Welcome!

UPDATE: We ended up expanding the purpose of the blog beyond the original plan for studying particular books for the Year of Faith. There are no plans to dismantle the blog, or to stop posting, but we just haven't been able to keep it very active.

Thank you for visiting our new blog! We hope to provide a forum for growing in faith together through prayer and reflection on some worthwhile books during this Year of Faith. Wherever you are in your relationship with God, you are most welcome to join us here in this endeavor.

Though the Year of Faith doesn't start until October 11th, we though we'd begin today, on the feast of the Birthday of Mary as a way of placing ourselves under her particular care and praying that she may help us draw closer to her Son and show us the way to bring Him to a world in great need. We also hope that, given the complexities and busy-ness of life, these extra few weeks before the Year of Faith begin will help us prepare to begin well.

We are planning on providing at least one post per chapter of each of these books. Please try to keep the conversation reasonably focused on that particular chapter (we are especially hoping to avoid the distraction of tangential hot-button issues like politics). Please do share and discuss what these passages mean to you, questions you may have in understanding them and connections you may discover between them and passages from Scripture and from the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Two of the books we will be discussing are not Catholic, but we feel to be worthwhile and offer some great discussion material. It is fair to note areas of disagreement, but again, we don't want these portions to distract us from finding what is true and good and discovering together how we might apply these to our own lives.

Feel free to read and discuss these books in whatever order you like. Because they complement and provide context for each other, I tend to work best having several of these types of books going at one time. If you prefer studying one book at a time, please use the book title tabs in the sidebar to follow a single discussion more easily.

We hope to ground this endeavor in prayer. Please feel free to share your own prayer requests via the  tab at the top.

Please keep us all in your prayers as we begin this exciting endeavor together.

You can learn more about the Year of Faith here: Year of Faith (USCCB)