Let God's Light Shine Forth
The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Though he was a familiar Church leader for many years before becoming pope, there has been little awareness of the spiritual side of Benedict XVI. Now for the first time readers are given a brilliant overview of the Pope’s most inspirational teachings in Let God’s Light Shine Forth. Editor Robert Moynihan offers a brief introduction to the life and work of Pope Benedict XVI and then presents an absorbing collection of his most persuasive words.
Within these pages, Pope Benedict XVI introduces a God who is good, beautiful, and true, the fountain of all life. The most important thing for each person, in Benedict’s view, is to discover and develop a loving relationship with God, because this is the way to the deepest and most lasting happiness that human beings can experience. Even in our darkest moments, he teaches, we can have hope that all things will ultimately work out in a wonderful way to show God’s glory and bring blessedness to individual men and women.
Many of these selections deal specifically with questions such as: Who is God? How we can know him? What does he wants us to do and to be? Having spent his entire life thinking, studying, and praying about such questions, Benedict has become perhaps the leading contemporary theologian (the word literally means “knower of God”) in the Roman Catholic Church. From his earliest work as a teacher to his first words as leader of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict’s vision of hope is powerfully summarized in Let God’s Light Shine Forth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope in April 2005, he had long been the second most powerful man in the Vatican, but his own writings had often been overlooked. This sampler of those writings--doubtless the first of many such collections--promises to give readers a taste of the theology and teachings of the man who is now Pope Benedict XVI. After a helpful biographical essay by Moynihan, the founder and editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, the book dashes through excerpts spanning Ratzinger's whole career, from his earliest days as a young professor to his first utterance as pope. Since these excerpts are undated and Moynihan gives them no historical context, the book is more useful as a devotional text than as a window into the evolution of Ratzinger's spiritual development. In any case, it would be useful to have an index that could help readers find the specific topics addressed here (Christmas, Islam, poverty, marriage, in vitro fertilization, pride, Easter, etc.). However, the reflections are loosely grouped in very general topical chapters and organized with helpful subheads. The readings are short, usually just a paragraph or two long, and representative of a wide variety of spiritual and social issues. Readers who are eager for a taste of the new pope's stance on topics like Protestant-Catholic relations, cloning, or the liturgy will enjoy leafing through this compilation.