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This edited collection is the first to gather in one volume the most relevant addresses, speeches, and homilies of His Holiness, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI to seminarians and consecrated men and women into a single volume for the English-speaking world.

Until recently theologians have been in a deep slumber about the subject of vocations. This volume represents one of the first awakenings in the theological community to this subject. The ten contributors, all theologians at Loyola University Chicago, present original essays that explore vocations, or callings.

Adele Wiseman was a seminal figure in Canadian letters. Always independent and wilful, she charted her own literary career, based on her unfailing belief in her artistic vision. In The Force of Vocation, the first book on Wiseman's writing life, Ruth Panofsky presents Wiseman as a writer who doggedly and ambitiously perfected her craft, sought a wide audience for her work, and refused to compromise her work for marketability.Based on previously unpublished archival material and personal interviews with publishers, editors, and writers, The Force of Vocation charts Wiseman's career from her internationally acclaimed first novel, The Sacrifice, through her near career-ending decisions to move into drama and non-fiction, to her many years as a dedicated mentor to other writers. In the process, Panofsky presents a remarkable and compelling story of the intricate negotiations and complex relationships that exist among authors, editors, and publishers.

Vocation to Virtue seeks to answer a perennial difficulty in the Catholic theology of marriage: how do the practice and bond of marriage lead to Christian perfection in spouses and their children? If the Second Vatican Council is correct in saying that all in the church are called to Christian perfection, we need an account of how those consecrated in the sacrament of marriage can fulfill that vocation. If the perfection of charity consists in Christ himself, then couples must imitate Christ. But how? If Christ is the poor, chaste, and obedient bridegroom of the church, then spouses achieve holiness inasmuch as they participate in Christ's own virtues: poverty, chastity, and obedience. The thesis is that the language of the evangelical virtues (poverty, chastity, and obedience), a rule of life, and robust preparation (maybe a novitiate) belongs as properly to marriage as to consecrated religious life. Both states are specifications of a common baptismal consecration to Christ himself. Lasnoski seeks to establish this fact and constructively apply this language to conjugal life. The book begins by explaining our marriage crisis and theological paradigms for speaking about Christian marriage as "relationship" or as "practice," and considers modern scholarly attempts to relate conjugal life and consecrated religious life. The book then offers a theological groundwork in Christ and the Trinity for a deeper, noncompetitive relationship between the consecrated religious life and married life. It offers an Augustinian account of the relationship between marriage and consecrated life, and develops the ecclesial connection between the states with recourse to John's Gospel, which sees Christian life in terms of "householding." The church's tradition has a dialogical relationship between the consecrated and married - a mutual sharing of both "monastic" and "domestic" language. The final chapter develops practices of Christian householding for conjugal life using the language of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a rule of life, and a kind of novitiate preparation.