Timeless A History Of The Catholic Church

All the makings of your favorite adventure story "š€š" drama, intrigue, promise, love, hope, and heartache spanning two thousand years...and YOU are a part of it! Timeless: A History of the Catholic Church is a fresh retelling of the history of the Church. In this easy-to-read, not-your-average history book, Steve Weidenkopf introduces you to the vivid, dynamic story of God's work in the world since Pentecost. Along the way, you will meet the weird, wonderful, and always fascinating heroes and villains of the Catholic family tree. Read Timeless and you'll Learn the past in order to make sense of our world, know Christ better, be prepared to defend your Faith and the Church, and understand where you fit in the greatest story ever told. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Steve Weidenkopf teaches Church History at the Christendom College Graduate School of Theology in Alexandria, VA. He is the author of The Glory of the Crusades (2014), The Real Story of Catholic History: Answering Twenty Centuries of Anti-Catholic Myths (2017), and 20 Answers: The Reformation (2017). He is the creator, co-author, and presenter of the adult faith formation program Epic: A Journey through Church History and is a popular author and speaker on the Crusades and other historical topics.

Suspense, politics, sin, death, sex, and redemption: Not the plot of the latest crime novel, but elements of the true history of the Catholic Church. Larger-than-life saints such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Jerome, Augustine, and political figures such as Emperor Constantine played an important part in the history of the Christianity. In The Church and the Roman Empire (301–490): Constantine, Councils, and the Fall of Rome, popular Catholic author Mike Aquilina gives readers a vivid and engaging account of how Christianity developed and expanded as the Roman Empire declined. In The Church and the Roman Empire (301–490), Mike Aquilina explores the dramatic backstory of the Council of Nicaea and why Christian unity and belief are still expressed by the Nicene Creed. He also sets the record straight about commonly held misconceptions about the Catholic Church. Readers may be surprised to learn: The Edict of Milan didn’t just legalize Christianity; it also established religious tolerance for all faiths for the first time in history. The growth of Christianity inspired a more merciful society: Crucifixion was abolished; the practice of throwing prisoners to wild beasts for entertainment was outlawed; and slave owners were punished for killing their slaves. Controversy between Arians and Catholics may have resulted in building more hospitals and other networks of charitable assistance to the poor. When Rome fell, not many people at the time noticed. Aquilina brings Church history to life in The Church and the Roman Empire, enabling Catholics to more deeply consider the true origins of the creed that unites us, the Bible we read, and the liturgy we celebrate.

We live in a liminal time. The anthropologist Victor Turner describes liminality as a time of severe disorientation for individuals and societies that lies between one stage of life and another. All the former signposts that provided people with an identity are in a state of upheaval as they transit between these stages. This book uses the lifelong personal and professional experiences of the author to analyse how Catholics experience liminality today and dealt with it yesterday. It provides the reader with an historical case study of frightening experiences, both in teaching what to expect during such a time and what to assume when it ends.

From the beginning to 1940. Written for both students and adults. The author intersperses the history with many brief, interesting biographies of famous people, and at the end of each chapter he quotes briefly from a famous writing of the era, blending a medley of elements into a comprehensive historical composition that is at once brilliant and fascinating. A story of the Church unparalleled in its scope, depth, variety and impact, and a book all Catholics should read.

Saintly theologians and artists have dedicated their lives and talents to communicating the substance of the Catholic faith. This book draws from the fruits of their meditations and concisely displays the meaning of the Creed in an engaging and visually inviting form.

Originally written as a personal testimony to his own children on why he became a Catholic, this is a conversion story of Sir Joseph Pope written during the early part of the 20th century. Born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, in 1854 to a family renowned for distinguished service to the Canadian government, Joseph carried on the family tradition as a highly regarded civil servant. Joseph served as the private secretary to Sir John Macdonald, Canada's first prime minister, and then as Undersecretary of State during the government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier. Like St. Thomas More, Pope was held in high esteem as a public servant, and he enjoyed the total confidence of prime ministers and governors, all whom sought his advice. He also was a prolific author of some two dozen books and pamphlets, including the official biographies of major Canadian historical figures. Amidst this busy public life, Sir Joseph Pope developed a profound spiritual life and a mind always hungry for eternal truth. Raised in a nominal Anglican family, early on he sensed the inconsistencies and lack of solid authority and doctrinal beliefs in Anglicanism. His persistent and courageous search for the fullness of truth and grace finally led him home to the Catholic Church. Having found the pearl of great price, he wrote this lasting memoir to share with his children, and now all of us, the rich treasure of his Catholic faith.

Schweizer listens carefully to the testimony of the various New Testament writers in order to understand the theological problem of how the New Testament church understood itself, and how it expressed that understanding in its order. The purely historical question about the form of the church at different times is seen by Schweizer as necessary, but need only be asked insofar as the actual shaping of the church is always evidence of the concept of its own nature to which it testifies. Thus, Schweizer arranges the New Testament writings primarily by the theological kinship of their idea of the church, providing a comprehensive examination of the church in the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers. He treats both the diversity of views and the unity found in these writings. He also discusses issues relating to church office, ministry, and ordination.

Few periods of history are more maligned or misunderstood than the Middle Ages--an exciting period of enduring cultural achievement, division, and reform. In this engaging and easy-to-understand narrative, Catholic historian and crusades scholar Steve Weidenkopf explores the shifting centers of power, reform movements, and tensions both within the Church and between the Church and government. As he examines the challenges the Church faced in the eleventh through fourteenth centuries, Weidenkopf also reintroduces some of our greatest saints--including Francis, Dominic, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, and Catherine of Siena--and separates fact from fiction about the era. The Church and the Middle Ages is part of the Reclaiming Catholic History series.

This book is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

In this wide-ranging and ambitious volume, Robert Royal, a prominent participant for many years in debates about religion and contemporary life, offers a comprehensive and balanced appraisal of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the twentieth century. The Catholic Church values both Faith and Reason, and Catholicism has given risen to extraordinary ideas and whole schools of remarkable thought, not just in the distant past but throughout the troubled decades of the twentieth century. Royal presents in a single volume a sweeping but readable account of how Catholic thinking developed in philosophy, theology, Scripture studies, culture, literature, and much more in the twentieth century. This involves great figures, recognized as such both inside and outside the Church, such as Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, Joseph Pieper, Edith Stein, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner, Henri du Lubac, Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar,Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Dawson, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, J. R. R. Tolkien, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. Royal argues that without rigorous thought, Catholicism – however welcoming and nourishing it might be – would become something like a doctor with a good bedside manner, but who knows little medicine. It has always been the aspiration of the Catholic tradition to unite emotion and intellect, action and contemplation. But unless we know what the tradition has already produced – especially in the work of the great figures of the recent past – we will not be able to answer the challenges that the modern world poses, or even properly recognize the true questions we face. This is a reflective, non-polemical work that brings together various strands of Catholic thought in the twentieth century. A comprehensive guide to the recent past - and the future.

History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of one’s situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as producers of historical narratives as well as distinct topics of historiography. Coming from different disciplines, the authors of this volume ask under which conditions and with what consequences religions are historicised. How do religious groups employ historical narratives in the construction of their identities? What are the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the History of Religion? The volume aims at initiating a comparative historiography of religion and combines disciplinary competences of Religious Studies and the History of Religion, Confessional Theologies, History, History of Science, and Literary Studies. By applying literary comparison and historical contextualization to those texts that have been used as central documents for histories of individual religions, their historiographic themes, tools and strategies are analysed. The comparative approach addresses circum-Mediterranean and European as well as Asian religious traditions from the first millennium BCE to the present and deals with topics such as the origins of religious historiography, the practices of writing and the transformation of narratives.

In the 1960s, the Second Vatican Council enacted the most sweeping changes the Catholic Church had seen in centuries. In readable and compelling prose, Mark S. Massa tells the story of the cultural war these changes ignited in the United States - a war that is still being waged today. Suddenly, one Sunday, the mass as the faithful had always known it was different, and so was the Church they had believed was timeless and unchanging. Once the Church opened the door to change, Massa argues, it could not be closed again. Skirmishes broke out over the proper way to worship. Soon, Catholics were bitterly divided over birth control, abortion, celibacy, female priests, and the authority of the Church itself. As he narrates these turbulent events, Massa takes us beyond stereotypes of liberals and conservatives, offering new insights into the last fifty years of American Catholicism.

Five essays offering analysis of Hecker's thought from the perspectives of church history, political science, theology, and psychology. +

No Catholic should pass beyond the age of 16 without being able to answer clearly, both to himself and to others, the challenges of those who do not believe in the existence of God, of Christ or the teachings of the Catholic Church. In this compact book, Fr John Laux gives both the student and the adult reader dozens of excellent, well reasoned answers to the classic objections against the Catholic Faith. He covers all the fundamental truths of the Faith. Providing both facts and sound logical reasoning for every question he considers. Every Catholic should have a firm grounding regarding the reasonableness of his beliefs, lest he fall victim to the superficial objections of of the world which have been refuted over and over again for years, even for centuries. From this book, the reader will derive the confidence that there are not only answers, but excellent, thought provoking, logical answers to any and all difficulties abut the Faith which may arise. Fr Laux's presentation is thus a powerful tool to help souls hold fast with firm confidence to their Faith which time and again has proved to be the bulwark of sanity in this world, as well as the inestimable Pearl of Great Price for which true believers will sacrifice anything to possess.

Historical Dictionary of Catholicism, Third Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, a bibliography, the dictionary has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on themes such as baptism, contraception, labor, church architecture, the sexual abuse crisis, doctrine and theology, spirituality and worship, and church structure.

This authoritative and cutting edge companion brings togethera team of leading scholars to document the rich diversity andunique viewpoints that have formed the religious history of theUnited States. A groundbreaking new volume which represents the firstsustained effort to fully explain the development of Americanreligious history and its creation within evolving political andsocial frameworks Spans a wide range of traditions and movements, from theBaptists and Methodists, to Buddhists and Mormons Explores topics ranging from religion and the media,immigration, and piety, though to politics and social reform Considers how American religion has influenced and beeninterpreted in literature and popular culture Provides insights into the historiography of religion, butpresents the subject as a story in motion rather than a snapshot ofwhere the field is at a given moment

Bible Appreciation for Catholics was written to invite everyone to learn about the Bible. The invitation is intended for everyone. Although directed primarily to Catholics, there are no restrictions for reading it. All Christians and all non-Christians are invited. Any motive for reading this book is fine: desire to know more about the Bible, curiosity about the title, checking it for errors and fallacies, or trying to find out why anyone would want to be stuck in the mentality of a 2,500-year-distant past. Welcome to all!