General Spiritual Writers

While everyone is delighted by beauty, and the more alive among us are positively fascinated by it, few are explicitly aware that we can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. Dubay explores the reasons why all of the most eminent physicists of the twentieth century agree that beauty is the primary standard for scientific truth. Likewise, the best of contemporary theologians are also exploring with renewed vigor the aesthetic dimensions of divine revelation. Honest searchers after truth can hardly fail to be impressed that these two disciplines, science and theology, so different in methods, approaches and aims, are yet meeting in this and other surprising and gratifying ways.

This book relates these developments to nature, music, academe and our unquenchable human thirst for unending beauty, truth and ecstasy, a thirst quenched only at the summit of contemplative prayer here below, and in the consummation of the beatific vision hereafter.

Why is it, asks Bishop Fulton Sheen, that one hears so often the expression "Go to hell!" and almost never the expression "Go to heaven!" Here, at his most penetrating, challenging, and illuminating best is Bishop Sheen with his answer, in a book that breathes new meaning into the truths about heaven and hell, and new life into the concepts of faith, tolerance, love, prayer, suffering, and death.

Beginning with "The First Faint Summons to Heaven," Sheen shows how unpopular it is today to be a true Christian, and describes the struggle for living our faith amid the disorders of our times. Keenly aware of evil in the myriad forms it takes in today's world, Bishop Sheen writes about the constant battle man faces with the "seven pallbearers of character" - pride, avarice, envy, lust, anger, gluttony and sloth - linking them with the corrosive forces that never cease in their attacks on the Church and those who earnestly desire to be serious Christians.

In Go to Heaven, a great spiritual teacher and writer, deeply aware of the human and spiritual conflicts being waged in the world, shows us the way to heaven in a most eloquent book, encouraging the reader to choose heaven now, and to understand the "reality of hell."

For more than eight years, Henri Nouwen felt that what he wrote was too raw and private to share with others. Instead, he published The Return of the Prodigal Son, in which he expressed some of the insights gained during his mental and spiritual crisis. But then friends asked him, "Why keep your anguish hidden from the many people who have been nurtured by your writing? Wouldn't it be of consolation for many to know about the fierce inner battle that lies underneath so many of your spiritual insights?"

For the countless men and women who have to live through the pain of broken relationships, or who suffer from the loss of a loved one, this book about the inner voice of love offers new courage, new hope, even new life.

"The beginning of the spiritual life is often difficult not only because the powers which cause us to worry are so strong but also because the presence of God's Spirit seems barely noticeable. If, however, we are willing to live a life of prayer and practice the disciplines of solitude and community, a new hunger will make itself known. This new hunger is the first sign of God's presence. When we remain attentive to this divine presence, we will be led always deeper into the kingdom. There, to our joyful surprise, we will discover that the power of our worries is weakening and all things are being made new."
- -from "Making All Things New"

\The guidance that you will find in this book will refresh your memory of the power of Archbishop Sheen\'s clear thoughts and deep personal spirituality.\ -from the Foreword by Msgr. Eugene V. Clark