The Favourite Daughter Of Teresa Of Jesus: Mary Of Saint Joseph by Carlos Ros

Paperback: María of Saint Joseph chosen by Teresa of Jesus as her successor in the Reform of Carmel, a woman who has been greatly calumniated in life and silenced after her death. 

María of Saint Joseph is an elegant writer, a fine poet, mystic, defender of the feminine state, fighter in defence of the truth, a woman of prayer and purity. 

She re-emerged after centuries of ostracism in which she had been hidden by misogynist friars who could not tolerate that they too, the men’s branch of the Discalced, had been founded by a woman. 

As Teresa of Jesus was not there they baited the heirs of her Reform. 

María of Saint Joseph, prioress of the Carmels of Seville and Lisbon, suffered bodily in the prison cell of the monastery amid abhorrent calumnies, and died, after an iniquitous exile, in the hidden monastery of Mancha.

The Favourite Daughter of Teresa of Jesus was first published in Spanish as La hija predilecta de Teresa de Jesús: María de San José in 2008. It was translated and completed by Fr John McGowan OCD on the Feast of Saints Joachim and Ann (26 July) and first published in English in 2018. 

About the author: Carlos Ros (b 1941) lives in Seville, Spain, a great friend of the Carmelite nuns in that city. He has written over thirty books about famous historical characters from his region. Besides this book on Sr Mary of St Joseph OCD, Teresa’s great disciple, he has also written books about St Edith Stein and Jerome Gratian.

About the translator: Fr John McGowan was born in London in 1950. He entered the Discalced Carmelite Order in 1975 and was ordained in 1982. In 1985 he obtained a Licentiate in Spirituality from the OCD Carmelite Pontifical College in Rome. At present he works at ODC Carmelite retreat centre, in Preston, England.

I Thought I Was A Writer

Fallen: The Inside Story Of The Secret Trial And Conviction Of Cardinal George Pell (Current Affairs) by Lucie Morris-Marr

Paperback: "Fallen is a tribute to all those affected by clergy sexual abuse in Australia and around the world, and those who have spoken truth to power, sought justice and used their voice to make change for future generations. And in memory of those who never made it through." - Lucie Morris-Marr, Melbourne, July 2019.

There was an eerie silence in the packed courtroom as everyone looked towards the foreman of the jury. 'Guilty' he pronounced five times.

The third most senior Catholic cleric in the world had been found guilty of sex crimes against children, bringing shame to the Church on a scale never seen before in its history.

Investigative journalist Lucie Morris-Marr was the first to break the story that Cardinal George Pell was being investigated by the police. In this riveting dispatch, she recounts how the cleric was trailed by a cloud of scandal as he rose to the most senior ranks of the church in Australia, all the way to his appointment by Pope Francis to the position of treasurer in the Vatican.

Despite anger and accusations, it seemed nothing could stop George Pell. Yet in 2017 he was charged by detectives, returning to Australia to face trial.

Take a front row seat in court with the author as she reveals the many intriguing developments in the secret legal proceedings which the media could not report at the time. Fallen reveals the full story of the brutal battle waged by the prince of the church as he fought to clear his name, including a ferocious bid to be freed from jail. The author also shares her own compelling personal journey investigating the biggest story of her career and the frequent attacks she endured from powerful Pell supporters. This book also charts how Pell's shocking conviction plunged the Vatican into an unprecedented global crisis after decades of clergy abuse cases.

It is a vitally important story that will fascinate anyone interested in the failure of the Catholic Church to address the canker in its heart.

Fallen (2019) is the inside story of the secret trial and conviction of Cardinal George Pell and winner of the Walkley Book Award 2020. It is shortlisted for Best Debut, Davitt Awards 2020 AU; and Best True Crime, Davitt Awards 2020 AU.

About the author: British-born investigative journalist, writer and broadcaster Lucie Morris-Marr was twice highly commended as Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards while working on domestic and international assignments for the Daily Mail in London. In 2006, she moved to Sydney as Associate Editor of Marie Claire where she focused on long form investigative journalism. She went on to work as a senior writer for the Herald Sun in Melbourne where she became the first reporter in the world to uncover a secret police investigation into Cardinal George Pell regarding child sexual abuse allegations. The author covered the subsequent legal case for The New Daily and CNN. She lives in Bayside, Melbourne with her family.

Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney And American Catholicism (Biography/Religion) by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M Fenster

Paperback: Father McGivney's vision remains as relevant as ever in the changed circumstances of today's church and society. - Pope John Paul II

Is now the time for an American parish priest to be declared a Catholic saint?

In Father Michael McGivney (1852-1890), born and raised in a Connecticut factory town, the modern era's ideal of the priesthood hit its zenith. The son of Irish immigrants, he was a man to whom "family values" represented more than mere rhetoric. And he left a legacy of hope still celebrated around the world.

In the late 1800s, discrimination against American Catholics was widespread. Many Catholics struggled to find work and ended up in infernolike mills. An injury or the death of the wage earner would leave a family penniless. The grim threat of chronic homelessness and even starvation could fast become realities. Called to action in 1882 by his sympathy for these suffering people, Father McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus, an organization that has helped to save countless families from the indignity of destitution. From its uncertain beginnings, when Father McGivney was the only person willing to work toward its success, it has grown to an international membership of 1.7 million men.

At heart, though, Father McGivney was never anything more than an American parish priest, and nothing less than that, either - beloved by children, trusted by young adults, and regarded as a "positive saint" by the elderly in his New Haven parish.

In an incredible work of academic research, Douglas Brinkley (The Boys of Pointe Du Hoc, Tour of Duty) and Julie M Fenster (Race of the Century, Ether Day) re-create the life of Father McGivney, a fiercely dynamic yet tenderhearted man. 

Though he was only thirty-eight when he died, Father McGivney has never been forgotten. He remains a true "people's priest," a genuinely holy man - and perhaps the most beloved parish priest in US history. 

Moving and inspirational, Parish Priest (2006) chronicles the process of canonization that may well make Father McGivney the first American-born parish priest to be declared a saint by the Vatican.

About the authors: Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.  In the world of public history, he serves on boards, at museums, at colleges, and for historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley as its official US Presidential Historian. His recent book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize, while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S Link-Warren F Kuehl Prize. He is a member of the Century Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Julie M Fenster is an award-winning author and historian, specializing in the American story. In 2006 her book Parish Priest, written with coauthor Douglas Brinkley, was a New York Times bestseller for seven weeks. She also wrote Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America's Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It, which won the prestigious Anesthesia Foundation Award for Best Book. Fenster is the author of six other books, including Race of the Century: The Heroic True Story of the 1908 New York to Paris Auto Race and The Case of Abraham Lincoln: A Story of Adultery, Murder, and the Making of a Great President.

My Beloved: The Story Of A Carmelite Nun by Mother Catherine Thomas, DC

Hardback: This is the 1955 autobiography of Cecelia Walsh, a high-spirited American woman who was drawn to the Order of Carmel, one of the oldest, most austere and strictly cloistered orders of nuns in the Catholic Church, and became Mother Catherine Thomas.

Here she writes of her three decades in the cloister with candour, sensitivity, and humour. She tells her story of her own vocation, her life as a Carmelite, what drew her to the cloister, and what kept her there, and includes the small details that many might wish to ask but are afraid to.

My Beloved was first published in 1955 by the McGrawHill Book Company, Inc, NY.

To Christ Jesus, The Beloved by St John of the Cross

Boxing Day

Merry Christmas

Virtual Life 2020

Christmas Meditation No 23

The Spirits Of Past, Present and Future

Christmas Meditation (Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), French Mathematician, Physicist, Inventor, Philosopher, Writer and Catholic Theologian)

Everyday Saints And Other Stories by Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)

Paperback: In this book I want to tell you about this beautiful new world of mine, where we live by laws completely different from those in “normal” worldly life - a world of light and love, full of wondrous discoveries, hope, happiness, trials and triumphs, where even our defeats acquire profound significance: a world in which, above all, we can always sense powerful manifestations of divine strength and comfort. - Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov)

More than a million copies and several million electronic versions of this book were purchased in less than a year after its release, claiming to be the most popular modern book of the Russian Orthodox Church. 

Everyday Saints and Other Stories is the English translation of a work that has soared to the top of the bestseller lists in Russia since its publication in late 2011. Winner of several national awards including "Book of the Year," its readership spans philosophical boundaries. 

Open this book and you will discover a wondrous, enigmatic, remarkably beautiful, yet absolutely real world. Peer into the mysterious Russian soul, where happiness reigns no matter what life may bring.

Page upon page of thanks, praise, and testimonies to the life-changing effect of these bright, good-hearted, and poignant tales have flooded the Russian media. This book has been the cause of many sleepless but happy nights: “I couldn’t put it down - was sorry when it ended” is the common reaction.

This book has been translated into more than 17 languages, including French, Chinese, Serbian and others. The English translation is every bit as charming as the original.

In Moscow, Everyday Saints and Other Stories has been awarded the Book of the Year prize for 2012. In 2012, its English translation won a first prize at New York’s Read Russia 2012 Festival.

Everyday Saints And Other Stories is translated from the Russian by Julian Henry Lowenfeld.

Proceeds from the sale of Everyday Saints will be used to build a memorial cathedral in Moscow dedicated to the victims of communist repression in Russia.

About the author: Archimandrite Tikhon (Shevkunov) is a bishop of Russian Orthodox Church and a popular writer. He is the Metropolitan of Pskov and Porkhov; the head of the Western Vicariat of Moscow city from 2015 to 2018; and Superior of the Sretensky Monastery in Moscow from 1995 to 2018. Bishop Tikhon is often referred as the personal confessor and spiritual advisor of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Metropolitan Tikhon is a prolific internet writer. He is the editor-in-chief of the internet-portal Pravoslavie.ru and the author of many publications there.

About the translator: Julian Henry Lowenfeld is an American-Russian poet, playwright, trial lawyer, composer, and prize-winning translator, best known for his translations of Alexander Pushkin's poetry into English. For his "outstanding literary translations and dedicated efforts to popularize Russian culture in the English language," Lowenfeld was awarded the Friendship and Cooperation Medal from the Russian Federal Agency Rossotrudnichestvo in 2013.

A Modern Family by Helga Flatland

Paperback: When Liv, Ellen and Håkon, along with their partners and children, arrive in Rome to celebrate their father’s seventieth birthday, a quiet earthquake occurs: their parents have decided to divorce.

Shocked and disbelieving, the siblings try to come to terms with their parents’ decision as it echoes through the homes they have built for themselves, and forces them to reconstruct the shared narrative of their childhood and family history.

A bittersweet novel of regret, relationships and rare psychological insights, A Modern Family encourages us to look at the people closest to us a little more carefully, and ultimately reveals that it’s never too late for change.

A Modern Family (2019) is a beautiful, bittersweet novel of regret, relationships and rare psychological insights. It is the winner of the Norwegian Booksellers' Award 2017 and was first published in Norwegian as En moderne familie in 2017. It is then translated into the English by Rosie Hedger in 2019. 

About the author: Helga Flatland is already one of Norway’s most awarded and widely read authors. Born in Telemark, Norway, in 1984, she made her literary debut in 2010 with the novel Stay If You Can, Leave If You Must, for which she was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas’ First Book Prize. She has written four novels and a children’s book and has won several other literary awards. Her fifth novel, A Modern Family, was published to wide acclaim in Norway in August 2017, and was a number-one bestseller. The rights have subsequently been sold across Europe and the novel has sold more than 100,000 copies.

About the translator: Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has lived and worked in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and now lives in York where she works as a freelance translator. Rosie was a candidate in the British Center for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for Norwegian in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett. Visit her website: rosiehedger.com and follow her on Twitter @rosie_hedger

Rating: 4/5

Come And Look At What I've Done!

The Grifter's Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, And The Selling Of The Presidency by Sarah Blaskey, Nicholas Nehamas, Caitlin Ostroff and Jay Weaver

Paperback: The Grifter's Club (2020) is an astonishing look inside the gilded gates of Mar-a-Lago, the palatial resort where President Trump conducts government business with little regard for ethics, security or even the law.

Donald Trump’s opulent Palm Beach club Mar-a-Lago has thrummed with scandal since the earliest days of his presidency. Long known for its famous and wealthy clientele, the resort’s guest list soon started filling with political operatives and power-seekers. 

Meanwhile, as Trump re-branded Mar-a-Lago “the Winter White House” and began spending weekends there, state business spilled out into full view of the club’s members, and vast sums of taxpayer money and political donations began flowing into its coffers, and into the pockets of the president.

The Grifter’s Club is a breakthrough account of the impropriety, intrigue, and absurdity that has been on display in the place where the president is at his most relaxed. In these pages, a team of prizewinning Miami Herald journalists reveal the activities and motivations of the strange array of charlatans and tycoons who populate its halls. Some peddle influence, some seek inside information, and some just want to soak up the feeling of unfettered access to the world’s most powerful leaders.

With the drama of an exposé and full of edgy humour, The Grifter’s Club takes you behind the velvet ropes of this exclusive club and into its bizarre world of extravagance and scandal.

About the authors: Sarah Blaskey is an investigative reporter and data specialist at the Miami Herald. For their reporting on Trump tourism, she, Nicholas Nehamas, and Caitlin Ostroff were named finalists for the 2020 Livingston Award for Excellence in National Reporting.

Nicholas Nehamas is an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald. He was part of a team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting on the Panama Papers.

Caitlin Ostroff is a data reporter who used data analysis and computer coding to report investigative pieces for the Miami Herald. She is a graduate of the University of Florida and is now with the Wall Street Journal.

Jay Weaver has covered courts, government and politics for more than 25 years for the Miami Herald. A graduate of UC Berkeley, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 2001. He and Nicholas Nehamas were also 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalists for a series on international gold smuggling.

O Sapientia, An Advent Antiphon

Lockdown by Peter May

Paperback: A CITY IN QUARANTINE

London, the epicenter of a global pandemic, is a city in lockdown. Violence and civil disorder simmer. Martial law has been imposed. No-one is safe from the deadly virus that has already claimed thousands of victims. Health and emergency services are overwhelmed.

A MURDERED CHILD

At a building site for a temporary hospital, construction workers find a bag containing the rendered bones of a murdered child. A remorseless killer has been unleashed on the city; his mission is to take all measures necessary to prevent the bones from being identified.

A POWERFUL CONSPIRACY

D.I. Jack MacNeil, counting down the hours on his final day with the Met, is sent to investigate. His career is in ruins, his marriage over and his own family touched by the virus. Sinister forces are tracking his every move, prepared to kill again to conceal the truth. Which will stop him first - the virus or the killers?

Written over fifteen years ago, this prescient, suspenseful thriller is set against a backdrop of a capital city in quarantine, and explores human experience in the grip of a killer virus.

Lockdown was completed back in 2005 during a six-week spell but was not published because British editors at the time thought the portrayal of London under siege by the invisible enemy of H5N1 (bird flu) was unrealistic and could never happen - in spite of the fact that all Peter May's research showed that it really could. It was finally published during the Covid-19 pandemic back on 30 April 2020 during the first lockdown.

About the author: An internationally bestselling crime writer, Scottish author  Peter May's first novel, The Reporter, was adapted for television, leading him into a successful career as a television writer, creator, and producer. Fiction remained his first love, however, and he continued to write crime novels alongside his other work, finally quitting to pursue a career as a novelist in the mid-1990s.

His highly successful novel, The Blackhouse, was initially rejected by UK publishers but published in French, earning critical acclaim and a number of awards before being picked up by the newly formed British publisher Quercus. The novel became the first in the hugely popular Lewis Trilogy, set in the Outer Hebrides.

Peter May is also the creator of the China Thrillers series, the Enzo files (set in France where May has lived for many years) and many successful standalone thrillers including Entry Island, Runaway and Coffin Road.

A message from Peter:

"I have taken the decision to donate the money from the advance that I have received for LOCKDOWN to various charitable organisations involved with supporting health workers, victims and others suffering as a result of Covid-19."

Rating: 3/5

The Law Of Innocence (Lincoln Lawyer Series) by Michael Connelly

Hardback: Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law. No one is ever exonerated by the verdict of a jury. The justice system can only deliver a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Nothing else, nothing more.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. 

In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

Defense attorney Mickey Haller is pulled over by police, who find the body of a client in the trunk of his Lincoln. Haller is charged with murder and cannot make the exorbitant $5 million bail slapped on him by a vindictive judge.

Mickey elects to defend himself and must strategize and build his defense from his jail cell in the Twin Towers Correctional Center in downtown Los Angeles, all the while looking over his shoulder - as an officer of the court, he is an instant target.

Mickey knows he has been framed. Now, with the help of his trusted team, including Harry Bosch, he has to figure out who has plotted to destroy his life and why. Then he has to go before a judge and jury and prove his innocence.

The Law Of Innocence (2020) is the sixth instalment in the stellar Lincoln Lawyer series and is available in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. 

About the author: Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA on 21 July 1956. He moved to Florida with his family when he was 12 years old. Michael decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing - a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat.  In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

Michael is the bestselling author of thirty-five novels and one work of non-fiction. With over seventy-four million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theatres worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Dark Sacred Night, Two Kinds Of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, and The Black Box. Michael’s crime fiction career was honoured with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018.

Michael is the executive producer of Bosch, an Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. Bosch streams on Amazon Prime Video. He is the creator and host of the podcast Murder Book. He is also the executive producer of the documentary films, Sound Of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Rating: 5/5

John le Carré (1931-2020), British Author Of Espionage Novels

A Depressed Alcoholic Cop Solving Horrifically Violent Murders

I Like To Sip

One...More...Chapter

Live In Sunlight

From Advent To Pentecost: Carthusian Novice Conferences by A Carthusian

Paperback: To this last sentence, 'Be my joy in the heart of the Church', the writer of these conferences for Carthusian monks adds a note: 'That is a definition of Carthusian life which is as good as any other, it seems to me.' 

And from the heart of that life he speaks to the whole Church, in publishing these conferences on the great seasons of the Christian year. 

'The Liturgy is a sea. We are plunged into it and transformed by it. Year after year the liturgical seasons come back like the tides over stones...always the same cycle, but shaping us slowly but surely, into living stones (1 Peter 2:5)'.

The author writes with warmth, with learning, with passion and with humour. The reader can enter into something of the accumulated wisdom of an Order whose members 'have carried out the same little series of exercises since the eleventh century'. 

Each season has its special appeal for Carthusians - as the Conferences on Mary and on John the Baptist in the Advent and Christmas seasons show. The great Sunday Gospels of Lent - the Transfiguration, the Samaritan woman at the well, the raising of Lazarus - are expounded; the Passion of Christ is the subject of meditations that are profoundly and sometimes startlingly direct in their candour.

But perhaps the most remarkable part of this unusual book is the author's capacity to speak at length and to the point about the Resurrection and the coming of the Spirit. Here, where Christian teachers and preachers have so often been either hesitant or dogmatically remote, we have someone who clearly participates in the mysteries of which he speaks. 

It is a priceless gift to us all.

From Advent To Pentecost (1999) offers an illuminating, even dazzling, insight into Carthusian ways that are little known, indeed traditionally hidden. Here are men who for all their silence need to be heard. From Advent To Pentecost is translated from the French by Carmel Brett, done with great love of Carthusian liturgy. 

Interpreted By The Storyteller

A Time For Mercy (John Brigance Series) by John Grisham

Hardback: Can a killer ever be above the law?

Deputy Stuart Kofer is a protected man. Though he's turned his drunken rages on his girlfriend, Josie, and her children many times before, the police code of silence has always shielded him.

But one night he goes too far, leaving Josie for dead on the floor before passing out. Her son, sixteen-year-old Drew, knows he only has this one chance to save them. He picks up a gun and takes the law into his own hands.

In Clanton, Mississippi, there is no one more hated than a cop killer - but a cop killer's defence lawyer comes close. Jake Brigance doesn't want this impossible case but he's the only one with enough experience to defend the boy.

As the trial begins, it seems there is only one outcome: the gas chamber for Drew. But, as the town of Clanton discovers once again, when Jake Brigance takes on an impossible case, anything is possible.

A Time for Mercy (2020) is the third book in the superb John Brigance series.

About the author: John Grisham is the author of thirty-five novels, one work of non-fiction, a collection of stories and seven novels for young readers. The recent critically-acclaimed Netflix series, An Innocent Man, was based on his non-fiction bestseller. His works are translated into forty-five languages. He lives in Virginia. Stay in touch via Facebook at John Grisham Books.

Rating: 5/5

Nonfiction and Novels

There Is More

On A Rainy Day Like Today

 

Guarding The Flame: The Challenges Facing The Church In The Twenty-First Century, A Conversation With Cardinal Péter Erdő by Robert Moynihan and Viktoria Somogyi

Hardback: Where is the Catholic Church going? How will it face the challenges of the 21st century? Do the recent advances in modern technology pose a threat to the human soul? 

In this wide-ranging, candid conversation, Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Budapest, Hungary, and one of the most respected cardinals in the Catholic Church, speaks with Dr Robert Moynihan, founder and editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, about the Catholic Church's faith in an increasingly secularized world.

As the two-time president of the Council of the Episcopal Conferences of Europe, Erdő is one of the leading bishops of Europe. And as the continent has descended into a deep secularism - more pronounced and rapid even than in the United States - he is uniquely positioned and qualified to identify and address the issues that secularism presents. 

Here for the first time in English is the wide-ranging and now updated interview in which the cardinal speaks forthrightly about the situation the Church faces today, the need to "guard the flame" of the traditional Christian faith, and the most effective way to do so in our post-Christian society. His 2018 lecture at Columbia University on The Role of Religion and the Churches in a Secular State serves as an effective capstone to the main text. 

Guarding The Flame (2019) is translated from the Italian by Christopher Hart-Moynihan from the original Italian edition, La fiamma della fede. Un dialogo con il cardinale Peter Erdő (2015).

Guarding The Flame was prepared on the basis of four days of interviews with Cardinal Erdő in his residence in Budapest in the summer of 2011 and three days of interviews in New York City in January of 2018.

About the authors: Cardinal Péter Erdő, Archbishop of Exztergom-Budapest and Primate of Hungary, was born in Budapest in 1952, the first of six children. He was created Cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2003. He has published more than 250 articles and 25 books on Canon Law, as well as other spiritual works.

Robert Moynihan (Harvard College, BA 1977 and Yale University PhD 1988) founded Inside the Vatican magazine in 1993. He has covered the Vatican and Church affairs for more than 30 years and is the author of books on Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

Viktoria Somogyi, born in Hungary, has lived and worked in Rome at the Hungarian language desk of Vatican Radio. She studied International Relations at the University of Rome.