Founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus remains the largest and most controversial religious order of men in Catholicism. Since the 1960s, however, Jesuits in the United States have lost more than half of their members, and they have experienced a massive upheaval in what they believe and how they work and live. In this groundbreaking book, Peter McDonough and Eugene C. Bianchi draw on interviews and statements gathered from more than four hundred Jesuits and former Jesuits to provide an intimate look at turmoil among Catholicism's legendary best-and-brightest.
Priests...

Archbishop Mark Doyle, a church reformer and a martial arts expert, falls wildly in love with his therapist, Miriam Faberini. Their love affair would be enough to complicate a celibate bishop's life, but his troubles multiply when two of his priests are murdered. A clandestine Catholic group claims responsibility for both killings, and vows to eliminate Doyle as a symbol of corrupt liberalism. The Vatican demands that Doyle account for damaging allegations against him. His shadowy nemesis, a priest defrocked for sexually abusing teenage boys, dogs the Archbishop's every step. His story...

Description: This memoir invites readers to explore stages of their own spiritual journey. Bianchi graphically describes his path from an Italian immigrant family on the West Coast, through twenty years as a Jesuit, to being a professor of religious studies at Emory University. As he develops a more this-worldly inner life, Bianchi struggles with church teachings about Christ, sexuality, and authority. He candidly reveals how failed marriages gave him a humbler grasp of meeting the transcendent in everyday problems. He embraces a contemplative spirituality that links Buddhist and Taoist...

Bianchi's wide-ranging book draws together insights from the social sciences, the humanities, and religion to establish a holistic framework for a spirituality of aging. He argues that middle life and late adulthood present opportunities for turning inward for a deeper contemplative life within the context of active, worldly endeavors. This can also augur a reform of social relationships--beyond individual development alone--toward the creation of a more cooperative, just society. In this way, physical decline is countered by a spiritual ascent. He summons aging persons, fortified with...