Ah, so that's why prayer is so difficult.

The extract below is from the introduction by Timothy Radcliffe OP to Eamon Duffy's book, The Heart in Pilgrimage: a Prayerbook for Catholic Christians

The One-Minute Aquinas

(No, I hadn't, either.)

Available this side of the Pond as an e-book and as a Proper Printed Book across the water.

Without commending or condemning it, here's the blurb from the UK-based Amazon. (The print version is available from Sophia Institute Press in the USA.)

If you don’t have a year to study the more than 3,000 pages St. Thomas wrote, then turn to The One-Minute Aquinas, the fast-paced book that provides busy readers with simple, readable explanations of the truths that, for 750 years now, have caused the works of St. Thomas to be sought out by kings and popes, scholars and saints, as well as by ordinary souls like you — hungry to know God and to love him more and more.  

In this book’s lucid pages, author Kevin Vost gives you small, digestible portions of St. Thomas’s life-giving wisdom that you can enjoy one minute at a time. Tables and graphics will help you grasp and remember St. Thomas’s key ideas with a minimum of time and effort. 

Best of all, in The One-Minute Aquinas you’ll find quick, sure refutations of the countless relativistic, secular, and pseudoscientific ideas that are so influential in our culture today — and so shallow, contradictory, and wrong!

Pope John Paul II declared that “the Church has been justified in consistently proposing St. Thomas as a master of thought and a model of the right way to do theology.” Now The One-Minute Aquinas enables even those with limited time and only a modest education to benefit from the wisdom of this great saint. 

Here, with minimal effort and among scores of other things, you’ll finally come to know and understand:  

 --Why God permits evil
 --Heaven: what it is (and is not)
 --Five simple proofs that God exists
 --Why God became man
 --Why Jesus let himself be tempted
 --How you can grow quickly in virtue
 --Why all souls need the sacraments --Why Jesus let himself be crucified
 --The causes of lust --The natural law and the Commandments
 --The soul, free will, sin, and damnation
 --The angels, their ranks, and their powers
 --How God governs (and refrains from governing)
 -- The surprising qualities of our resurrected bodies

Enjoy. Maybe. Or maybe not, if your name is... no. Better not.

On being a Christian (tsk, no, not that one)

The Christian is someone who knows that without Christ his existence would be aimless, empty and without hope. What has changed his situation into one of hope and purpose is his experience of and share in the resurrection, in which he has with Christ made the breakthrough into the world of the ultimate reality of God. And in his certainty that what Christ has begun in him he will come to complete, the Christian lives a life fill of expectancy, free from the guilt-ridden fear that haunts mankind.

Hubert Richards
St Paul and his Epistles 
ISBN 0 232 51449 6 

With thanks to Clare Richards for recommending her late husband's marvellous little book!

Turner's new Aquinas portrait 'a triumph'. Oooh! Tempted... very tempted...

Denys Turner is much too modest. He claims that his study of Thomas Aquinas is 'not intended for professional theologians and philosophers', but rather provides a 'way into' Aquinas for a general readership. Make no mistake, that general readership should be very grateful. They will encounter one of the finest analyses of the great man's work and they will not suffer too many headaches as they attempt to grasp the complexities of Aquinas's thought. [...] Turner's account is rich, provocative and sophisticated, a work of both passion and serious scholarship. It is a triumph.

Thus begins a glowing review by Jonathan Wright in the current edition of the Catholic Herald.

Tempting, eh?

ISBN-10: 0300188552
ISBN-13: 978-0300188554
256 pages
Yale University Press $28.00
Amazon UK £18.99