Carmelite Spirituality

After escaping his captors, John fell into a state of profound ecstasy and wrote Dark Night of the Soul. Later, he added an important commentary to his poem to guide other searching souls along the arduous path to communion with God. Here, for the first time, a scholar unaffiliated with the Catholic Church has translated this timeless work. Mirabai Starr, who has studied Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism, lends the seeker's sensibility to John's powerful text and brings this classic work to the twenty-first century in a brilliant and beautiful rendering

On the same summer day in 1942, Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and hundreds of other Catholic Jews were arrested in Holland by the occupying Nazis. One hundred thirteen of those taken into custody, several of them priests and nuns, perished at Auschwitz and other concentration camps. They were murdered in retaliation for the anti-Nazi pastoral letter written by the Dutch Catholic bishops.

While Saint Teresa Benedicta is the most famous member of this group, having been canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1998, all of them deserve the title of martyr, for they were killed not only because they were Jews but also because of the faith of the Church, which had compelled the Dutch bishops to protest the Nazi regime. Through extensive research in both original and secondary sources, P.W.F.M. Hamans has compiled these martyrs' biographies, several of them detailed and accompanied by photographs. Included in this volume are some remarkable conversion stories, including that of Edith Stein, the German philosopher who had entered the Church in 1922 and later became a Carmelite nun, taking the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

Several of the witnesses chronicled here had already suffered for their faith in Christ before falling victim to Hitler's "Final Solution," enduring both rejection by their own people, including family members, and persecution by the so-called Christian society in which they lived. Among these were those who, also like Sister Teresa Benedicta, perceived the cross they were being asked to bear and accepted it willingly for the salvation of the world. Illustrated

Today the question of time has become one of the most urgent. We think we live with a constant lack of time; that we don't have enough time in our lives. And when many of us experience stress and burn-out, we understand that this way of life cannot go on.

Can time be our friend? And how can we make use of the immense opportunites that time offers us?

Stinnisen's classic book helps us to dare to see time with new eyes, to meditate on time and what it means. The insight that eternity is written in the depths of our hearts can help us to live in time in a new way that leads us deeper into God's joy.

He says that we should rejoice in the fact that everything around us is so great and mysterious that we can live in eternal wonder. We are like children in a land of fairy tales where everything is exciting and exploration never ends.

His intention is not to explain what time is and thus take away its mystery. Instead, his aim is to focus on time, to see it from different perspectives, to discover how rich and multi-faceted time is. Above all, he shows how we can make use of the tremendous possibilities that time offers to us.