Born in 1907 Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and
colourful of Japan's early modern poets. A bohemian romantic,
his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his
imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets.

Since the Second World War Nakahara's stature has risen, and his
poetry is now ranked among the finest Japanese verse of the 20th
century. Influenced by both Symbolism and Dada, he created
lyrics renowned for their songlike eloquence, their personal
imagery and their poignant charm.

This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara's creative life
includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent
scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.

First published in 1939, this book is a phenomenon in contemporary spiritual writing. The message that every Christian man and woman, whatever their place of work or calling, is called to sanctity has touched countless lives; this work offers a starting-point for a prayer which finds Christ in all the experience of living. A special feature of this new edition is the footnotes, drafted not only for those approaching the book as a tool to help them pray, but having in mind also readers studying the text as an example of 20th Century Spanish literature. This is a revised annotated bilingual edition, has parallel Spanish and English texts.

THE SEVEN SACRAMENTS lie at the centre of Christian life and experience, for here God the Holy Trinity touches human lives and hearts. This book is one of the few at the present time to offer a global synthesis of the main themes in the sacramental mystery in which the human and divine, the material and the spiritual realms are intimately intertwined. Paul Haffner outlines how the sacraments are the chief means in the Church through which God's people are reconciled to the Father, through His Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The treatise illustrates classical issues like the conditions for the validity and the efficacy of the sacraments, as well as the minister, recipient and effects of these sacred mysteries; it deals with particular topics like the necessity of Baptism, the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, and the nature of Marriage. As he examines each sacrament in turn, the author also explores how new ecumenical questions affect Christian sacramental understanding.

Among the most beautiful prayers ever composed, the 'O' Antiphons have for twelve centuries voiced the Church's longing for Christ's Coming at Christmas. In this remarkable book Oliver Treanor explores the rich biblical background to each Antiphon and, drawing on the spiritual tradition of the Fathers and the teachings of Vatican II as well, leads us to the deep sources of meditation that lie within the texts. Here is an ideal Advent companion for individuals or groups seeking to recharge their spirituality for Christmas - and indeed throughout the year. For the 'O' Antiphons guide us beyond Advent into the entire mystery of salvation, bringing us beyond the Christmas season to the Paschal Mystery itself. It is in fact a book for all seasons. Oliver Treanor is author of Mother of the Redeemer, Mother of the Redeemed; he has written for L'Osservatore Romano, Priests and People, Religious Life Review, Theology Digest and many other journals. He has worked for five years as a producer and broadcaster at Vatican Radio.

Neither a theological study of our Redemption nor a devotional commentary of the Cross and Resurrection, but rather an introduction to the liturgical celebration of Holy Week and Easter, this book is written in the double conviction that the depth of meaning of the Paschal Mystery is seriously weakened if it is not given its full liturgical and sacramental expression, and that the Holy Week liturgy demands from all who participate in it a more profound awareness of its biblical background and of its central place in the Church's life.

The journey we begin on Ash Wednesday is a unity, or rather a series of interrelated unities, controlled by the metaphor of Exodus, Passover or Transitus, which slowly but surely coalesce and intensify through Holy Week to the climax of the Easter Liturgy and the Triduum, the commemoration of the single act by which Christ passed over from death to life, the transitus Domini.

The season is a time of incomparable liturgical richness whose rites and ceremonies are an unsurpassed treasury of instruction and devotion for those who immerse themselves in them. These rites and ceremonies, rediscovered, rationalised, reformed and re-ordered, are essentially something of the most profound significance. This study, so enthusiastically received when first published, is now extensively revised and updated in this new fourth edition, fully reflecting change and reform of the liturgy in both the Anglican and the Catholic Church over the last sixty years

The thoughts contained in this book were from the pen of one who, in the silence of the Charterhouse, had already arrived at the summits of the spiritual heights, and dwelt there unceasingly. Souls who have reached such perfection in this life are rare; not so rare, however, are those who ardently aspire thereto. It is chiefly for such as these - to encourage and help them to arrive at those same heights - that these thoughts have been preserved and collected. They Speak by Silences was first published in French in 1948, and has since allowed Carthusian wisdom and spirituality to reach the widest possible audience. This new, and widely requested edition carries on the tradition. It will provide material for daily reading and reflection for newcomers to Carthusian spirituality and, equally, for those who have already discovered the riches it has to offer. Not everyone can experience that same recollection that exists in a Charterhouse, but they must not be afraid to set aside as far as possible at least some moments, however short, for recollection and to give some time to Him Who is within them. It is in that silence that He speaks to us, and bids us listen to Him. Other books of classic Carthusian spirituality published by Gracewing include The Call of Silent Love, The Prayer of Love and Silence and The Wound of Love.

The Psalmist wrote: Be still and know that I am God (Ps 46:10). Coming from the deep silence and asceticism of medi val Carthusian monasteries, this book's prayers and meditations have a unique ardour that reflects the genuine spirituality of their authors. The piety of these monks, strongly grounded in Sacred Scripture and the early Fathers of the Church, cannot fail to impress and to inspire. Like that of Jesus, Carthusian prayer, but also any authentic prayer, is anchored in interiority, solitude and silence. Jesus goes off to a deserted place, under the sole gaze of the Father. And in this solitude and this silence, He formed His disciples.

Conscience before Conformity tells the story of German students who dared to speak out against Hitler and the Third Reich, and died for their beliefs. Operating under the name of the White Rose, they printed and distributed leaflets condemning Nazism and urging Germans to offer non-violent resistance to the 'atheistic war machine'.

By looking at the cultural and religious journey of the protagonists, Hans and Sophie Scholl, we can see what made them change from active participants in the Hitler Youth to leaders of the White Rose resistance. These modern-day heroes were deeply influenced by intellectuals they met in secret, and by the writings of great Christian thinkers such as St Augustine, Pascal, Georges Bernanos, and Bl. John Henry Newman. What they learnt gave them the strength to put their consciences before conformity to the Nazi lie.

THIS SHORT, BEAUTIFULLY ILLUSTRATED BOOK serves as an introduction to Francis for all those who may be interested in the saint. His Canticle is an apt 'way in' to him, for as Chesterton pointed out nearly a century ago, it is 'a supremely characteristic work' and 'much of St Francis can be reconstructed from it alone'. This book will also be a useful resource for Franciscans, in particular for those in the Secular Franciscan Order, for possible use in formation and discussion. In the vast literature on Francis and Franciscanism much has been written concerning his poem, and though most of it has been in Italian, French or German, several valuable works have appeared in English. Each in its different way is highly thought-provoking, as well as deeply spiritual and Franciscan. Each takes its own approach to the Canticle, so that it largely complements the others and says much that is new. The approach here is different again, so that those who have already read many or all of the other books should still find fresh insights and further knowledge. Seeking to grasp and express the meaning of the Canticle, the essential key is to be found in Scripture: the Old and New Testaments were always Francis' own main sources. Scripture informs all his writing and his works are dense with biblical allusions. His Canticle is no exception--with no direct biblical quotations or references, it is the free poetry of a man thoroughly versed in Scripture, which is his constant background companion. In this fascinating introduction, John Watts provides a fresh new translation as well as the original Umbrian to provide the texture and rhythm of St Francis' original composition, shown against its historical and literary background.

For more than fifteen hundred years Christianity has cultivated a rich and varied teaching on the practice of stillness and inner calm. Here we can find answers to the contemporary psychological struggle for inner peace.

In a fresh and engaging reading of this contemplative path, Jean-Yves Leloup explores the writings of many spiritual masters from across the centuries, in particular the Desert Fathers, the fourth-century monk Evagrius, St John Cassian, and the anonymous nineteenth-century author of The Way of the Pilgrim.

Drawn from the experience of the monasteries of Sinai and Mount Athos, here is a clear and practical presentation of the spiritual art of arts: stillness in the face of interior pain and confusion.

These spiritual riches, refined and developed by the Orthodox tradition in Christianity, can also be recognized in the teaching and practice of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islamic Sufism.

The fundamental truth of one tradition is to be found under its own proper forms and nuances in others. Far from diminishing the unique value of this hesychastic way of prayer, the most developed spiritual traditions of humanity affirm it as one of the great forms through which humanity reaches out to embrace Infinite Reality.

In this groundbreaking work a foremost literary and cultural critic turns to the major figure in English literature William Shakespeare and proposes a dramatic new way of reading and performing his works. The key to A Theatre of Envy is Ren Girards's original expression and application of what he calls Mimetic Theory. For Girard, people desire according to the desires of others. He sees this as fundamental to the human condition and works out its implications in a most convincing and ultimately, easily comprehensible way. Bringing his insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night's Dream from the status of entertaining chaotic comedy to a profound and original commentary on the human condition. Shakespeare transforms the crude literary form of revenge tragedy into a profound and prophetic unmasking of violence - even more relevant today than in his time. Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard's prose is sophisticated enough for the academic as well as being accessible to the general reader. Anyone interested in literature, anthropology, psychology and particularly, theology as relevant to the overriding contemporary problems of violence in all its forms will want to read this challenging book. All those involved in theatrical productions and performance will find A Theatre of Envy full of exciting and practical ideas. 'In its enormous breathtaking scope, (Ren Girard's work) suggests...the projects of those 19th century intellectual giants (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) who still cast such long shadows today. By contrast, contemporary criticism seems paltry and fainthearted.' Comparative Literature Ren Girard was born in Avignon, read cultural history in Paris and in 1947 went to the USA where he has for the last 50 years held a number of prestigious academic posts. He has written more than half a dozen books, best known of which are, Violence and the Sacred, The Scapegoat, and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, he has also been featured in many interviews and magazine articles. His Martin D'Arcy Lecture - Victims, Violence and Christianity - delivered in Oxford in November 1997, aroused the enthusiastic interest of a wide variety of British experts in many fields as well as those involved in the wider and increasingly significant world of contemporary spirituality in all its popular and peremptory expressions. While not giving a naive answer Ren Girard does provide a profound and practical way to unmask violence not only in Shakespeare's world, but in our own.

Born in 1907 Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and
colourful of Japan's early modern poets. A bohemian romantic,
his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his
imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets.

Since the Second World War Nakahara's stature has risen, and his
poetry is now ranked among the finest Japanese verse of the 20th
century. Influenced by both Symbolism and Dada, he created
lyrics renowned for their songlike eloquence, their personal
imagery and their poignant charm.

This selection of poems from throughout Nakahara's creative life
includes collected and uncollected work and draws on recent
scholarship to give a full account of this extraordinary figure.

Ever since the Spiritual Exercises were first published in 1548, the need had been felt for explanations to help guide those giving them; hence the so-called Directories. But directors today continue to feel the same need, perhaps more acutely than ever with the spread in popularity of both spiritual direction and retreat work.

Michael Ivens draws both on the wealth of published material and on the wisdom of his own long experience to produce a new commentary that attempts to unravel the inner workings of the Spiritual Exercises. He presents a new translation, as faithful as possible to the original, while commenting in detail on words or phrases that call for elucidation. At the same time his longer introductions to each section enable the director to distinguish the wood from the trees, and arrive at a firm and nuanced understanding of a great classic of western spirituality.

The Commentary is a master class, as it were. It looks to the art of giving the Exercises. It distils great erudition with reflection on long years of experience. Experience illuminates the text and the early sources and invites the sources to illuminate experience. It is spare, lucid, complete, learned and wise. Joseph Veale, SJ

A unique, informative, lucid and much needed commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. The book draws on the wisdom and experience of sixteenth-century Jesuit givers of the Exercises, and is written by a twentieth-century Jesuit, whose wisdom and lived experience of the Exercises is manifest. Gerard Hughes, SJ

Michael Ivens, SJ was born in England and completed early studies in France and England before taking up writing and teaching in the area of spirituality. He worked for many years with The Way publications, under the guidance of James Walsh, and was then appointed as spiritual director to young Jesuit priests and brothers in their final year of training. This work took him to Australia and the USA. Later he helped establish the new retreat centre, St Beuno's in North Wales, with its specialized work in guided retreats. His wisdom and insight made him one of the best-known English directors of the Spiritual Exercises. Michael Ivens died in 2005.

During the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I it was high treason, and therefore death, to be a Catholic priest in England. It was consequently vital that there be somewhere to hide when the pursuivants came battering at the door. One name is prominent in the construction of priest-holes ‒ that of Nicholas Owen. A very short and later crippled man, he built the majority of these shelters, so saving the lives of untold numbers of priests and fugitives. His early apprenticeship as a joiner and his knowledge of construction served him well as he burrowed into walls and constructed near-invisible entrance holes. Although a well-known figure in Recusant studies, and almost invariably mentioned in histories of the Gunpowder Plot, this is his first detailed biography. St Nicholas Owen was born in Oxford, the son of a carpenter. Two of his brothers were to train as Catholic priests on the continent. A third, Henry, the first apprentice at what was to become the Oxford University Press, went on to assist the Mission with the production of Catholic books and pamphlets. Nicholas was himself apprenticed to an Oxford joiner in 1577. Acting as a servant to Fr Henry Garnet SJ for nearly twenty years, Owen had many adventures, narrowly evading capture, and assisted in the escape of the Jesuit Fr John Gerard from the Tower of London in 1597. St Nicholas was tortured at the Poultry Compter in 1594 but later released. He was finally taken in one of his own priest-holes during the rigorous pursuit of Catholics that followed the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, and died upon the rack in the Tower of London in 1606. Evidence of St Nicholas Owen's work is still visible in country houses and mansions across England, and recent research has unveiled greater detail of his fascinating career assisting the English Mission at the close of the 16th and beginning of the 17th centuries. Tony Reynolds read Architecture at University College London in the 'sixties, and became interested in the application of computers to architecture, then very much in its pioneering stages. A staunch member of the caving club at college, this love of confined spaces combined with his architectural training may have given him special insight into the construction of priest-holes. Working as a computer manager and resident programmer, he has published several textbooks on computer use by architects, and, most recently, a well-received book of pastiche Sherlock Holmes stories.

What moves us first of all in these 'Conversations' is, in the words of Father Boucher CSsR, Van's spiritual director, 'The unbelievable familiarity and ... the tenderness of which Brother Marcel has been the object on the part of his heavenly interlocutors. On reading the little sheets that he handed over to me each week I had the feeling that this very small Redemptorist brother whom Jesus, Mary and Th r se were leading by the hand would have a role to play in the Church and in the world.' Indeed, 'Jesus, from the time of his first conversation, expressed to him his wish to choose him to serve as an intermediary of his Love towards his Vietnamese compatriots, ' in order to be the apostle of souls... We are only at the beginning of what little Van has to tell us to do here below: 'O Mary, my particular mission is to be the apostle of souls, and the apostle particularly of children. It is only later, in heaven, that I will be able to fulfil it perfectly.' Private revelations must not be read in a spirit of curiosity but always in a willingness to allow ourselves to be led to the centre of our faith, towards God and his will, towards Christ and his love: the Conversations lead us right to the centre, to the immeasurable love of Christ. They invite us, through the little apostle of his love, to become so in our turn. from the Preface by Cardinal Christoph Sch nbor Conversations, now published in English, is the second volume of the four-volume French language OEuvres Compl tes of Marcel Van (1928-1959), responding to the desire of the late Pope John Paul II for the life stories of the twentieth-century witnesses and martyrs to the Faith to be gathered together. The first volume, Autobiography, was published in English by Gracewing in 2006.

St Philip Neri (1515-1595) is known as the Apostle of Rome and the founder of the Congregation of the Oratory. This translation of his maxims and sayings is the work of Fr Faber, first published in 1847. His Maxims emphasise the constant teaching of the masters of the spiritual life, going back to the Desert Fathers (themselves always the favourite reading of St Philip). Full of good sense, they present us with an essential spirituality, presented as easily accessible reflections for each month of the year.

Aidan Nichols has been contributing to theological literature since the beginning of the 1980s.

Now in his seventy-fifth year, he looks back not only at his writings but at the three-quarters of a century of life from which they came. He explains how, despite a nominally Anglican background, his early sense of the transcendent was really of God in nature. Only through an experience in the Russian church in Geneva did he become a confessing Christian.

Back home, where he was left a teenage orphan, he moved from Anglo-Catholicism into the Roman Catholic Church. After reading Modern History at Oxford, that led by a natural progression to becoming a Religious and a priest. In this book Nichols describes the wide variety of situations in which he has lived in Scotland, Norway, Rome, France, Ethiopia, and Jamaica, as well as England and the United States.

Over the years, drawing on not only Catholic but also Orthodox and Anglican sources, he has produced a small library of books, touching on many areas of theology and culture while also seeking, at different times, to bind them together into a coherent unity, inspired by, principally, two great giants: Thomas Aquinas, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

For Aidan Nichols, the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI were a halcyon time. Things have been more difficult under the successor to these popes. He explains the problems he has encountered, both theoretical and practical, and his search for a resolution that is satisfactory both theologically and autobiographically. He ends his apologia with a raft of proposals for the stabilization and enrichment of ecclesial life in the decades to come.

Mystery of the Church presents a global picture of the main themes of current ecclesiology. First, it deals with the institution of the Church and her essential nature. Subsequently the four hallmarks of the Church are described. Her unity and holiness are guaranteed by the sanctity of Christ her Head despite the sinfulness of her members. The catholicity of the Church is also examined from the perspective of Eastern Christendom. The apostolicity of the Church leads to a description of the Petrine Office. The Church is seen as the instrument of salvation, and her relationship with the State and with science is investigated. Finally the Church is pictured as leading to the Kingdom of God. This is the fifth volume of Fr Paul Haffner's systematic exposition of theology - previously published volumes in this series: Mystery of Creation, The Mystery of Mary, The Mystery of Reason, The Sacramental Mystery. Paul Haffner is a priest and professor of theology at Regina Apostolorum University in Rome, visiting professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and adjunct lecturer at Duquesne University Roman Campus.