The Way of the Fathers: Praying With the Early Christians

From the pious to the practical, the reflections of the Fathers of the Church cover virtually every aspect of the Christian life.

Noted author Mike Aquilina has compiled their ancient axioms into a concise collection of comments designed for busy, modern readers.

Pray with the poetry of St. Gregory Nazianzen. Find clear direction in the practical advice of St. Jerome. And, let your heart turn toward the heavenly Jerusalem, following the 1,000 timeless treasures in The Way of the Fathers.

“A power-packed collection of the Fathers’ concise, clear, and challenging statements on issues still relevant to Christians today. A helpful tool, for anyone seeking to live the authentic Gospel life as understood by the first Christians.”

Companion Guide to Pope Benedict’s ‘The Fathers’

Popular author Mike Aquilina’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Church Fathers intersects seamlessly with Pope Benedict XVI’s insightful reflections about them in this faith-building companion guide.

It shows that the Fathers are much more than wise men from ages past who sacrificed their lives for what they believed: they are teachers and philosophers, orators and pastors, leaders and problem solvers, martyrs and heroes whose stories and example are still relevant today.

Discover a wealth of inspiration and insight on twenty-six Fathers of the Church as well as thoughtful reflection/discussion questions on what His Holiness and the Fathers have said. Divided into six sections, the Companion Guide to Pope Benedict’s The Fathers provides an easy road map for parish study groups or independent study.

Roots of the Faith: From the Church Fathers to You

This highly readable introduction to the roots of many Catholic beliefs and practices provides a sense of connection to our brothers and sisters who have gone before us and who helped shape the faith. Mike Aquilina makes it clear that as far as the essentials are concerned, a time-travel trip back to the beginning of the Church would reveal a Church familiar to Catholics today. Just as an acorn grows into a tree and yet remains the same plant, so the Catholic Church is a living organism that has grown from the faith of the earliest Christians into the Body of Christ we know today.

A Year With The Church Fathers: Patristic Wisdom for Daily Living

Times change, but human nature does not. Neither do the daily struggles that all Christians experience in their walk with the Lord. Today as two thousand years ago we fight anger, pride, lust, spiritual sloth. Now as then we strive to be more diligent in prayer, more faithful to the commandments, more patient and charitable toward others. And in our time, no less than in the earliest centuries of Christianity, we need wise guidance to direct us on the road to holiness.

In A Year with the Church Fathers, popular Patristics expert Mike Aquilina gathers the wisest, most practical teachings and exhortations from the Fathers of the Church, and presents them in a format perfect for daily meditation and inspiration. The Fathers were the immediate inheritors of the riches of the Apostolic Age, and their intimacy with the revelation of Jesus Christ is beautifully evident throughout their theological and pastoral writings: a profound patrimony that is ours to read and cherish and profit from.

Learn to humbly accept correction from St. Clement of Rome. Let Tertullian teach you how to clear your mind before prayer. Read St. Gregory the Great and deepen your love for the Eucharist. Do you suffer from pain or illness? St. John Chrysostom’s counsels will refresh you. Do you have trouble curbing your appetite for food and other fleshly things? St. John Cassian will teach you the true way to moderation and self-control.

A Year with the Church Fathers is different from a study guide, and more than a collection of pious passages. It is a year-long retreat that in just a few minutes every day will lead you on a cycle of contemplation, prayer, resolution, and spiritual growth that is guaranteed to bring you closer to God and His truth. From the Church Fathers we should expect nothing less.

Beautiful gift edition, with two- tone ultra soft cover, ribbon marker, and designed interior pages.

Faith of Our Fathers: Why the Early Christians Still Matter and Always Will

Getting to know the Church Fathers means getting to know our own roots. It means knowing more deeply who we are as we learn more and more about who they are. The early Christians are our ancestors, our common genealogy, our family. When we look to our roots, what do we see? That’s what Mike Aquilina shows you in this book. The Fathers managed to pull off an amazing achievement. They converted the pagan world in a mere two and a half centuries. They did it without any resources, without any social or political power. They did it with the most primitive communications media. Yet their Church sustained a steady growth rate of 40 percent per decade over the course of those centuries. Maybe there’s something we can learn from them. This book is a journey into that world, a tour where your guides are the Fathers.

The Fathers of the Church Bible

Bringing together Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition in one volume!

The Fathers of the Church Bible, NABRE will instruct in the faith and enliven your interest in Scripture through the insights from the Church fathers. You’ll enjoy the latest NABRE translation of the Bible, along with 88 full color inserts covering a wide range of writings from the Church fathers, including:

  • What is the canon of Scripture?
  • What was God doing before creation?
  • One being with two natures
  • The Resurrection of the Body
  • The Heavenly Hierarchy
  • Baptism: Immersion or Sprinkling?
  • And so much more!

Each topic features the wisdom of one or more of the Church fathers including St. Augustine, St. Justin Martyr, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyprian, Irenaeus, Tertullian, St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, and more.

The Fathers of the Church Bible, NABRE is ideal for anyone wanting to combine Scripture with insights on the Church fathers, their lives, and their thoughts on topics crucial to the Church and our Faith.

The Fathers of the Church: An Introduction to the First Christian Teachers

We hear the voices of the early Church Fathers even today. Their teachings, their guidance, their insights, and their sacrifice shaped the Catholic Church. They defined the canon of Scripture. They developed our creeds and forms of worship. They defined Christianity’s distinctive moral sense.

But who were they? What can we learn from their ancient teachings? What can the Fathers teach the 21st century – about holiness, culture, faith, and the Gospel.

This is the definitive resource for anyone interested in learning about the Church Fathers and their legacy. Ideal for RCIA, catechists, clergy, as well as lay Catholics who want to learn more about the great teachers of early Christianity.

In this new and extensively updated Third Edition, you’ll find:

  • New! Twenty Church Fathers never before covered in this series
  • Nearly 75 more pages of information on the early Church!
  • New! Many poets of ancient Christianity, whose hymns we still sing today.
  • An extensively revised introduction
  • The Mothers of the Church and their impact
  • Research-friendly references and citations, topical index, timeline, and detailed bibliography

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The Ancient Path: Old Lessons from the Church Fathers for a New Life Today

by John Michael Talbot and Mike Aquilina

People often imagine that the Church Fathers looked like their icons and smelled of incense, heroic figures wrapped in fine liturgical vestments of silk and lace, engulfed in billows of smoke from their golden censers. Yet, truth be told, even in their writings they resemble more the tattered cloak of Jesus or the dusty sweat-soaked habits of the early Desert Fathers and Mothers. Theirs is an utterly incarnational spirituality. It is heaven-sent, but it moves forward with both feet on the ground of the earth.

In this powerful work, John Michael Talbot tells the story of how these men deeply influenced his spiritual, professional and personal life. Coming to the Christian faith as a young man during the turbulent 1960s, he soon grew a fond of the Church Fathers, including St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Augustine and Gregory the Great and found guidance, reassurance and wisdom on his path to Jesus.

“The First Epistle of Saint Peter,” writes Talbot, “tells us that we are ‘a spiritual temple built of living stones.’ The early Church Fathers represent the first rows built upon the foundation of the Apostles. And that sacred building project continues throughout history to our time today. But it rests on the Fathers. It depends on them.”

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Through the Prayers of the Holy Fathers …

A dear reader of A Year with the Church Fathers writes to let me know he completed his 365 days with the book and was beginning again. He sent along a beautiful prayer from the Divine Liturgy of St.John Chrysostom. He offered it for me, and I offer it for you: “through the prayers of our holy Fathers, O Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us and save us.”

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Greek-English Inerlinear Apostolic Fathers

It’s out! Rick Brannan has finished his electronic, searchable, lovable Greek-English Interlinear of the Apostolic Fathers. It’s out from Logos — at a price I find impossible to refuse. I wish I’d had this every day of the last fifteen years!

He demonstrates just how useful this package can be in two blog posts, here and here.

This is the perfect toy to buy all the patristic nerds in your life this Christmas. It could keep them occupied for … well, forever.

UPDATE: The folks at Logos asked me to mention that there are other excellent Catholic products coming up. See here.

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Newman and the Fathers

My long article on Newman and the Fathers (and us) appeared in Our Sunday Visitor last month. Subscribers can view it in its entirety online — and everyone should subscribe!

For a brief moment in September, Cardinal John Henry Newman.caught the attention of the world. As Pope Benedict XVI declared him “blessed” during an apostolic visit to Great Britain, Blessed Newman’s conversion story was once again newsworthy, as it had been a century and a half before.

At the heart of Blessed Newman’s conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism was his study of the early Christians, the Fathers of the Church. As an Anglican clergyman, he believed that they held the answer to his denomination’s perennial problem — fragmentation in doctrinal and practical matters. Blessed Newman sought a purer reflection upon Scripture in the writings of the Fathers, an interpretation untainted by modern politics and controversies.

Yet his methods were — and remain — particularly appealing to modern readers. I confess I’ve filched them shamelessly as I prepared my recent books, especially Roots of the Faith.
Blessed Newman read the Fathers deeply, and not merely to extract theoretical propositions. He wanted to enter their world — to “see” divine worship as they saw it, to experience the prayers as they prayed them, to insert himself into the drama of the ancient arguments.

He immersed himself in the works of the Fathers, so that he could recount their stories in his brief Historical Sketches, in his book-length studies and, later, in one of his novels. After decades of such labors, he concluded that, “of all existing systems, the present communion of Rome is the nearest approximation in fact to the Church of the Fathers. … Did St. Athanasius or St. Ambrose come suddenly to life, it cannot be doubted what communion he would take to be his own.”

An interesting thing had happened. His study of the Fathers of the Church had caused him to desire The Church of the Fathers (yet another of his book titles). He wanted to place himself in real communion with the ancients, with Athanasius and Ambrose. A notional or theoretical connection wasn’t enough, and could never be. He wanted to move out of the shadows of hypothetical churches, based on a selective reading of the Church Fathers, and into the reality of the Fathers’ Church.

In declaring Cardinal Newman blessed, Pope Benedict has held up his life as worthy of imitation. And, in the matter of encountering the Fathers, it should hardly be a burden.

Like Blessed Newman and his contemporaries, so many people today hold a lively curiosity about Christian origins. Many ordinary Christians would like to move beyond the preoccupations of today’s tenure-track historians and documentarians (gender and conflict, power and more gender). They would like to find their own imaginative entry into the world of the Church Fathers. They would like “Historical Sketches” that were vivid enough to see with an attentive mind’s eye.

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The Fathers — and Your Batty Uncle

In reviewing my new book, A Year with the Church Fathers, David Scott at Catholic News Agency has written an appreciation of my work over the last decade and a half. He calls me “the unofficial family historian of the Catholic Church” and portrays me as the “eager younger brother” in God’s family — the family member who’s always pulling down old photo albums, letters and deeds. I’m profoundly moved by the review, though I’ve always pictured myself more as the batty uncle who embarrasses the family by showing up on the TV show “Hoarders.”

It’s a strange feeling having such a tribute come from a writer I’ve admired through most of my professional life. Non sum dignus. I can’t say I agree with David about the degree to which I’ve succeeded, but it’s gratifying to know that someone sees what I’m trying to do. It’s a long review, but here’s a snip.

The enthusiasm that Aquilina brings to his task is infectious, and he is diligent in sharing his discoveries. He blogs daily on Church history, archeology, and spirituality at FathersoftheChurch.com. His voice can be heard almost daily somewhere in America on some Catholic radio station. And he’s a familiar smiling face on EWTN, where he hosts regular series with his friend and colleague, the theologian Scott Hahn, with whom he founded the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology a few years back.

Most scholars of “paleo-Christianity” — the first centuries of the Church — are word guys. They study the paper trail — homilies, letters, teaching manuals, works of theological disputation, even the court records kept by the persecutors of the early Church.

Aquilina loves the words, too. But he also finds the sermon in the stuff, the theology expressed in the little things that the first Christians left behind — fading murals on catacomb walls, pottery and dishware, pieces of coinage, ancient hymns and Mass prayers, common household items … The point is that for Aquilina, the little things matter — because they tell us big things about what Catholics believe and how they look at the world …

Aquilina’s latest book is his most beautiful and most ambitious.

“A Year with the Church Fathers” is a kind of culmination of Aquilina’s efforts to turn the water of archeology and scholarship into the new wine of piety, devotion, and spirituality.