Three Really Good, and Really Short, Books

Broken link, Father :).

Today is the Feast of St. Augustine. He taught that there is a rivalry and conflict over objects of desire given the fact that all desire can be unstable and that human beings are free. In the monastic tradition, the ascetic struggle is not a way to suppress our drives and passions, but a way to transform and to shape them. The three basic desires - eating, sex and greed - are transformed through what the monastic tradition calls fasting, asceticism, and alms giving. Michael

Well, I have to laugh at this one. Short is good. Like drive-in fast food with an ear to the cell phone? My personal experience is that publishers too like short. Or, say, 100 pages that they can sell for $12.95. Refuse to cut your 250 pages and, well.... Now, I'm not saying that anyone should have to read Alphonsus Rodriquez,S.J.'s Practice of Perfection and Christian Virtues which has three volumes of about the same size, the last volume being 505 pages, but I am proud that I have read it. Of course I've read the unabridged City of God by Augustine a couple of times too. But I can't brag, only eat humble pie when I realize that the guys who wrote these books wrote 20 or 30 other ones too. And then there is Josef Pieper's 100 pages of quotes- The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas. His pick #188 runs, ''A natural desire cannot possibly be vain and senseless''. Why read anything else when this phrase will get you through life!