presents a formidable challenge in its hostility to religion and objective truth.

As I have shared in past columns, I enjoy reading books. Every now and then, I come across a special one. Recently, I came across such a book.