I am a linguist and a Christian (a Catholic), with a lifelong passion for clear understanding. I have spent my life, over many decades, searching for the shared human concepts because I believe these concepts give us the key to open the meaning of what people say (in different languages) and of what Jesus says in the Gospels. In the process, I have published some thirty books engaging many disciplines. Three of them deal directly with Christianity: What Did Jesus Mean? (OUP 2001), What Christians Believe? (OUP 2019); and The Nicene Creed in Minimal English: Why Christianity Needs Universal Human Concepts (Palgrave 2025).
My experience shows that this book can be a lifesaver for anyone living with depression, chronic anxiety, or a troubled heart.
It offers a Christian take on how to achieve interior freedom and preserve it in troubled times. A friend of mine told me that there was a period in her life when she wouldn’t leave her house without taking this book with her.
In fact, I have often done this myself. The sense of freedom from external circumstances that I could find when reading a page from this book in hard places, at hard times, was extraordinary.
The author, Jacques Philippe, a member of the Community of the Beatitudes, has a special appeal to modern readers, and many say he has helped them to attain a peace of heart.
It's not always possible to control external events. There are so many things that are outside our control: the past, what others think of us, chronic health issues, other peoples' actions, the weather, unforeseen events. This list goes on and on.
It is possible, though, to gain more control over our interior life.
In his book Interior Freedom, Fr. Jacques Phillipe shows us that we possess, each of us, inside of us a space of freedom that no-one can take away. Despite the most unfavorable outward circumstances, we can claim our freedom because God is its source and its guarantee.…
As a Christian and a lifelong reader of historical fiction and of books on Christianity, I loved this book and couldn’t put it down.
“Theophilos” is the mysterious addressee of Luke’s Gospel. O’Brien imagines him to be the adoptive father of Luke. In the novel, Luke becomes deeply absorbed in the stories that people who knew Jesus personally tell him and decides to chronicle them as a historian. Theophilos travels to Palestine to try to rescue Luke from the “madness” of Christianity.
The book is an extraordinary feat of historical and psychological imagination. While replete with breathtaking episodes, it is, generally speaking, not fast-paced – one often stops to ponder a sentence, or a reflection – yet it is also a thriller.
St. Luke addressed his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles to a man named Theophilos.
Who was Theophilos? Scripture scholars do not know, making him a fit subject for Michael O'Brien's vivid imagination. In this fictional narrative, Theophilos is the skeptical but beloved adoptive father of St. Luke. Challenged by the startling account of the "Christos" received in the chronicle from his beloved son Luke and concerned for the newly zealous young man's fate, Theophilos, a Greek physician and an agnostic, embarks on a search for Luke to bring him home. He is gravely concerned about the deadly illusions…
As a Veteran, I once dismissed Christianity, viewing it as outdated and irrelevant.
But as I witness the West sliding into chaos, I realize how wrong I was. It is no accident that Christianity is under assault while the West is being overwhelmed by a cultural virus that sows discord…
My autistic grandson, as a teenager, read this book to me aloud twice; and now, at twenty, he is reading it to me, at my request, but once again with gusto, for the third time.
It is a meticulous and loving chronicle of Jesus’ life, his doings and sayings. I have read many “biographies” of Jesus, but, along with Aleksander Men’s The Son of Man, this is my favourite. The reading of this long book aloud, chapter by chapter, is a joy.
It is dramatic in style, very reliable in details, and sound and insightful in their interpretation. At the same time, the author’s heart is in it, and so is the reader’s. It is nourishment for the soul, as well as for the mind. A splendid book.
2016 Reprint of 1962 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Sheed's concern with the Gospels is to come to know Christ as he actually lived among us and as he interacted with all the various people he encountered from his infancy to his passion and death. Sheed attempted to show Jesus through his effect upon others--seeing how they saw him, trying to see why they saw him so. There is much about Mary and Joseph in their task of bringing up a Jesus; about John the Baptist; about Mary of Bethany and Mary…
This is another big book that my autistic grandson read aloud to me, with enthusiasm, when he was still in his teens.
It is St Paul’s acclaimed biography “by his greatest living interpreter” (so says historian Tom Holland, the author of Dominion). It is a gripping adventure story, following Paul from Tarsus to Rome (“Three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned; three times I have been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea”) as well as a journey into Paul’s mind and heart.
I loved the scholarship, the narrative mastery, the outer and inner drama of St Paul’s life, so vividly, empathetically, and thrillingly offered to the reader.
As a Veteran, I once dismissed Christianity, viewing it as outdated and irrelevant.
But as I witness the West sliding into chaos, I realize how wrong I was. It is no accident that Christianity is under assault while the West is being overwhelmed by a cultural virus that sows discord…
For me, Sheridan’s new book was a riveting read – a mind-opening reminder of how early Christians, unbelievably, converted a good part of the classical world and spread Jesus’ radical teaching of love, forgiveness, human equality, and fraternity in a world in which they were total nobodies, scorned, persecuted, tortured, and killed.
Attractively, the book also shows some modern countercultural Christian lives, based on the same Gospel teachings, still capable of acting as a leaven and a sign of hope in the spiritually disoriented Western world.
I found this book extremely refreshing and encouraging, and I have recently given it as a birthday present to a seventeen-year-old granddaughter to inspire her to set herself challenging and God-oriented goals worth living and dying for.
This book offers an unpacked version of the Nicene Creed, a definitive statement of belief of mainstream Christianity and a unique document in human history – “the world’s one unchanging creed” (Georgiana Fullerton). The book seeks to clarify this compressed text through “Basic Human” – the conceptual language of all people discovered by the author and colleagues through decades of wide-ranging crosslinguistic investigations.
At a time of post-Christian spiritual disorientation, when many are seeking the threads of meaning to hold things together, the vision of the Nicene Creed can offer a new reference point and a beacon of hope. By articulating this vision in Basic Human, in simple words found in all languages, this book makes it clearer and more accessible than ever before.
