Joyful Discipleship Initiative Study Results

library notes

When the Church Was Young: Voices of the Early Fathers by Marcellino D’Ambrosio Ph.D.

If the word trinity isn’t in Scripture, why is it such an important part of our faith? And if the Bible can be interpreted in many ways, how do we know what to make of it? And who decided what should be in the Bible anyway? The Church Fathers provide the answers. These brilliant, embattled, and sometimes eccentric men defined the biblical canon, hammered out the Creed, and gave us our understanding of sacraments and salvation. It is they who preserved for us the rich legacy of the early Church.

Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz by Kevin Wells

In 1957, at twenty-seven years old, Father Aloysius Schwartz of Washington, D.C., asked to be sent to one of the saddest places in the world: South Korea in the wake of the Korean War. Just a few months into his priesthood, he stepped off the train in Seoul into a dystopian film. Within just fifteen years, Father Schwartz had changed the course of Korean history, founding and reforming orphanages, hospitals, hospices, clinics, schools, and the Sisters of Mary, a Korean religious order dedicated to the sickest of the sick and the poorest of the poor. All the while, he himself—like the Sisters—lived the same hard poverty as the people he served and loved. Biographer Kevin Wells tells the story of a different kind of American hero, an ordinary priest who stared down corruption, slander, persecution, and death for the sake of God’s poor.

The Grace of “Nothingness”: Navigating the Spiritual Life with Blessed Columba Marmion by Fr Cassian Koenemann

In the early twentieth century, Blessed Columba Marmion’s dogmatically-grounded spiritual theology, expressed in artful prose, set the Catholic world on fire. A century later, in The Grace of “Nothingness,” Fr Cassian Koenemann seeks to rekindle that fire for a new generation with his inspired presentation of Marmion’s key spiritual insights. To this task he brings a monk’s sensitivity to friendship with God, a schoolteacher’s focus on the fruits of theology, and a spiritual theologian’s attentiveness to grounding it all in proven sources. Marmion reminds us that God heals and perfects us to the extent we allow him to do so, but that we often block that transformation through prideful “self-reliance,” trying to solve our problems by our own efforts.

KATE RHEA is the Library/Cemetery Administrative Assistant for Slattery Library and Saint Joseph Cemetery at the Diocese of Shreveport.

Slattery Library has re-opened to the public! Our hours are 9am-Noon Monday through Friday. As always, if you’d like to inquire about a book or periodical before your visit, please e-mail Kate Rhea at krhea@dioshpt.org or call (318) 219-7264.