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Anticipating the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Robert Blair Kaiser tells us how the Council made the bishops more human, more real, more loving. The bishops turned around and made us (and the whole Church) more human, more real, more loving. Kaiser covered the Council for Time magazine, and has published five books on the Council and the post-conciliar Church. He is one of the few still alive who was there in Rome, an unusual participant-observer at the Council. With an introduction by Remi DeRoo, retired bishop of Victoria, BC, the youngest bishop at Vatican II.

Michael's book Thank GOD for EVOLUTION and his deeply inspired message have been featured in media ranging from The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post to the National Catholic Reporter, NPR, and the BBC. He says, "The New Atheists and scriptural literalists are not the only games in town. In contrast to Richard Dawkins' God-less universe, tens of millions of us in the middle celebrate both Jesus and Darwin. For us, religious faith is strengthened by what God is revealing through science." Endorsed by 6 Nobel Prize-winning scientists and religious leaders across the spectrum, THANK GOD FOR EVOLUTION offers the missing link in the debate over Darwin vs. Design—a sacred view of evolution that is "beyond biology or belief." Dowd, an ordained Christian minister and former young-earth creationist, now proclaims a gospel billions of years old and embraces evolution as theology, not just theory. "Creation and evolution are one and the same," explains Dowd. "Science and religion go hand in hand. One without the other leaves humanity lost in the literature, searching in vain for answers to post-modern problems in ancient religious texts written when people believed the world was flat. Only by looking through evolutionary eyes can we see our way out of the current global integrity crisis that is destroying economies and ecosystems around the world.”

Sister Helen Prejean has been instrumental in sparking a national dialogue on the death penalty and helping to shape the Catholic Church's newly vigorous opposition to state executions. She considers herself a southern storyteller and she travels around the world giving talks about her ministry. In 1984, Sister Helen, a member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, realizing that being on the side of poor people is an essential part of the Gospel, moved into the St. Thomas Housing Project in New Orleans.There, she was asked to correspond with a death row inmate, Patrick Sonnier, at Angola. She agreed and became his spiritual adviser. After witnessing his execution, she wrote a book about the experience. The result was "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States." The book became a movie, an opera and a play. Since "Dead Man Walking," Sister Helen has divided her time between educating citizens about the death penalty and counseling individual death row prisoners.

"Matthew Fox might well be the most creative, the most comprehensive, surely the most challenging religious-spiritual teacher in America . He has the scholarship, the imagination, the courage, the writing skill to fulfill this role at a time when the more official Christian theological traditions are having difficulty in establishing any vital contact with either the spiritual possibilities of the present or with their own most creative spiritual traditions of the past.He has, it seems, created a new mythic context for leading us out of our contemporary religious and spiritual confusion into a new clarity of mind and peace of soul, by affirming rather than abandoning any of our traditional beliefs." Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work, The Dream of the Earth and The Universe Story

Who was Mary Magdalene? Could she have been the wife and beloved of Jesus? What became of her after the Crucifixion? Why was her story suppressed by the Church Fathers and why must we now retrieve it? With an eye to the "Easter Mysteries" celebrated at the Spriing equinox, Margaret Starbird, who has published seven books on Mary Magdalene and continues to do Magdalene research, will examine the sacred partnership revealed at the very heart of the Christian faith. Reclaiming this ancient mystery corrects a tragic "design flaw" in Christian doctrine-the loss of the Holy Bride. Reclaiming Mary Magdalene as "Bride" absolves the Church of a need for a celibate priesthood. This "new story" of Mary Magdalene provides us with a model for our own journey with Christ.