Ann Garrido’s 2009 article in America magazine on the spirituality of administration in Catholic settings created a wave of demand in this successful academic administrator’s already full speaking schedule. Garrido admits that she sometimes finds administration draining, even boring, as it fractures her days into “tiny shards of time” that make it impossible to focus on “the big ideas.” And yet she has found spiritual gifts in her many years as a theologian, parish minister, and administrator in higher education. In Redeeming Administration, she reveals those gifts by examining twelve spiritual habits for Catholic leaders in parishes, schools, religious communities, and other institutions—presenting a saint who embodies each habit—and showing readers how to experience their administrative work as a crucial ministry of the Church. A brief prayer and questions for personal reflection, group conversation, or spiritual direction complete each chapter. Free downloads to accompany Redeeming Administration include a small-group guide and prayer resources.

From two legal luminaries, a highly original framework for restoring confidence in a government bureaucracy increasingly derided as “the deep state.” Is the modern administrative state illegitimate? Unconstitutional? Unaccountable? Dangerous? Intolerable? American public law has long been riven by a persistent, serious conflict, a kind of low-grade cold war, over these questions. Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue that the administrative state can be redeemed, as long as public officials are constrained by what they call the morality of administrative law. Law and Leviathan elaborates a number of principles that underlie this moral regime. Officials who respect that morality never fail to make rules in the first place. They ensure transparency, so that people are made aware of the rules with which they must comply. They never abuse retroactivity, so that people can rely on current rules, which are not under constant threat of change. They make rules that are understandable and avoid issuing rules that contradict each other. These principles may seem simple, but they have a great deal of power. Already, without explicit enunciation, they limit the activities of administrative agencies every day. But we can aspire for better. In more robust form, these principles could address many of the concerns that have critics of the administrative state mourning what they see as the demise of the rule of law. The bureaucratic Leviathan may be an inescapable reality of complex modern democracies, but Sunstein and Vermeule show how we can at last make peace between those who accept its necessity and those who yearn for its downfall.

It seems counterintuitive: conflict can be a blessing. But Catholic theologian and conflict mediator Ann M. Garrido identifies conflict as a potentially fruitful exchange that arises from living and working together in the diverse world God created. Garrido, author of the bestselling Redeeming Administration, offers twelve practical habits for responding to conflict, pairs each habit with a spiritual companion from history, and offers questions and prayers for growth. In Redeeming Conflict, Ann Garrido explains that conversion comes through conversation, that there is a difference between “the truth” and “my truth,” and that you should be curious and practice “Pentecost listening”—or empathic listening—even if you think something is way off base. Garrido will help Christian leaders discover how to speak directly with colleagues about tensions and about how to know themselves well enough to keep from becoming defensive in the face of negative feedback. She uses saintly examples to illustrate her points, calling upon stories of St. Francis and a Muslim sultan, Leo the Great, Archbishop Óscar Romero, and Our Lady, Undoer of Knots. Garrido also offers sample exercises and tools to work through conflict within an organization and provides self-assessment questions and a prayer at the end of each chapter to help apply it to your personal and professional life. A small group discussion guide and a parish resource guide, which features homily and bulletin aids are available as a free downloads for the book. Redeeming Conflict was a 2017 winner of the Association of Catholic Publishers Excellence in Publishing Award: Resources for Ministry (Second Place) and Honorable Mention in the 2017 Catholic Press Association Book Awards: Professional Books.

Feeling overwhelmed and unproductive? The answer isn’t to do more. What image forms in your mind when you think of productivity? An assembly line? Spreadsheets? Business suits or workplace uniforms? In the ancient world, productivity didn't conjure images like these. Instead, it referred to crop yield and fruit bearing. This agrarian imagery helps us understand productivity through a biblical lens. Jesus taught, By this my Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit (John 15:8). Who doesn’t want to have a truly productive life—to bear much fruit? But how does this happen in the places we hold dear—the home, workplace, and in our communities? We often feel overworked and overrun, defeated and discouraged. The world says be productive so that you can get all you can out of this life. The Bible says be productive so you can gain more of the next life. In Redeeming Productivity, author Reagan Rose explores how God’s glory is the purpose for which He planted us. And he shows how productivity must be firmly rooted in the gospel. Only through our connection to Christ—the True Vine—are we empowered to produce good fruit. This book shows how we can maintain the vitality of that connection through simple, life-giving disciplines. Readers will discover manageable applications like giving God the first fruits of our days. Additionally, Reagan discusses how our perspective on suffering is transformed as we see trials as God’s pruning for greater productivity.

Winner of a second-place award in the church professional category from the Catholic Media Association. The mere mention of “truth” will often start arguments, even among the best of friends and the closest of family members. To avoid conflict, Church leaders often side-step the topic altogether. In Let’s Talk about Truth, Ann M. Garrido shares practical ways that preachers and others charged with moral and spiritual leadership in the Church can stop backing away from the topic and instead help Catholics recover the practice of truth as a way of life. In Let’s Talk about Truth, award-winning author and associate professor of homiletics Ann M. Garrido shows Catholic preachers, teachers, and other leaders ways to approach the contentious topic of truth with confidence that the Church’s intellectual and pastoral traditions are squarely on their side. She explores truth as a multifaceted reality that serves four foundational roles in the Christian life. Truth: equips us to see the world as it actually is informs our opinions and assists us with making judgments shapes the way we communicate with each other enables us to build long-lasting relationships with one another Garrido’s clarity and conviction inspire confidence and the practical homiletic tools she offers are readily applicable to teaching and other forms of Church leadership. Sample preaching texts illustrate key points and show readers how to understand truth as a way of life that the Christian must pursue. Each chapter includes a summary of key insights, a list of practical takeaways, and probing questions for self-reflection or group dialogue. Garrido also provides a five-point assessment tool for preachers in a brief appendix to facilitate their willingness and growth toward better preaching about the practice of truth in the Christian life.

Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

Political constitutions are compromises with injustice. What makes the U.S. Constitution legitimate is Americans’ faith that the constitutional system can be made “a more perfect union.” Balkin argues that the American constitutional project is based in hope and a narrative of shared redemption, and its destiny is still over the horizon.