Search results for ""Author Alan Hilliard""

How can we know what it is to be holy? What difference can holiness make in our lives? Far from being a matter for only the `Holy Joes’ among us, holiness is the concern of all Christians, and is intimately connected to a life of Christian Joy. In How to be Holy: The Practice of Joy in Pope Francis’s Gaudete et Exsultate, Fr Alan Hilliard takes us on a journey through Pope Francis’ latest Apostolic Exhortation. Chapter by chapter he explains the significance of Pope Francis’ remarks in an illuminating, and accessible way. Included are extracts from Gaudete et Exsultate, personal introductions to each chapter, and sets of questions to encourage you on your own spiritual journey. Pope Francis wants to help tune us in to God, and in How to be Holy: A Guide to Pope Francis’s message Gaudete et Exsultate Fr Alan Hilliard wants to help us tune in to Pope Francis! Rejoice and be glad!

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Foreword by Dr Tony Bates Using the format of his earlier books Dipping into Lent and Dipping into Advent, Alan Hilliard again opens up a space for us to engage with our emotional and spiritual response to what life throws at us. The loss, fear, isolation, and fragmentation of 2020 causes us all to pause and take stock of what really matters in our lives, so Dipping into Life comes at the perfect time to help us do this. All of life is in these pages – absence and presence, loss, grief, laughter, believing, forgiveness, enchantment, distraction, gratitude, cousins, freedom, pints and play. Alan has the rare gift of opening out our everyday lives and considering these in light of the wisdom of the religions, of literature, poetry, music, sociology and common sense. As we dip into this book, opening a page at random, Alan helps us to find the deeply religious in the everyday and take time to ‘cultivate reverence and recognition for what is already present’. There is an honesty in these pages that this is not always easy to do. Dipping into Life invites us to be enchanted by the complexity and beauty of our own lives as it is here that we encounter God.

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The aim of this booklet is to help foster an understanding of the plight of migrants that leads to action in the local faith community. Understanding of the role of the Christian towards the ever more present reality of migration and of the great Catholic tradition of hospitality is more important than ever, especially if we want or desire to make the appropriate response. The actions may not change situations in the homelands from which people migrated in the first place but the action we undertake in our neighbourhood where we live together can have amazing impacts for the stranger, for us and for our community, eventually influencing policy via our mutual understanding of the way our world is functioning or not functioning. The information in this booklet will hopefully help nurture the instincts of those who wish to make a difference in the face of the current crisis which brings with it so much tragedy. Author interviewed on High Noon on Newstalk with George Hook.

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