The Three Conversions Of The Christian Life

Christianity is a religion of conversion, but what is conversion? This book explores the fullness of the Christian life and the threefold turnings that it demands of Jesus’ followers. Starting with St. Paul while looking in detail at his Damascus Road experience and examining the remarkable lives of exemplary Christians, the authors unfold dynamics of conversion and call all followers to grow deeper in their discipleship.

In this compact book; the famous Thomist; Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange; sets forth the classic Catholic traditions on the spiritual life as the full flowering of Sanctifying Grace in the soul. He explains the three stages of the spiritual life-the Purgative Way; the Illuminative Way; and the Unitive Way-showing the transitions or conversions from one period to another. How can one become a saint without knowing the way -- the pitfalls; common mistakes; and experience of Saints who have gone before. Friar Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange OP., was a worldwide known Catholic Theologian and, among Thomists of the scholastic tradition, is generally thought to be the greatest Catholic Thomist of the Twentieth Century. He taught at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, commonly known as the Angelicum, in Rome from 1909 until 1960.Gontran-Marie Garrigou-Lagrange was born in Auch, Midi-Pyrénées, France, on February 21, 1877, into a solid Catholic family living in the south-west of France. In 1896, he began studies in medicine at the University of Bordeaux, but whilst there he read a book by the Catholic philosopher Ernest Hello which changed the direction of his life.Medical studies abandoned, Gontran-Marie entered the French Dominicans at the age of twenty, and received the Religious Name of Reginald, after Blessed Reginald of Orleans, a contemporary of St Dominic, to whom Our Lady appeared in a vision, curing him of a mortal sickness and gaving him a white scapular that thereupon became part of the Dominican habit. Friar Reginald had the good fortune to receive his initial training from Dominicans committed to implementing Pope Leo XIII's encyclical letter "Aeterni Patris", the document that insisted upon the unique place of St. Thomas Aquinas in Philosophy and Theology. It was by studying the Angelic Doctor that the young Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange nourished the conviction that had brought him to the cloister: the unchangeableness of revealed truth.

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Volume One of the spiritual classic by the man who taught John Paul II theology at the Angelicum in Rome

WINNER OF THE WOLFSON PRIZE FOR HISTORY 2015 A major new interpretation of how one of the great figures of Christian history came to write the greatest of all autobiographies Augustine is the person from the ancient world about whom we know most. He is the author of an intimate masterpiece, the Confessions, which continues to delight its many admirers. In it he writes about his infancy and his schooling in the classics in late Roman North Africa, his remarkable mother, his sexual sins ('Give me chastity, but not yet,' he famously prayed), his time in an outlawed heretical sect, his worldly career and friendships and his gradual return to God. His account of his own eventual conversion is a classic study of anguish, hesitation and what he believes to be God's intervention. It has inspired philosophers, Christian thinkers and monastic followers, but it still leaves readers wondering why exactly Augustine chose to compose a work like none before it. Robin Lane Fox follows Augustine on a brilliantly described journey, combining the latest scholarship with recently found letters and sermons by Augustine himself to give a portrait of his subject which is subtly different from older biographies. Augustine's heretical years as a Manichaean, his relation to non-Christian philosophy, his mystical aspirations and the nature of his conversion are among the aspects of his life which stand out in a sharper light. For the first time Lane Fox compares him with two contemporaries, an older pagan and a younger Christian, each of whom also wrote about themselves and who illumine Augustine's life and writings by their different choices. More than a decade passed between Augustine's conversion and his beginning the Confessions. Lane Fox argues that the Confessions and their thinking were the results of a long gestation over these years, not a sudden change of perspective, but that they were then written as a single swift composition and that its final books are a coherent consummation of its scriptural meditation and personal biography. This exceptional study reminds us why we are so excited and so moved by Augustine's story.

A leading American evangelical minister—whom public figures long turned to for guidance in faith and politics—recounts his three conversions, from childhood Jewish roots to Christianity, from a pure faith to a highly politicized one, and from the religious right to the simplicity of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Rob Schenck’s extraordinary life has been at the center of the intersection between evangelical Christianity and modern politics. Attacked by partisans on both sides of the aisle, he has been called a "right-wing hate monger," the "ultimate D.C. power-broker," a "traitor" and "turncoat." Now, this influential spiritual adviser to America’s political class chronicles his controversial, sometimes troubling career in this revelatory and often shocking memoir. As a teenager in the 1970s, Schenck converted from Judaism to Christianity and found his calling in public ministry. In the 1980s, he, like his twin brother, became a radical activist leader of the anti-abortion movement. In the wake of his hero Ronald Reagan’s rise to the White House, Schenck became a leading figure in the religious right inside the Beltway. Emboldened by his authority and access to the highest reaches of government, Schenck was a zealous warrior, brazenly mixing ministry with Republican political activism—even confronting President Bill Clinton during a midnight Christmas Eve service at Washington’s National Cathedral. But in the past few years Schenck has undergone another conversion—his most meaningful transition yet. Increasingly troubled by the part he played in the corruption of religion by politics, this man of faith has returned to the purity of the gospel. Like Paul on the Road to Damascus, he had an epiphany: revisiting the lessons of love that Jesus imparted, Schenck realized he had strayed from his deepest convictions. Reaffirming his core spiritual beliefs, Schenck today works to liberate the evangelical community from the oppression of the narrowest interpretation of the gospel, and to urge Washington conservatives to move beyond partisan battles and forsake the politics of hate, fear, and violence. As a preacher, he continues to spread the word of the Lord with humility and a deep awareness of his past transgressions. In this moving and inspiring memoir, he reflects on his path to God, his unconscious abandonment of his principles, and his return to the convictions that guide him. Costly Grace is a fascinating and ultimately redemptive account of one man’s life in politics and faith.

Discipleship occurs when someone answers the call to learn from Jesus how to live his or her life as though Jesus were living it. The end result is that the disciple becomes the kind of person who naturally does what Jesus did. How the church understands salvation and the gospel is the key to recovering a biblical theology of discipleship. Our doctrines of grace and salvation, in some cases, actually prevent us from creating an expectation that we are to be disciples of Jesus. A person can profess to be a Christian and yet still live under the impression that they don’t need to actually follow Jesus. Being a follower is seen as an optional add-on, not a requirement. It is a choice, not a demand. Being a Christian today has no connection with the biblical idea that we are formed into the image of Christ. In this ground-breaking new book, pastor and author Bill Hull shows why our existing models of evangelism and discipleship fail to actually produce followers of Jesus. He looks at the importance of recovering a robust view of the gospel and taking seriously the connection between conversion—answering the call to follow Jesus—and discipleship—living like the one we claim to follow.

Walter Conn has provided us with something we have needed for a long time -- a scholarly study of Christian conversion that draws synthetically from present day psychology, philosophy, and theology and uses these insights to analyze actual Christian religious experience. And in doing that, Conn has produced what is probably the best treatment to date of foundational moral theology. To follow Conn through the pages of this volume is to become acquainted with most of today's important reflection on human moral and personal development. But one emerges with much more than relevant information about what is being said; Conn's own view of conversion goes beyond the thinkers from whom he draws and provides a basic challenge to and enrichment of our understanding of faith and morality. -- Bernard Cooke, Holy Cross College Walter E. Conn is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University. He is also the editor of Horizons, journal of the College Theology Society.