Ignatian Spirituality

Every Christian has a Mission. What's Yours?
"Is it time to change jobs?" "Should I marry?"
"Am I called to religious life?"

Sooner or later, every thoughtful Christian asks such questions. For everyone ready to make the shift from "What do I want for my life?" to "what does God want for my life?" Fr. Gallagher offers this new book to help you make sense of your major life decisions.

Drawing from the timeless methods of Ignatius Loyola and richly illustrated with examples and stories, this book offers practical wisdom for aligning your will to God's will. Fr. Gallagher takes you through each step of the process, including opening your heart to whatever God wants; making use of silence, the Eucharist, Scripture, and spiritual direction; and finding clarity (and what to do when you lack clarity).

While this book focuses on the major decisions such as marriage and career and vocation choices, the insights gained here can be adapted to other significant life decisions as well. Fr. Gallagher's clear style makes this book an important resource for all who want to discover where God is leading them, as well as for spiritual directors, retreat directors, and counselors

To navigate the inevitable ups and downs of our spiritual lives, countless souls have found comfort and guidance in St. Ignatius of Loyola's Rules for Discernment. For the past forty years, popular retreat master and author Fr. Timothy Gallagher has been at the forefront of making St. Ignatius's Rules understandable and applicable to hundreds of thousands of Catholics seeking greater sensitivity to the "movements of their souls.

Now Fr. Gallagher returns with a more focused mission: to help you apply these rules to your role as a husband or a wife.

In Discernment of Spirits in Marriage, Fr. Gallagher aims to free you from discouragement and assist you in finding peace in your spiritual life and in your marriage. He will help you determine what is of God and what is not and will show you how the enemy works to discourage you in your daily spousal interactions in order to undermine both your spiritual growth and your marital bond.

Best of all, you'll learn what to do about it!

With St. Ignatius and Fr. Gallagher as your guides, you'll learn:

The examen prayer is a transforming and ever-growing practice in Christian spirituality. In The Examen Prayer, Fr. Timothy Gallagher draws from real-life stories and his experience as a spiritual director to explain the core principles of the examen prayer: What is the examen and how can we begin to pray it? How can we adapt it to our individual lives? What are its fruits?

Timothy Gallagher has focused his entire adult life to studying and teaching Ignatian spirituality. For decades he has made it the focus of his work to guide spiritual directors in the rich Ignatian discipline which currently is experiencing a remarkable renaissance far beyond the Catholic realm. Out of this work grew the Handbook for Spiritual Directors which will make Fr. Gallagher's extraordinary teaching available to Fr. Gallagher's growing audience around the world. This book helps spiritual directors guide the process of Ignatian discernment in a very practical and yet profoundly spiritual way. Spiritual directors receive few requests more often, and more demanding than that of helping a person discern God's will in life's taxing decisions. With this handbook, Fr. Gallagher has provided the means necessary for responding to and helping with this request. For those spiritual directors trained in Ignatian spirituality this book offers to become an essential companion, and for those who want to learn this form of discernment this book will provide the foundation for understanding and learning this age-old, proven process for discerning the will of God.

What would it be like to meet Jesus face to face? To walk with him along the roads and seashores of ancient Palestine, to eat with him, to hear his words, to witness his miracles?

For centuries, Christians have "walked with Jesus" through the practice of imaginative prayer. In Imagine You Walked with Jesus, you'll learn the method of imaginative prayer developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola five hundred years ago. Then you'll be guided through forty Gospel-based encounters with Jesus, from his birth to his resurrection.

Key features of Imagine You Walked with Jesus include:

Jesus' invitation to walk with him wasn't limited to the people of the Gospels; Jesus invites each of us to walk with him today, too. Imaginative prayer is a deeply intimate way to respond to that invitation - and ultimately to be transformed by the encounter.

About the Author

Jerry Windley-Daoust is the author of more than a dozen books on Catholic social teaching, family spirituality, and Ignatian prayer. Cofounder of Gracewatch Media, which creates print and digital resources for Catholic families, he is especially grateful for the ten years he spent as a stay-at-home dad for his five children. Find him online at windhovering.com.

When Luke Larson and his wife Evie embarked on a 500-mile pilgrimage across northern Spain, their purpose was to experience walking as a way of keeping company with Jesus and his companions, of both earth and heaven, such as Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Keeping Company is filled with personal, luminously candid, and often amusing stories of the couple's experiences along the Way of Saint James. More than anything, this book invites you to step off the treadmill of self-effort in your quest to experience God more intimately through the spiritual practice of walking, literally, with God.

This step-by-step guide on how to make a Particular Examen is rooted in the five wounds of Jesus and includes prayers, sample format, and predominant faults to avoid in prayer, work, study, and recreation. As most of us struggle with the same assortment of sins, these targeted reflections will assist you in conquering your faults.

This reprint of the 1952 classic contains prayers for each topic from the traditional Roman Missal that help you foster the proper spirit of mind and unction of heart for fruitful meditation.

Here is a valuable resource for any Catholic -- priest, consecrated, or lay -- wishing to develop a plan for spiritual holiness. It provides self-inventory questions for each vice to help determine angles of attack and addresses misconceptions about each vice. You will learn ways to defeat your vices, and thus serve God more wholeheartedly, and will find rules for practicing fraternal charity by contemplating the cardinal and theological virtues.

If your root sin is a type of pride, this book will show you how to cultivate the corresponding virtue of humility by meditating on the lives of Jesus and Mary. By the same token, if your predominant fault is avarice, the biblical references provided will bolster your resolve and engender thoughts of poverty in spirit instead. Penetrating reflections are offered to overcome lust with purity, anger with
meekness, gluttony with temperance, envy with common sense, and sloth with zeal.

You will also acquire tips on how to:

Hidden saints embolden the Church in times of persecution. Take up your cross. Defend your faith for God's glory and the salvation of souls.

For most people most of the time, prayer is hard. It is especially difficult--not to mention unsatisfying--when people experience it as formal, dry, and repetitious. But what might happen if you discovered a simple prayer that changed all that? What if you discovered a prayer that changed you?

In A Simple, Life-Changing Prayer, Jim Manney introduces Christians to a 500-year-old form of prayer that dramatically altered his perception of prayer and the way he prayed. The prayer is the examen, which St. Ignatius Loyola developed for the purpose of nurturing a reflective habit of mind that is constantly attuned to God's presence. What makes the prayer so powerful is its capacity to dispel any notion that God is somewhere "up there," detached from our day-to-day tasks and concerns. Instead, the examen leads us into a relationship with a God who desires to be personally caught up in the lives of those whom he created.

By following five simple yet powerful steps for praying the examen, we can encounter the God who, as Scripture tells us, "is not far from each one of us"--the God whose presence in our lives can make all the difference in the world.

Satan is always at work breeding sadness and anxiety while providing obstacles that prevent souls from making spiritual progress. In this concise yet powerful book, author Dan Burke presents the venerable, time-tested wisdom of Catholic mystics to help you understand the influence of the Enemy on your mind and heart, and the tactics you need to combat him.

With St. Ignatius as his guide, Burke presents here an indispensable, authoritative manual for engaging in daily battle with the Adversary--combat that is both inevitable and winnable. Burke will help you recognize the ebbs and flows of consolation and desolation, and distinguish between the voices of God and of Satan. Best of all, you'll come to see the spiritual life not as a science to be learned, but as an intuitive art to be practiced as you move with increasing success from habitual sin to sanctity.

The battle for our souls is unavoidable. The saints won theirs by learning how to be spiritual warriors and by recognizing that we become stronger through battle and grow weaker from avoidance. With this book as your guide, you'll grow in strength and contentment as you learn: