New Nazareths In Us

Born in the silence and simplicity of rural New-England, this book gathers some brief reflections and sermons of a parish Priest. The sermons fix their attention upon the Mother of God, and the author's approach is essentially liturgical. Side-stepping the language of apologetics and controversy, he studies the texts of the Roman liturgy and shares what he finds there. The meditations-concentrated and pithy-consider, beneath the light of inspired human reason and Sacred Scripture, such topics as:

• Humility and cheerfulness
• Anxiety and truth
• Modernism and Mary
• The Law and the Little Way of St Therese
• Scandal, hope, and the Divine Gardener
• The cloister's unlikely lessons on Patriotism
• Courage, pharisaism, and a fate worse than death
• The peace of the wounded Christ

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, Fr Sliwa enriches his meditations by engaging with saints, writers, and philosophers from Augustine and Aquinas to Evelyn Waugh and Georges Bernanos. In a phrase of the priest-poet Hopkins, the grace of Christ's Incarnation 'Makes, O marvelous! New Nazareths in us.' Thus the aim of this book can be summed up as preparing human lives for the visits of divine grace.