Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years. Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesarea in Palestine, broke new ground in writing the History and provided a model for all later ecclesiastical historians. In tracing the history of the Church from the time of Christ to the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century, and ending with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, his aim was to show the purity and continuity of the doctrinal tradition of Christianity and its struggle against persecutors and heretics.

This fascinating account of a Yale-trained psychiatrist's twenty-year experience with Native American healing interweaves autobiography with stories of the Native Americans who challenged his medical school assumptions about their methods.

"The Paulist Press' recent 60-volume series on the Western mystics is to my mind the most hopeful sign in American publishing." Kenneth L. Woodward Religion Editor of Newsweek Magazine in Publishers Weekly Bonaventure-The Soul's Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St. Francis translation and introduction by Ewert Cousins, preface by Ignatius Brady, O.F.M. "But if you wish to know how these things come about ask grace not instruction, desire not understanding, the groaning of prayer not diligent reading, the Spouse not the teacher, God not man, darkness not clarity, not light but the fire that totally enflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections. This fire is God and his furnace is in Jerusalem..." Bonaventure, 1217-1274 Long before Bonaventure was called "The Prince of Mystics" by Leo XIII or "The Seraphic Doctor" by John Gerson, he was known throughout the Christian world as "The Devout Teacher." Professor Ewert Cousins says in his introduction, "In the history of Western Spirituality, Bonaventure holds a central and pivotal position. The 13th century friar, professor at the University of Paris, minister general of the Franciscan Order, cardinal and advisor to popes, played a major role in the spiritual ferment of the high Middle Ages...when Islamic, Jewish and Christian spirituality were flourishing-he produced one of the richest syntheses of Christian spirituality. Although cosmic in its scope, it was distinctively Christian in its content, grounded in the doctrine of the Trinity and devotion to the humanity of Christ. Within Christianity he achieved a striking integration of Eastern and Western elements." The three works contained in this volume offer the core of his vision. In The Soul's Journey into God, considered Bonaventure's masterpiece, he takes the six-winged Seraph as the symbol for the six stages of contemplation in which the created world is seen as a reflection of God. The Tree of Life is a simple meditation on the life of Jesus, "based on the Gospel accounts" in which "Christ is seen as the Tree of Life on whose branches blossom such virtues as humility, piety, patience, constancy and justice." The Life of St. Francis was the official biography commissioned by the Franciscan Order in 1260. The editor of this volume, Dr. Ewert Cousins, is Professor of Theology, Fordham University and Visiting Professor, Columbia University. He is Director of the Spirituality Graduate Program at Fordham. Ignatius Brady, O.F.M., who wrote the preface to this volume, is one of the world's leading authorities on Bonaventure and early Franciscan spirituality. He is Prefect of the Theology Section of the Franciscan research center, Collegio S. Bonaventura at Grottaferrata near Rome.

Only if, with regard to the diversity of religions, there are questions about truth and falsehood do we have a problem about the pluralism of religions and the unity of truth.

That problem is not concerned with preserving religious liberty, freedom of worship, and the toleration, in a particular society or in the world, of a diversity of religious institutions, communities, practices, and beliefs. It is concerned only with the question of where, in that diversity, the truth lies if there is any truth in religion at all.

Succinctly describes 140 sacred texts, dating from the earliest times to the present, in relation to the cultures that created them

Introduction by Martin E. Marty

"...a milestone in American religious publishing." New Catholic World Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings translation and introduction by John Van Engen preface by Heiko A. Oberman "I intend to order my life to the glory, honor, and service of God and to the salvation of my soul; to put no temporal good of body, position, fortune or learning ahead of my soul's salvation; and to pursue the imitation of God in every way consonant with learning and discernment and with my own body and estate, which predispose certain forms of imitation." Geert Grote The "Modern Devotion" appears in nearly every textbook account of medieval spirituality as the characteristic expression of later medieval religious life. One written testimony to this "Modern Devotion," The Imitation of Christ, was to prove the single most influential devotional book in the history of Western Christianity. Yet apart from the Imitation itself, the spiritual works that taught this "New Devotion" have rarely been translated into English and have never been gathered in a single place. With the publication of this volume, Van Engen has made available the essential sources of the devotional movement that later medieval people looked upon as "modern" or "new." The movement originated with a Dutchman of patrician stock, Master Geert Grote, and was carried forward in communities that came to be known as the Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life. Eventually they acquired counterparts in orders, the regular canons and canonesses of the Windesheim congregation. This volume contains several works by the founder himself, Geert Grote, as well as representative lives of the Brothers and Sisters, translated for the first time from Latin and medieval Dutch. To illustrate the range of spiritual teaching these communities developed, Van Engen has chosen to translate works from several different genres: "sayings" that captured their religious insights, "statutes" that guided their collective lives, "exercises" that guided their individual lives, and "collations" or sermons that inspired their new devotion. Finally, Van Engen offers a modern translation of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen's Spirituality Ascensions as a kind of religious summation of the entire movement. Though little known today, it proved the single most widely read work inside the movement itself.

The author describes life at her family's old country farmhouse and shares her observations on nature, writing, and the human community.