Catholic in The Books Store

The sixteen people whose stories are told here are a variety of Jews, including some who came from secularized, liberal or even atheistic backgrounds, while others came from Orthodox Judaism, or even Hasidism. Some were well trained Jews, others unschooled in Judaism; some rich and wildly successful, others down and out. But their common link was they all had a profound longing for God that gave them no peace until they found God Himself in the Catholic Church.

Some of these converts are famous people like Edith Stein, Alphonse Ratisbonne, Karl Stern, and Rabbi Zolli, while others are less well known, but all have powerful stories of life-changing spiritual transformations.

The brilliant theologian and philosopher Hans Urs von Balthasar writes about God's involvement with man and man's involvement with God in the Old and the New Testaments. He shows how that interaction of the divine with the human reveals the meaning of true freedom that man is always hungering for but often strives after in wrong and dangerous ways. He shows that God's free revelation of himself in Christ is an invitation to enter into the realm of absolute and divine freedom, in which alone human freedom can be fully realized.

From the true Christian there radiates the kind of freedom that is constantly being sought after by the non-Christian. In modern times, the freedom of man is a theme that preoccupies everyone. Atheistic philosophies are wholly taken up with this preoccupation. The Enlightenment was concerned with the freeing of reason from the "fetters of faith". Marx wrote about freeing man economically, and Freud wrote of freeing man from the bondage of a past as yet unmastered.

As opposed to those whose search for freedom urges them onward into a barren void, the Christian stands as the messenger of freedom accomplished and a freedom attainable by all. A true freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

"Just as Love Alone Is Credible captures the essence of the seven-volume The Glory of the Lord, so does Engagement with God explain his five-volume Theo-Drama. But here he does more: by setting his account of the drama of Christian discipleship against the anti-Christian ideologies of the 1960s he brings his theology to bear on the highest cost of discipleship--martyrdom--by seeing the martyr as the mirror of God's own involvement in the human race through his own martyred Son. One can hardly read a more sober, and yet exhilarating, account of what it means to live committed to God's own commitment to the world."