Do you attend Mass out of love rather than obligation? Are you closer to God now than you were a year ago? Are you able to keep a consistent prayer life? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, your spiritual life needs a jump-start. In Humdrum to Holy, popular priest and radio host, Fr. Ed Broom, will stir in you a holy reverence and spiritual joy that’ll point your soul to heaven. By following the wise counsel of this experienced spiritual advisor and confessor, you’ll first learn how to identify your “kryptonite” — those hidden sins in your life that keep God from working in your soul. Fr. Ed will walk you through the simple steps to creating a plan of life — your roadmap to the heights of holiness. In a clear, methodical, and practical way, you’ll learn how to cultivate virtues like patience and purity — virtues that are difficult to attain but essential for happiness in this life and getting into heaven in the next! You’ll discover some of the most potent Catholic traditions, such as lectio divina, that have made saints out of countless sinners. And he’ll show you how to transform pious practices such as Confession and Eucharistic adoration into a powerhouse of graces flooding into your soul. And finally, you’ll learn how to keep your spiritual life strong by forming a healthy conscience, and how the pains of suffering can be transformed into the tears of joy. Scripture tells us that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. Our world needs saints, and God is offering you the graces needed to become one. Leave behind the humdrum spiritual life and open the door to the road to sainthood. Fr. Broom is ready to show you the way.

In his 18th century masterpiece, True Devotion to Mary, St. Louis de Montfort tells us that the quickest, easiest, and most efficacious path to Jesus is through the Blessed Virgin Mary. In her 1917 appearances at Fatima, Mary repeatedly urged us to pray the Rosary daily. Since Mary is the best path to Jesus and since she herself insists on daily recitation of the Rosary, Fr. Ed Broom has developed this powerful do-it-yourself retreat that culminates in the total consecration to Jesus through Mary by focusing on the Mysteries of the Rosary and the Seven Sorrows of Mary – and all it takes is a few moments each day! For years Fr. Ed Broom has transformed lives by leading this five-week retreat in Southern California. Now, for the very first time, that retreat is available in book form for those who cannot attend one of Father’s retreats in person. Here you’ll find the entire retreat program to bring you closer to Our Lady and to Our Lord: Scripture readings keyed to each Rosary decade, Fr. Broom’s succinct meditations on each Mystery, daily prayers, and wise but practical steps to help you gain the most from each meditation as you draw daily closer to your retreat’s culmination in the fifth week: your own Total Consecration to Jesus through Mary. Why not spend the next five weeks with Fr. Broom meditating on the mysteries of the Rosary and the words of Scripture? Do so, and you’ll quickly come to appreciate as never before the beautiful prayer that is the Rosary as well as Jesus and Mary, whom you will soon know better and love more.

Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something author Tish Harrison Warren does in a day—making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys—and relates it to spiritual practice as well as to our Sunday worship.

On first publication in the 1960s, "Honest to God" did more than instigate a passionate debate about the nature of Christian belief in a secular revolution. It epitomised the revolutionary mood of the era and articulated the anxieties of a generation.

Most people would not consider north central Kansas' Waconda Lake to be extraordinary. The lake, completed in 1969 by the federal Bureau of Reclamation for flood control, irrigation, and water supply purposes, sits amid a region known--when it is thought of at all--for agriculture and, perhaps to a few, as the home of "The World's Largest Ball of Twine" (in nearby Cawker City). Yet, to the native people living in this region in the centuries before Anglo incursion, this was a place of great spiritual power and mystic significance. Waconda Spring, now beneath the waters of the lake, was held as sacred, a place where connection with the spirit world was possible. Nearby, a giant snake symbol carved into the earth by native peoples--likely the ancestors of today's Wichitas--signified a similar place of reverence and totemic power. All that began to change on July 6, 1870, when Charles DeRudio, an officer in the 7th U.S. Cavalry who had served with George Armstrong Custer, purchased a tract on the north bank of the Solomon River--a tract that included Waconda Spring. DeRudio had little regard for the sacred properties of his acrea≥ instead, he viewed the mineral spring as a way to make money. In Holy Ground, Healing Water: Cultural Landscapes at Waconda Springs, Kansas, anthropologist Donald J. Blakeslee traces the usage and attendant meanings of this area, beginning with prehistoric sites dating between AD 1000 and 1250 and continuing to the present day. Addressing all the sites at Waconda Lake, regardless of age or cultural affiliation, Blakeslee tells a dramatic story that looks back from the humdrum present through the romantic haze of the nineteenth century to an older landscape, one that is more wonderful by far than what the modern imagination can conceive.

This provocative account of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s tells the stories of eight pivotal players. The saints are now honored as martyrs by the Catholic Church, and the sinners were political and military leaders who were accomplices in the persecution. The saintly standouts are Anacleto González Flores, whose non-violent demonstrations ended with his death after a day of brutal torture; Archbishop Francisco Orozco y Jiménez, who ran his vast archdiocese from hiding while on the run from the Mexican government; Fr. Toribio Romo González, who was shot in his bed one morning simply for being a Catholic priest; and Fr. Miguel Pro, the famous Jesuit who kept slipping through the hands of the military police in Mexico City despite being on the "most wanted" list for sixteen months. The four sinners are Melchor Ocampo, the powerful politician who believed that Catholicism was the cause of Mexico's problems; President Plutarco Elías Calles, the fanatical atheist who brutally persecuted the Church; José Reyes Vega, the priest who ignored the orders of his archbishop and became a general in the Cristero army; and Tomás Garrido Canabal, a farmer-turned-politician who became known as the "Scourge of Tabasco". This cast of characters is presented in a compelling narrative of the Cristero War that engages the reader like a gripping novel while it unfolds a largely unknown chapter in the history of America.

Father Walter Ciszek, S.J., author of the best-selling He Leadeth Me, tells here the gripping, astounding story of his twenty-three years in Russian prison camps in Siberia, how he was falsely imprisoned as an "American spy", the incredible rigors of daily life as a prisoner, and his extraordinary faith in God and commitment to his priestly vows and vocation. He said Mass under cover, in constant danger of death. He heard confession of hundreds who could have betrayed him; he aided spiritually many who could have gained by exposing him. This is a remarkable story of personal experience. It would be difficult to write fiction that could honestly portray the heroic patience, endurance, fortitude and complete trust in God lived by Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J.