The story of an extraordinary encounter at the height of the Fifth Crusade

Aviad Kleinberg a professor of history at Tel Aviv University belongs to that not inconsiderable number of contemporary historians who have taken seriously the cult of the saints in the history of Christianity That interest in the saints has been especially energized by Peter Brown rsquo s The Cu

One could do worse than devote some time during Lent to 'lectio divina' and reading the Scriptures prayerfully.

In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that the essential functions of the church are three, for which he gives the Greek terms: leitourgia (worship), marturia/kerygma (witness/proclamation), and diakonia (service). He uses the word marturia (witness) in the original s

At the insistent urging of a motel clerk near the Minneapolis airport a few years ago, I took the motel shuttle to that temple of American consumerism, The Mall of America, even though, as I told the lady at the front desk, I am not a mall kind of a guy. After a few bewildering minutes of strolling

There are so many mistaken notions about St. John of the Cross (1542-91) that we might do well to clarify some of them.

In 1918 the German religion scholar Friedrich Heiler published his great phenomenological study of prayer which for all its merits and sympathy for prayer was flawed by his rigid separation of prayer from ritual gesture folk custom and icon Heiler rsquo s restrictive methodology did not come

Invariably reviewers of writings by the Rev Andrew Greeley feel obliged to mention how much he writes which is a lot Few bother to note how certain basic themes run like threads through his work particularly when Greeley reflects on the mountain of data he has produced over a very long career a

It always disappoints me a bit when the celebrant at Mass chooses Eucharistic Prayer 1 (the Roman Canon) and skips the invocation of the saints, that resonant list of early martyrs recited before and after the institution narrative. The omission is all the more disappointing since one of those lists

Garnished with stories of saintly figures and their teachings, Robert Ellsberg's book consists of eight chapters that are like interlocking facets of happiness and holiness.