Few figures from antiquity are as well known to us as Augustine of Hippo. Thanks to his Confessions, we know a great deal about Augustine's life prior to his conversion to Christianity. Yet, without this little biography written by his intimate friend Possidius, bishop of Calama, we would know comparatively little about Augustine's life after his baptism. In straight-forward, unadorned prose, Possidius shows Augustine as a powerful intellect, voluminous writer, and compelling orator, willing and able to defend the Church against all comers be they pagans, Donatists, Arians or Manichaeans. But he also presents an Augustine who humbly endured the everyday trials and difficulties of life as a bishop in Roman Africa. He shows a man who ate sparingly, worked tirelessly, despised gossip, shunned the temptations of the flesh, and exercised prudence and frugality in the financial stewardship of his see. Possidius also supplies one of the only first-hand descriptions of the great tragedy of Augustine's life-the Vandalic conquest of Roman Africa. He poignantly describes Augustine's final illness as he lay locked inside Hippo Regius with the barbarian host literally at the city gates. More than simply the biography of a great saint, The Life of Saint Augustine provides a tantalizing glimpse into life in late Roman Africa-a prosperous society on the verge of destruction. This edition of Weiskotten's translation has been completely re-typeset for the modern reader. The text has been amended to include several corrections from an errata sheet that accompanied the original publication. It includes an expanded bibliography, updated citations, and a revised map. (Note: this edition does not include Weiskotten's revised Latin text.)

This book is the fruit of Fr. Dubay's many years of study and experience in spiritual direction and in it he synthesizes the teachings on prayer of the two great doctors of the Church on prayer--St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila--and the teaching of Sacred Scripture.

But the teaching that Fr. Dubay synthesized is not collected from Teresa and John for contemplatives alone. It is meant for every Christian and is based on the Gospel imperative of personal prayer and the call to holiness. All the major elements of these great teachers are ordered, commented on and put in the context of their scriptural foundations. Here is an outstanding book on prayer and the spiritual life written by one of the best spiritual directors and retreat masters of our time, and based on the writings of the Church's two greatest mystical doctors.

2008 Catholic Press Association Award Winner!
This magnificent new publication distinguishes itself from others by its comprehensiveness, and in its coverage of Eastern, as well as Western, saints. The book contains approximately 7,-000 Saints and Blesseds. Entries are placed in alphabetical order according to name. Where there are numerous saints with the same name (for example John) these are now listed chronologically. The entries include date and place of birth and death as well as family background, education, activity for which the saint is remembered, and whether he/she is a patron saint.

In order to be comprehensive, even possibly mythical saints are included 'Barbara, Christopher and Katherine of Alexandria, because their stories have been so important in art, literature and popular devotion. This is the most complete and accurate Dictionary of Saints available.

A superb new translation brings the words of Augustine the preacher stirringly to life!

When the great Saint Augustine was called from his country home to become Bishop of Hippo in the fourth century, his new responsibilities took him away from the solitude of his writing and into the glare of the public eye. The author of two of the greatest works of religious literature, Confessions and City of God, Augustine became a shepherd to the people, inspiring and enlightening them with his sermons. His skills as a speaker were as great–if not greater–than his skills as a writer. According to his friend Possidius, “Those who read what Augustine wrote on the divine topics do get something out of them. But those who saw and heard him in person–they were the ones who got heaven and Earth.”

Sermons to the People collects the homilies on the liturgical seasons of the Church Saint Augustine delivered over the course of his lifetime. This Image edition includes the first sermons in that vast collection: from Advent, Christmas, New Year’s, and the Epiphany. Newly translated by William Griffin, they address timeless concerns, including the problems of materialism and the intellectual difficulties of faith. Griffin renders the sermons with such immediacy, it is as though he had been present when Augustine spoke to his flock.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Part detective story and part courtroom drama—with a touch of the supernatural—The Third Miracle exposes, for the first time ever, the secret rituals and investigations the Catholic Church today undertakes in order to determine sainthood.
On a raw January 2001 morning at a Catholic convent deep in the Indiana woods, a Baptist handyman named Phil McCord made an urgent plea to God. He was by no means a religious man but he was a desperate man. McCord’s right eye was a furious shade of red and had pulsed for months in the wake of cataract surgery. He had one shot at recovery: a risky procedure that would replace part of his diseased eye with healthy tissue from a corpse. Dreading the grisly operation, McCord stopped into the convent’s chapel and offered a prayer—a spontaneous and fumbling request of God: Can you help me get through this? He merely hoped for inner peace, but when McCord awoke the next day, his eye was better—suddenly and shockingly better. Without surgery. Without medicine. And no doctor could explain it. Many would argue that Mother Théodore Guérin, the long-deceased matriarchal founder of the convent, had “interceded” on McCord’s behalf. Was the healing of Phil McCord’s eye a miracle?
That was a question that the Catholic Church and the pope himself would ultimately decide. As part of an ancient and little-known process, top Catholic officials would convene a confidential tribunal to examine the handyman’s healing, to verify whether his recovery defied the laws of nature. They would formally summon McCord, his doctors, coworkers, and family to a windowless basement room at the Archdiocese of Indianapolis. They would appoint two local priests to serve the roles of judge and prosecutor. And they would put this alleged miracle on trial, all in an effort to determine if Mother Théodore, whose cause for beatification and canonization dated back to 1909, should be named the eighth American saint.
In The Third Miracle, journalist Bill Briggs meticulously chronicles the Church investigation into this mysterious healing and offers a unique window into the ritualistic world of the secretive Catholic saint-making process—one of the very foundations on which the Church is built. With exclusive access to the case and its players, Briggs gives readers a front-row seat inside the closed-door drama as doctors are grilled about the supernatural, priests doggedly hunt for soft spots in the claim, and McCord comes to terms with the metaphorical “third miracle”: his own reconciliation with the metaphysical. As the inquiry shifts from the American heartland to an awaiting jury at Vatican City in Rome, Briggs astutely probes our hunger for everyday miracles in an age of technology, the Catholic Church’s surprisingly active saint-making operation, and the eternal clash of faith and science. 


From the Hardcover edition.

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries.

Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy.

The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

As barbarian hordes storm once-civilized lands, ordinary people must rescue what they can of morality and faith, building a Christian Age on the bits and pieces of the past. Based on real people and events in sixth-century France, when Christian Europe was forming on the ruins of the Roman Empire, The Ring and the Cross mingles history, fiction, and religion. The poet Fortunatus begins as a playboy and ends as the saintly bishop of Poitiers, under the spiritual guidance of his beloved St. Radegund. Queen Brunhild marries a doomed prince and avenges his murder, against the counsel of St. Radegund. This is the story that inspired Wagner's Brunhilde, and shines light on our own times, today.

The purpose of this book is to call your attention to twenty men and women whose lives can provide inspiration and examples for those trying to follow Christ today as best they can. They are real, flesh-and-blood people, human beings with the same weaknesses we all possess as human beings, but with an inner strength and purposefulness that can serve as examples to us in the daily struggle that is life today.

From its earliest centuries, one of the most notable features of Christianity has been the veneration of the saints—the holy dead. This ambitious history tells the fascinating story of the cult of the saints from its origins in the second-century days of the Christian martyrs to the Protestant Reformation. Robert Bartlett examines all of the most important aspects of the saints—including miracles, relics, pilgrimages, shrines, and the saints' role in the calendar, literature, and art.

The book explores the central role played by the bodies and body parts of saints, and the special treatment these relics received. From the routes, dangers, and rewards of pilgrimage, to the saints' impact on everyday life, Bartlett's account is an unmatched examination of an important and intriguing part of the religious life of the past—as well as the present.

Lives of Saints includes hundreds of pages, but can conveniently fit in your E-Reader!  
Alban Butler (1710–1773) was an English Roman Catholic priest who wrote about religious leaders in the Catholic Church. Lives of Saints is Alban Butler’s best known work. Lives of Saints is a wonderful text which took Mr. Butler 30 years of studying to accomplish. Lives of Saints is the most comprehensive collection of biographies on church leaders over the centuries.

Modern editions of Butler’s Lives, including this one, are split up by the month that each saint’s feast day falls within.