Is the Shroud of Turin -- an ancient linen bearing the mysterious image of a man, purported to be Jesus of Nazareth -- the ingenious work of an artist, or the true shroud of Christ? For centuries, this question has perplexed and enticed the most brilliant minds. In The Truth about the Shroud of Turin: Solving the Mystery, reporter Robert K. Wilcox (formerly for the New York Times and Miami Herald) investigates every aspect of the Shroud's history, from the ancient Egyptian weave of the cloth to the possible role of radiation in forming the image on its surface. Drawing on evidence collected over thirty years of travel, interviews with experts, and painstaking research, Wilcox presents the full story of the Shroud in astonishing detail: The Shroud of Turin -- a clever hoax, or the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ? Revelations in The Truth about the Shroud of Turin: read more

Is death the end? That's the ultimate question that has preoccupied mankind from the beginning of time to the present. And in truth, there is no more important question in life -- it is the one issue that makes every other issue trivial, for death is the great wrecking ball that destroys everything. But does anything lie beyond that great disruption, that terrible dissolution? Bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza answers that question with a resounding "yes." In his new blockbuster, Life After Death: The Evidence, he offers solid proof that death is not the end -- and shows why the rational side of this debate is the side that believes in the afterlife, while those clinging to blind faith are the ones who say that the end of this life is the extinguishing of all human existence.

read more

For the past 150 years scientists have interpreted the world supposing there is nothing in principle that cannot accounted for, where the unknown is merely waiting-to-be- known. And so it has been until very recently, writes James Le Fanu, when two of the most ambitious scientific projects ever conceived revealed, quite unexpectedly -- and without anyone really noticing – that we are after all a mystery to ourselves. Now, in Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves, Le Fanu -- an award-winning science reporter and practicing physician -- explores the power of science to penetrate the deep mysteries of our existence, as well as its limits, challenging the common assumption that has persisted since Darwin's Origin of Species that we are no more than the fortuitous consequence of a known evolutionary process.

read more

Time was, people in Western society lived in a culture where the Bible was assumed to possess a certain authority. In today's secular culture, that's no longer true. From TV documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters, from newsmagazines to bestselling books, frontal attacks on the reliability of the New Testament are as common today as they were unthinkable only a few decades ago. As a result, many Christians find themselves not merely on the defensive but overwhelmed -- scarcely able to keep track of the attacks, much less to answer them. Now, the remedy: in Conspiracies and the Cross, historian and Scripture scholar Dr. Timothy Paul Jones examines in depth the ten most popular "conspiracy theories" calling the New Testament into question -- and shows how, when subjected to actual historical evidences, each of them crumbles beneath the weight of its own overblown claims.

read more

During her lifelong service to the poorest of the poor, Mother Teresa of Calcutta's public image was that of a tiny, energetic woman of cheerful disposition who embodied the essence of Christian faith in action. But only her closest spiritual advisors knew of the agonizing spiritual pain she endured for almost fifty years. Now, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of her death, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light brings together the private letters she wrote to her spiritual advisors which reveal the hidden dynamics of her relationship with God -- including moments, indeed years, of utter desolation. In this moving chronicle of her spiritual journey, Mother Teresa emerges as a classic mystic whose inner life burned with the fire of charity and whose heart was tested and purified by an intense trial of faith, a true "dark night of the soul." read more

After Vatican II, a major weapon in the arsenal of struggling Catholics was turned into a marshmallow. Frequent Confession became "necessary" only for those "in mortal sin," it was thought (and sometimes taught). Out of print, too, went this hugely popular volume on both sides of the Atlantic, easily the most methodical book ever written about the many uses of Confession for spiritual growth. Confession, its author makes clear, is not a counseling session. Rather, says the late German Abbot, Benedict Baur, OSB, frequent Confession has "high value in the spiritual life" -- and can help you overcome various weaknesses, bad habits and perverse inclinations.

read more

Many orthodox Catholics are under the impression that Church teaching requires them to reject free enterprise and favor an array of interventions in the marketplace. Not so, argues Thomas E. Woods in this principled and unapologetic defense of the free market from a Catholic perspective.

read more

It's a trend: in this anything-goes age, ever larger numbers of people are opting for tougher moral standards. Millions are streaming out of churches that preach the Gospel of "If It Feels Good, Do It," and are finding homes in houses of worship that preach a more traditional and more demanding religion. Churches that have ditched Christian doctrine in favor of an unremitting advocacy of the Democratic Party platform, like the Episcopalians and Unitarians, are hemorrhaging members -- while conservative churches like the Southern Baptists are gaining members in record numbers.

read more

Ask a college student today what he knows about the Catholic Church, and his answer might come down to one word: "corruption." But according to Thomas E. Woods, Jr., that one word should be "civilization." In How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, Professor Woods shows how the Catholic Church has shaped our civilization to a far greater degree than most people -- Catholics included -- have been taught. "To be sure, most people recognize the influence of the Church in music, art, and architecture," writes Woods (author of the New York Times bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History). But her influence goes far beyond that. In fact, he reveals, the Church's imprint can be found on every major achievement and institution of the West -- from science and economics, to international law and "just war" theory, to the university system and organized charity.

read more

Fr. J.L. Menezes knew Islam up close: as a priest in India, he devoted his priestly life to introducing that nation's tens of millions of Muslims to Christianity. With this life of Mohammed, he left us the record of his appeals: a frank, honest, and exhaustively researched exploration of the life of the "prophet" of Islam, the development and contents of the Koran, and an introduction to various Muslim sects.

read more

It's an experience familiar to millions of faithful Christians and Jews: A priest, minister or rabbi reads a passage from the Bible -- then delivers a sermon declaring the passage to be somehow false or wrongheaded. How did the Bible lose its authority as the Word of God? The problem, argue Eyal Rav-Noy and Gil Weinreich, is not bad ideology, but bad Bible scholarship. Armed with elaborate theories of multiple authorship -- and sources, phantom editors, and later interpolations -- liberal religionists can profess to revere the Bible, but then find wiggle room to depart from any particular passage they don't like. But now, in Who Really Wrote the Bible?: And Why It Should Be Taken Seriously Again, Rav-Noy and Weinreich show that this "scholarship" is not only demonstrably wrong, but actually makes the Bible harder to read and understand.

read more

Letter to a Christian Nation may be the most explicitly anti-Christian book ever to become a nationwide bestseller - and these days, that's saying something. In this ignorant and hate-filled book, Sam Harris contends that most of the evils of the world can be blamed on religion - and he appeals to liberals, academics, and the media elite to wrench Christianity out of American life. Now, in Letter from a Christian Citizen, Doug Wilson provides the Christian response, in the form of a direct answer to Sam Harris himself. If you or anyone you know was confused by Harris's arguments, here is the perfect antidote. read more

Books like John Cornwell's Hitler's Pope and Garry Wills's Papal Sin (and others) have become New York Times bestsellers by arguing that Pope Pius XII was complicit in the Holocaust by failing to do enough to save the Jews from Nazi extermination. But in The Myth of Hitler's Pope, Orthodox Jewish Rabbi David Dalin explodes this newly resurrected, widely accepted, yet utterly bankrupt smearing of a pope who was, in fact, to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, "a righteous gentile."

read more

Everywhere you turn, pundits and politicos are writing the obituary of the religious Right. We are told in ponderous articles the movement is fracturing, splintering, losing momentum, losing heart, and on the verge of irrelevance. But is it true? Or is it wishful thinking on behalf of those who have always despised what the religious Right stands for? "We’re not betting men, but we're pretty sure it’s the latter," write Harry Jackson Jr. and Tony Perkins. Now, in In Personal Faith, Public Policy, Jackson and Perkins name the seven areas that Christian conservatives must engage in to regain our confidence and clout -- and explain how to do it successfully.

read more

On July 7, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI shook up the Catholic world as no pope has since John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962. In his Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum, the pontiff announced that any priest in the world may offer the traditional (“Tridentine”) rite of Mass, the liturgy of the Catholic Church before the new Mass was introduced after Vatican II.

read more

The foundation of all Judeo-Christian belief, the Ten Commandments were until very recently the undisputed basis for American morality and governance. Today, however, they are in danger of becoming irrelevant in our society -- even among professing Jews and Christians. As a resident of the most secular region of the U.S., the Pacific Northwest, David Klinghoffer sees daily the consequences of that attitude. Now, in Shattered Tablets: Why We Ignore the Ten Commandments at Our Peril, he uses his trenchant personal observations to expose how modern society, in spurning the Commandments, is paying a heavy price in everything from our family relationships to our national discourse -- and explains why we will likely pay an even heavier price if we persist in our folly. read more

Richard Dawkins' runaway bestseller The God Delusion has established him as the world's most high-profile atheist polemicist, who directs a ferocious trade of criticism against religion in general and Christianity in particular. Now, in The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath, together with wife Joanna McGrath, subjects Dawkins' critique of faith to rigorous scrutiny - and finds it wanting in more ways than one. read more

Aren't all religions fundamentally the same? Don't they teach the same basic ethical principles, and worship the same God? To the media, the answer is an obvious "yes" -- but the real answer is an emphatic "no." Now, in The Religions Next Door: What We Need to Know about Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam -- and What Reporters Are Missing, Marvin Olasky tells the truth about about non-Christian religions -- and the danger of believing that all religions hold different variations of the same tenets.

read more

Spencer, author of the bestselling Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and four other books on Islam and jihad, here works exclusively from the sources that Muslims themselves revere as most reliable for information about Muhammad. He explains why it matters so much today what Muhammad was like, and traces his tumultuous life in depth: from his first "revelation" from Allah (which filled him with terror that he was demon-possessed) to his deathbed (from which he called down curses upon Jews and Christians). read more

Christians are called upon to be "contenders" for their faith. Today, that means confronting the challenge of modern atheists, who -- in such anti-religious bestsellers as The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God Is Not Great -- have declared open warfare on the Christian faith. Now, in What's So Great About Christianity, bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza gives a Christians a kind of toolkit to meet this challenge head on -- or risk being silenced altogether. read more