Are you looking for a way to keep your family engaged in the true spiritual nourishment Lent has to offer? Tending the Garden of Our Hearts offers family devotions based on the scriptures for each day of Great Lent, including questions to discuss and ponder and an appendix full of hands-on activities to bring the lessons of the season to life. Whether you use it every day or dip into it occasionally as time permits, this book will help the whole family get more out of this crucial season of the Orthodox year.

In Seasons in My Garden, award-winning writer Sr. Elizabeth Wagner reveals how tending to a garden in her Maine hermitage brought her to a deeper understanding of what it means to have faith, love others, and hope in the mercy of God. Her keen eye for the most intricate details of nature will help you find a path that brings you closer to God as well. Sr. Elizabeth Wagner believed God was calling her into deeper contemplation, so she built a hermitage in the Maine wilderness in order to ponder nature and become closer to God. Seasons in My Garden is a thought-provoking series of meditations, written as Sr. Wagner watched her own monastic garden progress through the seasons. Her reflections invite you to look over her shoulder as she tends to her beautiful garden and meditates on the mysteries of God’s creation and how it corresponds with her own life. In this captivating book, you will relate to Sr. Wagner as she struggles with feelings of a cold heart—just as her garden lay frozen under a foot of snow—and realizing that God was working to renew her spirit. As sudden storms threatened to destroy her hard work, Sr. Wagner will help you understand that careful preparation of the soul will help you resist the temptation to resent others. Seasons in My Garden intricately weaves insights from Sr. Wagner’s own growth through the seasons with spiritual guidance and an understanding that patient tending to your soul will help you grow into a beautiful garden that God can use to reflect his glory.

Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God. It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too. In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas details nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise. Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren't necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you. Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God. A Sacred Pathways video Bible study is also available for group or individual use, sold separately.

"Margaret Silf explores nine landscapes of prayer, both classic and modern ... All are fruitful areas for self-discovery, inviting us to connect with the mystery of God in our lives. Prayer can have its own sense of place -- landscapes that we can inhabit and explore, and meet God as tangibly as we might meet a fellow traveller"--Publisher.

From Pinocchio to The Chronicles of Narnia to Charlotte's Web, classic children's tales have shaped generations of young people. In recent years, homeschoolers and new classical schools have put these masterpieces of children's literature at the center of their curricula. And these stories continue to be embraced by parents, students, and educators alike. In Tending the Heart of Virtue, Vigen Guroian illuminates the power of classic tales and their impact on the moral imagination. He demonstrates how these stories teach the virtues through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, while he also unveils components of the good, the true, and the beautiful in plot and character. With clarity and elegance, Guroian reads deeply into the classic stories. He demonstrates how these stories challenge and enliven the moral imaginations of children. And he shows the reader how to get "inside" of classic stories and communicate their lessons to the child. For more than two decades Tending the Heart of Virtue has been embraced by parents, guardians, and teachers for whom the stories it discusses are not only beloved classics but repositories of moral wisdom. This new revised edition includes three new chapters and an expanded annotated bibliography in which Guroian interprets such stories as Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling, the Grimms' Cinderella, and John Ruskin's The King of the Golden River.