Discover the answer to our culture’s need for simplicity and peace—by doing less and loving more. If you crave simplicity, yearn for peace and calm, this is the book for you. Author Chip Ingram goes beyond quick fixes and speaks to all of us who find it impossible to break free of our busy lifestyles, filled with too many good and important things that fill our schedules. The message of this book is simple: Spiritual simplicity will not be achieved by strategic attempts to control our lives and schedules but through doing less because we are able to love more. As you learn the practice of loving people, you will experience a shift from complex to simple, from hurried to peaceful, from “never enough time” to “time enough for those you love.” It’s time to redirect our focus from the complex, overextended lifestyle that keeps us running but never arriving. In Spiritual Simplicity, learn how to “reorient your life around life. The result is a life whose priorities are so radically rearranged that” (Dave Stone, author of the Faithful Families series) lasting change is finally within your reach.

Few people have ever seen or heard of The Spirit of Simplicity: it has been hidden for almost seventy years after quietly being published by the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Anonymously translated and annotated by a young monk named Thomas Merton, the book’s author—who also is not mentioned by name in the original edition—is Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous French Cistercian whose only other book, The Soul of the Apostolate, has been a favorite of modern saints and popes, including Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. Every generation struggles with the question of simplicity. In the history of our faith, there have been no more eloquent voices calling us back to simplicity than the monks of the Cistercian Order, from Bernard of Clairvaux to Chautard to Merton—all of whom contribute to this powerful book. Merton surrounds Chautard’s text with his own remarks on simplicity, translations of classic texts by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, and commentary that allows readers to pursue the themes of simplicity in their own lives. "Only a very inadequate idea of exterior simplicity can be arrived at if we do not trace it back to its true source: interior simplicity. Without this, our resolution to practice exterior simplicity would be without light, without love …," Chautard wrote at the beginning of the book. He is writing to his fellow Cistercians, but he might as well be speaking to twenty-first century Christians. He goes on to lay out the best disciplines that a monk—or anyone—might practice to find the elusive simplicity, with quotations from St. Benedict, St. Bernard, and other pillars of monastic life and spirituality. A dozen photographs of Cistercian architecture illustrate how principles of simplicity are incorporated into Cistercian daily life. In Part 2, Merton opens up the teachings of St. Bernard, a great mystic and doctor of the Church, offering excerpts from St. Bernard’s writings on the original simplicity in the Garden of Eden, the difficulty of intellectual simplicity, the simplicity of the will (obedience), and other kindred topics. Merton also offers personal reflections from the perspective of one who had recently exchanged an active life in pursuit of worldly things for the solitude of a monk.

Richard J. Foster’s Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth is hailed by many as the best modern book on Christian spirituality with millions of copies sold since its original publication in 1978. In Celebration of Discipline, Foster explores the "classic Disciplines," or central spiritual practices, of the Christian faith to show how each of these areas contribute to a balanced spiritual life. Foster, the bestselling author of several books (Prayer and Streams of Living Water) and intrachurch movement founder of Renovaré, helps motivate Christians everywhere to embark on a journey of prayer and spiritual growth.

Our closets, our garages, our cupboards, our lives are--let's face it--cluttered. Stuff is everywhere: old yearbooks, projects we started years ago but never finished, commitments to activities that we now regret making but don't feel we can pull out of. Are you longing for space--for simplicity? Here is a book to bring you there. Soul Care® Resources are designed to be simple, but not simplistic, guides to maintaining or recovering the life and health of your soul, that essential personhood created by God as you. In four sections Mindy Caliguire helps you discover and embrace who you are, set healthy boundaries and embrace simplicity as a lifestyle that brings freedom. You use this book in small chunks of daily reading, covering the whole book in the course of four weeks. Also included are four guided group discussions for use with a small group or a spiritual friend. Are you ready to start your journey toward simplicity?

We search the world for spirituality and peace--only to discover that happiness and satisfaction are not found "out there" in the world but right here, in our houses and in our hearts. "There's no place like home" holds true whether we live in a castle or a condo, a mansion or a studio apartment. Home Sweeter Home offers creative insights and suggestions for making our home life more nurturing, spiritual, and rewarding for ourselves, our families, and our friends.

The doctrine of divine simplicity has long played a crucial role in Western Christianity's understanding of God. It claimed that by denying that God is composed of parts Christians are able to account for his absolute self-sufficiency and his ultimate sufficiency as the absolute Creator of the world. If God were a composite being then something other than the Godhead itself would be required to explain or account for God. If this were the case then God would not be most absolute and would not be able to adequately know or account for himself without reference to something other than himself. This book develops these arguments by examining the implications of divine simplicity for God's existence, attributes, knowledge, and will. Along the way there is extensive interaction with older writers, such as Thomas Aquinas and the Reformed scholastics, as well as more recent philosophers and theologians. An attempt is made to answer some of the currently popular criticisms of divine simplicity and to reassert the vital importance of continuing to confess that God is without parts, even in the modern philosophical-theological milieu.

Which activities give you energy and connect you with God? Do you know what behaviors are life-draining for you, separating you from God? In this book Jan Johnson provides small experiments with simplicity as well as questions for discussion or reflection to help you discover the unhurried rhythms of grace.