About the Book:
Keep Christ in Christmas this year by turning to this slim volume of daily Advent meditations by Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, one of the greatest homilists in the history of the Church.
Carefully selected to lift your soul to God in those hectic days that stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas, these forty daily meditations will keep you mindful of the real meaning of Christmas while affording you an admirable distillation of the doctrines and piety of our Holy Catholic Church.
With the help of Bishop Bossuet — and the sense of God’s grandeur and love that permeates his every word — all through the rush toward Christmas you’ll stay mindful of the holy words of Isaiah foretelling the birth of our savior; you’ll find yourself marveling at the Annunciation and the Visitation; you’ll rejoice in anticipation of the coming birth of Jesus; and, finally, you’ll look forward to kneeling with St. Joseph and the Blessed Virgin in silent adoration of the incarnate Son of God.
This year, you won’t (as so often happens) arrive at Midnight Mass distracted, exhausted, and frazzled, having neglected your Advent devotions and your ordinary prayers, too. Instead, you’ll find yourself stepping lightly into church, ready and eager to adore the newborn King, your soul what it should be: a fit dwelling place for the Redeemer.
Don’t waste another Advent!
Let Meditations for Advent keep you prayerful amidst the worst distractions of the holiday season. Let it draw you daily closer to Jesus, whose birth the season celebrates, and whose birth your soul yearns to celebrate, too.
My Comments:
Since we are halfway through Advent, I'm going to put this one away until next year.
About the Book:
Many claim that Catholic Social Teaching implies the existence of a vast welfare state. In these pages, Anthony Esolen pulls back the curtain on these false philosophers, showing how they’ve undermined the authentic social teachings of the Church in order to neutralize the biggest threat to their plans for secularization — the Catholic Church.
With the voluminous writings of Pope Leo XIII as his guide, Esolen explains that Catholic Social Teaching isn't focused exclusively on serving the poor. Indeed, it offers us a rich treasure of insights about the nature of man, his eternal destiny, the sanctity of marriage, and the important role of the family in building a coherent and harmonious society.
Catholic Social Teaching, explains Pope Leo, offers a unified worldview. What the Church says about the family is inextricable from what She says about the poor; and what She says about the Eucharist informs the essence of Her teachings on education, the arts — and even government.
You will step away from these pages with a profound understanding of the root causes of the ills that afflict our society, and — thanks to Pope Leo and Anthony Esolen — well equipped to propose compelling remedies for them.
Only an authentically Catholic culture provides for a stable and virtuous society that allows Christians to do the real work that can unite rich and poor. We must reclaim Catholic Social Teaching if we are to transform our society into the ideal mapped out by Pope Leo: a land of sinners, yes, but one enriched with love of God and neighbor and sustained by the very heart of the Church’s social teaching: the most holy Eucharist.
My Comments:
All too often it seems that when "morality" it the topic of the day, the crowd splits between those on the right who are concerned with the unborn, with sexual sins, and with church attendance and those on the left who worry about the poor, about racism and about tolerance for those who are different than we are. This book has caught my eye because, at least in the blurb above, it looks like Esolen acknowledges that all those points are important.
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