Little Talks With God

"Eternal greatness! You made yourself low and small to make mankind great." While in an ecstatic trance, St. Catherine of Siena dictated The Dialogue. In this intense and searching work, she offers up petitions to God, filling her conversation with instruction on discernment, true and false spiritual emotion, obedience and truth, and revealing her famous image of Christ as the Bridge. Catherine's brilliant insights into the nature of the spiritual life have motivated Christians for centuries to unite a life of prayer with a life of action. "This have I told you, my sweetest daughter, that you might know the perfection of this union-producing state, when the eye of the intellect is ravished by the fire of my charity, in which it receives supernatural light. With this light the souls in the state of union love me, because love follows the intellect, and the more it knows the more it can love." (from the book)

Suppose you could ask God any question and get an answer. What would it be? Young people all over the world have been asking those questions. So Neale Donald Walsch, author of the internationally bestselling Conversations with God series had another conversation. Conversations with God for Teens is a simple, clear, straight-to-the-point dialogue that answers teens questions about God, money, sex, love, and more. Conversations with God for Teens reads like a rap session at a church youth group, where teenagers discuss everything they ever wanted to know about life but were too afraid to ask God. Walsch acts as the verbal conduit, showing teenagers how easy it is to converse with the divine. When Claudia, age 16, from Perth, Australia, asks, "Why can't I just have sex with everybody? What's the big deal?", the answer God offers her is: "Nothing you do will ever be okay with everybody. 'Everybody' is a large word. The real question is can you have sex and have it be okay with you?" There's no doubt that the casual question-and-answer format will help make God feel welcoming and accessible to teens. Conversations with God for Teens is the perfect gift purchase for parents, grandparents, and anyone else who wants to provide accessible spiritual content for the teen(s) in their lives.

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Are you living as God’s burning bush, without being consumed? Or might you be headed toward burnout? We will rediscover the blessing of this mutual love relationship with God, overflowing to others, as God’s sheer gift. Could it be that the first and greatest commandment is for our greatest joy, and not some mysterious burden to fulfill? One metaphor is the vine and the branches from John 15:1–11. Jesus is the vine and we are the branches; apart from the vine the branch can do nothing. God wants to be our supply, our source, in an intimate encounter of the finite with the infinite. God was the source for these heroes of faith: Augustine of Hippo, Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin, and Teresa of Avila. Using a descriptive process called the Classic Three Ways, including the purgative (letting go), illuminative (seeing with the heart), and unitive (intimacy), dating back to around 500 CE, we now add a fourth way, the unitive/active (the dance). From that dance of mutual love, ministry overflows. We do it together; it is participatory, humankind following God’s lead. It’s not a formula. It’s our living God!

Margaret Simon has a lot of things to think about--making friends in a new school, boys and dances and parties, growing physically "normal" and choosing a religion. "With sensitivity and humor, Judy Blume has captured the joys, fears, and uncertainties that surround a girl approaching adolescence."--"Publishers Weekly." Great Stone Face Award winner. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.