Three ’windows’ to spiritual maturity How can a faithful Christian avoid stagnating in their spiritual development? Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity: Psychological, Contemplative, and Moral Challenges in Christian Living explores effective ways in which Christian discipleship can grow in spiritual maturity. This thoughtful, integrative roadmap explains the journey through three interrelated perspectives, or ’windows,’ psychotherapeutic psychology, prayer and contemplation, and moral theology. The author uses numerous examples from everyday life to make the reflections interesting and practical. Unlike other books on Christian spirituality, this book is more challenging and sophisticated in its depth of thought. Spiritual maturity is a process that begins when a person accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, and progresses ongoing through a Christian’s life. Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity discusses in detail the challenges one must face, including the sustained, in-depth, and faithful attention to psychological wholeness, conversion to the true self, and interpersonal and social responsibility. Effective strategies are given through example and personal story, making understanding of the principles easier. This reflection on Christian maturity helps readers to focus directly on the personal issues all must face when attuning to the Spirit of Christ. Topics in Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity include: reforming the wayward self moral or guilt-based perfectionism achievement or shame-based perfectionism the two types of conversion responsibility and accountability agape and the loving of oneself three virtues at the heart of the responsible life—integrity, courage, and compassion virtues as habits the relationship between personal fulfillment and the Christian vocation Moving Toward Spiritual Maturity is a unique look at the path toward spiritual maturity, and is challenging, thoughtful reading for laypersons, ministers, priests, and theological students.

Penance. Confirmation. Eucharist. Children participate in these sacraments, and many other Catholic rites, thanks to America's long-standing model of parish catechesis. Once children become adults, however, what becomes of their faith formation?In Toward an Adult Church: A Vision of Faith Formation, Jane Regan explores the current structure of parish catechesis. Basing her ideas on contemporary theory and traditional practice, Regan sets forth an intriguing argument: the vitality of the Church depends on establishing a new education paradigm--one that is focused on adults.How can parishes design a framework for adult catechesis? Will such programs be accepted by local church communities? Where does children's faith formation fit into the new structure?Regan answers these questions and offers ideas for developing a balanced approach to religious education--one that addresses the ongoing faith life of adults.

Surveying the disparate expert "literatures," which normally take no account of each other, Kegan brings them together to reveal, for the first time, what these many demands have in common. Our frequent frustration in trying to meet these complex and often conflicting claims results, he shows us, from a mismatch between the way we ordinarily know the world and the way we are unwittingly expected to understand it. In Over Our Heads provides us entirely fresh perspectives on a number of cultural controversies - the "abstinence vs. safe sex" debate, the diversity movement, communication across genders, the meaning of postmodernism. What emerges in these pages is a theory of evolving ways of knowing that allows us to view adult development much as we view child development, as an open-ended process born of the dynamic interaction of cultural demands and emerging mental capabilities.

Articles from the Living light. Includes bibliographical references.