When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani's singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, Spirto gentil (Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . .). At that moment, Giussani understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart's goal existed: happiness.

Many years later, after founding Communion and Liberation-a lay movement within the Catholic Church-Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto Gentil, that included many of the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national traditions. The English translations of his introductions to the booklets that accompanied the compact discs have finally been gathered together, revised, and published in book form.

Giussani heard in music a privileged way of perceiving beauty as the splendor of truth, capable of arousing and keeping alive the desire for infinite beauty, recognizing it as one way through which the Mystery speaks to the heart of man. Spirto Gentil thus introduces us not only to the elements of musical form but above all it accompanies us in a search for the ultimate meaning of existence.

The Religious Sense, the fruit of many years of dialogue with students, is an exploration of the search for meaning in life. Luigi Giussani shows that the nature of reason expresses itself in the ultimate need for truth, goodness, and beauty. These needs constitute the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times. So strong is this sense that it leads one to desire that the answer to life's mystery might reveal itself in some way.Giussani challenges us to penetrate the deepest levels of experience to discover our essential selves, breaking through the layers of opinions and judgments that have obscured our true needs. Asserting that all the tools necessary for self-discovery are inherent within us, he focuses primarily on reason, not as narrowly defined by modern philosophers, but as an openness to existence, a capacity to comprehend and affirm reality in all of its dimensions.Part of the so-called new religious revival, The Religious Sense avoids any sentimental or irrational reduction of the religious experience. It is a forthright and refreshing call to reassess our lives. In this revised edition, John Zucchi offers a new translation of this seminal and best-selling work.

What do we mean when we say I? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject-a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one's own I.

And nothing is as moving and provocative as the belief that God became flesh and blood to accompany each person's journey in search of their own human face. Unfolding the implications of that belief is the burden of In Search of the Human Face, one of the seminal books by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation.

Life presents us first of all with a decision about what we recognize as our own foundation-and this decision is an event that is continually proposed again. The encounter with the Christian event has for two thousand years been the encounter with a human phenomenon in which the passion for the discovery of one's own face and openness to reality are mysteriously awakened, and it has as an inevitable consequence-the inauguration of a new type of morality, aptly described by Romano Guardini: In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.

When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani's singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, Spirto gentil (Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . .). At that moment, Giussani understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart's goal existed: happiness.

Many years later, after founding Communion and Liberation-a lay movement within the Catholic Church-Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto Gentil, that included many of the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national traditions. The English translations of his introductions to the booklets that accompanied the compact discs have finally been gathered together, revised, and published in book form.

Giussani heard in music a privileged way of perceiving beauty as the splendor of truth, capable of arousing and keeping alive the desire for infinite beauty, recognizing it as one way through which the Mystery speaks to the heart of man. Spirto Gentil thus introduces us not only to the elements of musical form but above all it accompanies us in a search for the ultimate meaning of existence.

There is an ancient Christian saying from the Patristic Era which is known in its most concise form as lex orandi, lex credendi. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church translates it: The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.

While the elegant simplicity of the phrase contains an abundance of wisdom, the liturgy has always been subject to forces that threaten to reduce this understanding to partial interpretations. As several observers have noted, these reductions include the archeological approach-explicating the liturgy's historical origins but in the process treating it as a dead letter-and the sociological approach-focusing on liturgy as little more than an expression of contemporary concerns.

In Living the Liturgy: A Witness, Father Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) restores a more balanced view, reminding us that (according to Roberto Braschi's introduction) in the liturgy God is its pres-ent subject and that the essence of every celebratory action is the possibility of a gaze toward Him-because it is always from Him that the dialogue with humanity moves. The memorable, bracing insights in Living the Liturgy were taken from conversations that Father Giussani had with members of the international lay movement he founded, Communion and Liberation.

What do we mean when we say I? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject-a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one's own I.

And nothing is as moving and provocative as the belief that God became flesh and blood to accompany each person's journey in search of their own human face. Unfolding the implications of that belief is the burden of In Search of the Human Face, one of the seminal books by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation.

Life presents us first of all with a decision about what we recognize as our own foundation-and this decision is an event that is continually proposed again. The encounter with the Christian event has for two thousand years been the encounter with a human phenomenon in which the passion for the discovery of one's own face and openness to reality are mysteriously awakened, and it has as an inevitable consequence-the inauguration of a new type of morality, aptly described by Romano Guardini: In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.

In his introduction, Fr. Julián Carrón asks: Why is hospitality a miracle? It seems like something we should take for granted-opening the door of our home and let-ting someone in should be normal. And yet, he notes, it is so exceptional that when it happens, everyone is amazed.

In the talks and interviews collected in The Miracle of Hospitality, Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL), delves into the source of this miracle-the free gift we call charity. He writes: Only if we are aware that we are loved-with clarity or confu-sion, implicitly or explicitly-can we love, which means to em-brace, to welcome within us, and to share.

Fr. Giussani's words were shaped by a long-running dialogue with the Welcoming Families Association, an organization that emerged out of the lived experience of CL and which has for many years promoted foster care and adoption, as well as support for migrants, the elderly, and the disabled. Given the ever-present phenomena of war, mass migration, and the many threats facing millions of children today, the miracle of hospitality is more urgently needed than ever.

In his introduction, Fr. Julián Carrón asks: Why is hospitality a miracle? It seems like something we should take for granted-opening the door of our home and let-ting someone in should be normal. And yet, he notes, it is so exceptional that when it happens, everyone is amazed.

In the talks and interviews collected in The Miracle of Hospitality, Fr. Luigi Giussani, founder of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL), delves into the source of this miracle-the free gift we call charity. He writes: Only if we are aware that we are loved-with clarity or confu-sion, implicitly or explicitly-can we love, which means to em-brace, to welcome within us, and to share.

Fr. Giussani's words were shaped by a long-running dialogue with the Welcoming Families Association, an organization that emerged out of the lived experience of CL and which has for many years promoted foster care and adoption, as well as support for migrants, the elderly, and the disabled. Given the ever-present phenomena of war, mass migration, and the many threats facing millions of children today, the miracle of hospitality is more urgently needed than ever.

This volume is a selection of the most significant writings by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of the Italian Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, which is practised in eighty countries around the world. Presented by Julián Carrón, Giussani's successor as head of Communion and Liberation, Christ, God's Companionship with Man is the most succinct introduction to the breadth of Giussani's thought, including memorable passages from works such as The Journey to Truth Is an Experience, At the Origin of the Christian Claim, Why the Church?, Generating Traces in the History of the World, and Is It Possible to Live This Way? Many speak of Giussani as a friendly presence, a man who believed that it was possible to live in faith every day and in any circumstance. As a writer and religious scholar who was deeply devoted to his work, Giussani's teachings and reflections have come to generate worldwide recognition and support. Revealing that spirituality and community can be found in ordinary ways, Christ, God's Companionship with Man will inspire all who read it.

Luigi Giussani, a high school religion teacher throughout the 1950s and 1960s, grounded his teachings in the vast body of experience to be found in Christianity's two-thousand-year history. He told his students, I'm not here to make you adopt the ideas I will give you as your own, but to teach you a method for judging the things I will say. Throughout his life, education was one of Giussani's primary intellectual interests. He believed that effective education required an adequate background in the Christian tradition, presented within a lived experience that underscored the capacity of the faith to answer universal questions. What he proposed was a process that allowed one to sift through tradition, critically examining it and comparing it against the ultimate criteria for judgment: the desires of the heart. In Giussani's view, the primary concern was to educate the human heart as God made it. In The Risk of Education he states that fear leads students to associate this process of criticism with negativity or doubt. Yet, without an education in criticism, students cannot develop conviction. At a time when young people are abandoning the church and questioning the value of faith, Giussani's method of judging and verifying Christianity as an experience seems a necessary intervention. In The Risk of Education he argues that, ultimately, education and the Christian message reveal themselves through human freedom.

In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking: Giovanni Testori is a well-known writer-and an openly gay man. Luigi Giussani is a Catholic priest who has attracted so many students with his striking way of re-proposing the Christian message that he's unwittingly started a movement (which came to be known as Communion and Liberation).

Testori, who has recently returned to the Catholic faith, begins with a provocative suggestion: modern people have lost contact with the existential and religious experience of birth, of an origin in love-the love of one's parents and the love of God. From here, the dialogue ranges widely, taking on the root causes of modern despair and alienation, the link between suffering and hope, the significance of memory, and what it means to encounter the presence of God in one another.

Profound but accessible, The Meaning of Birth is a resonant and bracing exploration of life's most fundamental questions.

Giussani argues that if we accept the hypothesis that the mystery entered the realm of human existence and spoke in human terms, the relationship between the individual and God is no longer based on a moral, imaginative, or aesthetic human effort but instead on coming upon an event in one's life. Thus the religious method is overturned by Christ: in Christianity it is no longer the person who seeks to know the mystery but the mystery that makes himself known by entering history. At the Origin of the Christian Claim presents an intriguing argument supported with ample documentation from the gospels and other theological writings.

Giussani begins by focusing on the Church as a community composed of people who are aware of themselves as defined by the gift of the Spirit, from which they derive a new conception of existence, the fruit of conversion. He then describes the Church's developing self-awareness of its dual elements of the human and divine. Concerned with verifying the Church's claim to embody Christ, Giussani situates the locus of verification in human experience, arguing that a different type of life is born in those who try to live the life of the Church. Why the Church? is a seminal study that will engage both the scholar and the general reader.

This volume of Is It Possible to Live this Way, a translation of Luigi Giussani's Si Può Vivere Così?, addresses the virtue of charity. A compilation of Giussani's conversations with young people who have chosen the path of the consecrated life in the Church - that is, have chosen to live their lives in the world according to the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience - it proposes an unusual yet reasonable approach to living as a Christian. As in all his works, Giussani encourages young people to be serious about their own existence and loyal to their experience. The conversations reported here are fascinating and insightful, providing support for a way of life that today is frequently questioned, rejected, or censured.

Is It Possible to Live this Way, a translation of the first part of Luigi Giussani's Si Può Vivere Così?, addresses the virtue of hope. A compilation of Giussani's conversations with young people who have chosen the path of the consecrated life in the Church - that is, have chosen to live their lives in the world according to the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience - it proposes an unusual yet reasonable approach to living as a Christian. As in all his works, Giussani encourages young people to be serious about their own existence and loyal to their experience. The conversations reported here are fascinating and insightful, providing support for a way of life that today is frequently questioned, rejected, or censured.

As a young priest, Luigi Giussani was troubled by Catholicism's inability to effectively deal with secularism or laicism. In 1954 he began to develop a vision of faith rooted in experience. His ideas resonated with students and led to the birth of the Gioventù Studentesca (Student Youth) movement. Known today as Communion and Liberation, the movement is flourishing in Italy and around the world, including Canada, the United States, Brazil, Uganda, and Britain. The Journey to Truth Is an Experience is the first English translation of Il Cammino al vero è un'esperienza, Giussani's early works on the Christian experience, written from 1959-64. It begins with a guide on how to live the Christian life within the Student Youth community, followed by a call to base one's relationship with Christ on the example set by the apostles and other figures in the New Testament. Giussani concludes by outlining the movement's mission and the possibility for community, charity, and communion in the Christian life.

There is an ancient Christian saying from the Patristic Era which is known in its most concise form as lex orandi, lex credendi. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church translates it: The law of prayer is the law of faith: the Church believes as she prays.

While the elegant simplicity of the phrase contains an abundance of wisdom, the liturgy has always been subject to forces that threaten to reduce this understanding to partial interpretations. As several observers have noted, these reductions include the archeological approach-explicating the liturgy's historical origins but in the process treating it as a dead letter-and the sociological approach-focusing on liturgy as little more than an expression of contemporary concerns.

In Living the Liturgy: A Witness, Father Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) restores a more balanced view, reminding us that (according to Roberto Braschi's introduction) in the liturgy God is its pres-ent subject and that the essence of every celebratory action is the possibility of a gaze toward Him-because it is always from Him that the dialogue with humanity moves. The memorable, bracing insights in Living the Liturgy were taken from conversations that Father Giussani had with members of the international lay movement he founded, Communion and Liberation.

Generating Traces in the History of the World is a synthesis of Monsignor Luigi Giussani's reflection on the Christian experience. His exploration of Christianity as an unforeseen and unforeseeable event in which the mystery became a man reveals how, by acknowledging this fact, an individual is simultaneously able to use reason and be moved by affection. Discussing the ways in which Christ continues to be present in history through the companionship of those whom He joins to himself in Baptism, Giussani illuminates how a sense of Christ's mercy can overcome negativity and encourage a useful life. A profound and moving work, Generating Traces in the History of the World will interest all those who have been inspired by Giussani's thought.

In 1980, two men sit down to record a conversation. They have much in common: both are passionate, articulate thinkers. But their differences are just as striking: Giovanni Testori is a well-known writer-and an openly gay man. Luigi Giussani is a Catholic priest who has attracted so many students with his striking way of re-proposing the Christian message that he's unwittingly started a movement (which came to be known as Communion and Liberation).

Testori, who has recently returned to the Catholic faith, begins with a provocative suggestion: modern people have lost contact with the existential and religious experience of birth, of an origin in love-the love of one's parents and the love of God. From here, the dialogue ranges widely, taking on the root causes of modern despair and alienation, the link between suffering and hope, the significance of memory, and what it means to encounter the presence of God in one another.

Profound but accessible, The Meaning of Birth is a resonant and bracing exploration of life's most fundamental questions.

The Religious Sense, the fruit of many years of dialogue with students, is an exploration of the search for meaning in life. Luigi Giussani shows that the nature of reason expresses itself in the ultimate need for truth, goodness, and beauty. These needs constitute the fabric of the religious sense, which is evident in every human being everywhere and in all times. So strong is this sense that it leads one to desire that the answer to life's mystery might reveal itself in some way.Giussani challenges us to penetrate the deepest levels of experience to discover our essential selves, breaking through the layers of opinions and judgments that have obscured our true needs. Asserting that all the tools necessary for self-discovery are inherent within us, he focuses primarily on reason, not as narrowly defined by modern philosophers, but as an openness to existence, a capacity to comprehend and affirm reality in all of its dimensions.Part of the so-called new religious revival, The Religious Sense avoids any sentimental or irrational reduction of the religious experience. It is a forthright and refreshing call to reassess our lives. In this revised edition, John Zucchi offers a new translation of this seminal and best-selling work.