'A faithful friend is a strong defence: and he that has found him, has found a treasure' (Sirach 6: 14). Friendship with God is the culmination of the Christian life, a life in which the human and Divine meet in the fellowship of perfect communion. But friendship is built upon a common life: upon shared sufferings and solace, sorrows and success; and we are far removed from the historical life of Jesus. How, then, do we become his friends? In this volume, Msgr. Benson shows us how to develop our friendship with Christ by sharing in the common life of the Church, meeting His presence in members of the Church; in the Sacraments, the Priest, the sinner, the saint and the everyman.

The Friendship of Christ

Literature & Fiction

Robert Hugh Benson

Classics

Civium Press

<p>Mr. Vane&#8217;s library is haunted by its former libarian. Few believed the old tale, and none could have guessed the Dantesque journey on which the Vergilian phantom would lead his patron's great-grandson.<br />
Mr. Vane passes through a mirrored door to find a world in which pure innocence and pure corruption. Yet, Mr. Vane proves himself truly vain. Although his raven guide reveals to him how to save the things he loves most, Mr. Vane ignores his advice and settles upon his own method. In th end, he learns the lesson which the raven had been trying to teach him all along: that only by dying may one truly live.</p>

Lilith

George, MacDonald

Faced with the choice between his people’s salvation and his own survival, one man chooses a glorious death over shameful life. When the Roman Legions invade the idyllic Mark, home to the many houses of the Gothic Kindreds, a people’s freedom is threatened by a looming imperialism forgetful of hearth and home. But, the men of the Mark rise against their foe to defeat “a grim folk that laugheth to see others weep.” Their leader forsakes his own life to ensure that his family and his kindred may live on. Morris recounts this tale with beautiful prose, scattered with plentiful lyrical poetry. The House of the Wolfings, along with The Roots of the Mountains, was cited by J. R. R. Tolkien as part of the inspiration for his writing The Lord of the Rings.

The House of the Wolfings

William, Morris

As King Peter’s sons grew into the prime of their lives, they chafed within their simple kingdom’s secure compass. The king consented to their wearing requests for the freedom to sojourn amongst the peoples of the earth, but bade his youngest son Ralph to stay with him and enjoy the wondrous modesty of the Upmeads. The young man’s heart, however, is unconsoled, and he sets out without way or end, but soon finds that his travails have all along been fatefully written into a quest “seeking of that which shall not be found.” But the relentless urgings of his heart compel Ralph to seek the Well at the World’s End and bear forth from it the redemption of his father’s kingdom: “For in the Well at the World’s End is no evil, but only the Quenching of Sorrow, and Clearing of the Eyes that they may behold.”

The Well at the World's End

“A good book ought to be like Eve; it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it.” Helen McGill often wonders if there’s not a lot of bunkum in higher education. As an author’s spinster sister, she has her own list of complaints to level against books, but when she meets a travelling bookseller named Roger Mifflin, she uncovers an undreamed of world of literary impracticality: kidnapping plots, German spies and old men who just won’t change. “Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world—the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking. Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade—would you wonder at his getting excited?”

Parnassus on Wheels & The Haunted Bookshop

Christopher, Morley

Dante And Catholic Philosophy In The Thirteenth Century

The work which produced this volume began when the author, only twenty years old at the time, found himself standing in the Camera della Segnatura before Raphael’s Disputa del Sacramento. Among the adoring Church—popes, monks, scholars and pastors—one head stood out from all the rest, crowned not in miter or tiara, but with laurels. Why should the painter bestow such august honor on the poet exile? This book is an attempt to answer that question. Unlike many who comment upon the poet’s work, Ozanam stresses the fidelity of Dante to the Catholic tradition and his filial devotion to the Church. Far from the revolutionary anti-Papal anarchist found in the passages of most commentaries, the portrait which Ozanam, following the Raphael’s lead, paints is the visage of a man who has set his mind on higher things and his hands on the lower: "Here is a poet who appeared in a tumultuous age, who lived as if enveloped in storms. Yet, behind the moving shadows of life, he divined immutable realities. Led by reason and by faith, he outstrips time, penetrates into the invisible world, there takes possession and establishes himself as if in his native land—he who has no longer a country here below. From that lofty station, when his eyes fall upon human things, he is able to see at once the beginning and the end; consequently, he measures and judges them."

Dante and Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century

Lucia Pychowska Frederic Ozanam

Literary

Misunderstood jokes are dangerous. Taking anything seriously can be dangerous. Taking a run-down London suburb seriously can be extremely dangerous: It might just turn into an empire.  When the farcical King Auberon inspires a preposterous love in the heart of a small boy for his ridiculous neighborhood, the youth grows up to have the last laugh: The facetious charge he took for an honest admonition sets the world on its head.  “The human being sees no real antagonism between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have lifted the modern cities into that poetry which everyone who knows mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend at the friend.”

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

G.K., Chesterton

The American Republic

Written toward the end of the American Civil War, this book examines the political turmoil of a nation at war with itself. Grounding his principles in the great Graeco-Roman tradition of classical Republicanism, Brownson critiques both the Southern States’ suicidal bid for independence and the Federal Government’s authoritarian overreach. He concludes that a Catholic America, which respectfully balances the interests of individual freedom and the binding solidarity of humanity, is the fulfillment of Republican development and will stand as a model beacon to the whole world. “Of all the states or colonies on this continent, the American Republic alone has a destiny, or the ability to add anything to the civilization of the race. Canada and the other British Provinces, Mexico and Central America, Columbia and Brazil, and the rest of the South American States, might be absorbed in the United States without being missed by the civilized world. They represent no idea, and the work of civilization could go on without them as well as with them.”

Politics & Social Sciences

Orestes Augustus Brownson

Social Sciences

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