With God in Russia

Author: Walter Ciszek
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 168149633X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Book Description
Father Walter Ciszek, S.J., author of the best-selling He Leadeth Me, tells here the gripping, astounding story of his twenty-three years in Russian prison camps in Siberia, how he was falsely imprisoned as an "American spy", the incredible rigors of daily life as a prisoner, and his extraordinary faith in God and commitment to his priestly vows and vocation. He said Mass under cover, in constant danger of death. He heard confession of hundreds who could have betrayed him; he aided spiritually many who could have gained by exposing him. This is a remarkable story of personal experience. It would be difficult to write fiction that could honestly portray the heroic patience, endurance, fortitude and complete trust in God lived by Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J.

He Leadeth Me

Author: Walter J. Ciszek
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780898705461
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Captured by the Russian army during World War II and convicted of being a "Vatican spy", American Jesuit Father Walter J. Ciszek spent some 23 agonizing years in Soviet prisons and the labor camps of Siberia. He here recalls how it was only through an utter reliance on God's will that he managed to endure. He tells of the courage he found in prayer - a courage that eased the loneliness, the pain, the frustrations, the anguish, the fears, the despair. For, as Ciszek relates, the solace of spiritual contemplation gave him an inner serenity upon which he was able to draw amid the "arrogance of evil" that surrounded him. Learning to accept even the inhuman work of toiling in the infamous Siberian gulags as a labor pleasing to God, he was able to turn the adverse forces of circumstance into a source of positive value and a means of drawing closer to the compassionate and never-forsaking Divine Spirit.

I Found God in Soviet Russia

Author: John H. Noble
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1839741058
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 211

Book Description
I Found God in Soviet Russia, first published in 1959, is a profoundly moving account of author John Noble's religious epiphany while confined in a brutal Soviet prison following World War II. The book also recounts Noble's harrowing survival of the massive Allied fire-bombing of Dresden, where he and his family took shelter in the cellar of their home (which was partially destroyed during the raid). Following World War II, Noble, along with his father, were arrested in East Germany and held in several prison camps in Germany including the infamous Nazi-era Buchenwald. Noble is eventually transferred to Vorkuta in far northern Russia where he works in a coal mine. Sustained by his faith and devotion to God, Noble recounts his experiences, stories of his captors and fellow inmates, and the deep faith shown by many of the other prisoners. Of special note is a chapter devoted to three nuns who, as punishment for refusing to work, were placed outdoors in sub-zero weather in only lightweight-clothing. Miraculously, the nuns came through the ordeal without frostbite and were thereafter excused from work details. Following an imprisonment of nearly 10 years, Noble was eventually released to the West, and would go on to lecture about his experiences for the remainder of his life. I Found God in Soviet Russia complements the author's other book entitled I Was a Slave in Russia, which details the day-to-day life in the Soviet gulag.

With God in Russia

Author: Walter J. Ciszek
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006264193X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
Republished for a new century and featuring an afterword by Father James Martin, SJ, the classic memoir of an American-born Jesuit priest imprisoned for fifteen years in a Soviet gulag during the height of the Cold War—a poignant and spiritually uplifting story of extraordinary faith and fortitude as indelible as Unbroken. Foreword by Daniel L. Flaherty. While ministering in Eastern Europe during World War II, Polish-American priest Walter Ciszek, S.J., was arrested by the NKVD, the Russian secret police, shortly after the war ended. Accused of being an American spy and charged with "agitation with intent to subvert," he was held in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison for five years. The Catholic priest was then sentenced without trial to ten more years of hard labor and transported to Siberia, where he would become a prisoner within the forced labor camp system made famous in Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize—winning book The Gulag Archipelago. In With God in Russia, Ciszek reflects on his daily life as a prisoner, the labor he endured while working in the mines and on construction gangs, his unwavering faith in God, and his firm devotion to his vows and vocation. Enduring brutal conditions, Ciszek risked his life to offer spiritual guidance to fellow prisoners who could easily have exposed him for their own gains. He chronicles these experiences with grace, humility, and candor, from his secret work leading mass and hearing confessions within the prison grounds, to his participation in a major gulag uprising, to his own "resurrection"—his eventual release in a prisoner exchange in October 1963 which astonished all who had feared he was dead. Powerful and inspirational, With God in Russia captures the heroic patience, endurance, and religious conviction of a man whose life embodied the Christian ideals that sustained him.

Surrender

Author: Seamus Dockery
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1477146660
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 56

Book Description
SURRENDER - JESUIT PRIEST/SOVIET PRISONER SURRENDER is the true story of the vocation of an American Jesuit priest, accused by the Soviet era K.G.B. of being a Vatican spy, who survived fifteen years of hard labor in Siberian prison camps. Father Walter Ciszek not only survived but learned to surrender to God's Providence. SURRENDER is a narrative digest based entirely on Father Ciszek's two books: With God in Russia, (1964), published one year after his release from Russia, and his second book, He Leadeth Me, (1973), published nine years later. SURRENDER interweaves these two books and telescopes the most dramatic events of Father Ciszek's vocation and steadfast fidelity to that calling through the crucible of unjust imprisonment following the end of World War II. Hopefully, through the relative brevity of SURRENDER, the major chords of Father Ciszek's heroic embrace of God's Providence in the most extreme conditions will resonate. The reason why Father Ciszek's cause for Canonization, the process of declaration of Sainthood in the Roman Catholic Church, is currently proceeding should be abundantly evident. SURRENDER describes not the triumph of human will-power but the freedom of total dependence on God. The paradox of power to love is only born in the powerlessness of surrender of self-will to God's Providence.

"HIV is God's Blessing"

Author: Jarrett Zigon
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520267648
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Book Description
"Zigon's ethnography provides a fascinating window onto the concrete processes through which people undergoing rehabilitation for drug addiction are remade as moral persons. This book adeptly combines ethnographically-based descriptions with forays into theology and Soviet history to deliver a compelling account of self-transformation in a contemporary Russian Orthodox milieu."—Eugene Raikhel, University of Chicago "Over the last decade, anthropologists have increasingly come to study the role of morality in shaping the course of social life. Within anthropological debates around morality, Zigon has been developing one of the most creative and challenging positions. In this book, he pushes his project to a whole new level, working it out carefully through an important ethnographic case. Those interested in morality in any field will want to read this striking exemplification of the way an anthropology of morality can help us think about social life in new ways."—Joel Robbins, University of California, San Diego

God, Tsar, and People

Author: Daniel B. Rowland
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501752103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
God, Tsar, and People brings together in one volume essays written over a period of fifty years, using a wide variety of evidence—texts, icons, architecture, and ritual—to reveal how early modern Russians (1450–1700) imagined their rapidly changing political world. This volume presents a more nuanced picture of Russian political thought during the two centuries before Peter the Great came to power than is typically available. The state was expanding at a dizzying rate, and atop Russia's traditional political structure sat a ruler who supposedly reflected God's will. The problem facing Russians was that actual rulers seldom—or never—exhibited the required perfection. Daniel Rowland argues that this contradictory set of ideas was far less autocratic in both theory and practice than modern stereotypes would have us believe. In comparing and contrasting Russian history with that of Western European states, Rowland is also questioning the notion that Russia has always been, and always viewed itself as, an authoritarian country. God, Tsar, and People explores how the Russian state in this period kept its vast lands and diverse subjects united in a common view of a Christian polity, defending its long frontier against powerful enemies from the East and from the West.

The Seventh-Day Ox, and Other Miracle Stories from Russia

Author: Bradley Booth
Publisher: Review and Herald Pub Assoc
ISBN: 0828025177
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 192

Book Description

Between God and Tsar

Author: Isolde Thyret
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 275

Book Description
Challenging traditional interpretations of the roles of royal women in patriarchal Muscovite society, Between God and Tsar opens a new approach to understanding medieval Russia. Drawing upon a wide range of sources in anthropology, sociology, art history, and literature, it sheds light on the lives of the tsaritsy, about which little has been known, and on the culture surrounding them. This pioneering study demonstrates that the wives of the early tsars played complex roles in government, especially during times of crisis, and shows how religious culture perpetuated the expressions of their legitimacy as female rulers. Muscovite Russia's values were sanctioned by religion, and it is through religious images that the royal women's claims to rulership can be seen most clearly. Thyrêt explores Orthodox iconography--such as that of the Golden Palace of the Tsaritsy, which proclaims Irina Godunova's right to act as an independent ruler--and shows how the Muscovite court used gendered images to reveal the spiritual power of female rulers. Myths and legends adapted from one generation to another also underscore royal wives' claim to authority based on their great spiritual power. Illuminating medieval Russia's art, literature, and culture, Between God and Tsar opens new ways to understand the tsaritsy. Students of Russian history have often wondered how and why, under the Romanovs, female rulers governed so often. Thyrêt's broadly researched study provides an answer. Between God and Tsar offers stimulating insights into the power of Russia's royal women and how it was manifest in Muscovite culture.

To Russia, with God's Love

Author: Mark Shaner
Publisher: 220 Desafio
ISBN: 9780991635856
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
A group of high school students travels to a city in the USSR off-limits to American during the Cold War. To their surprise, they encounter a warm welcome and probing questions--not just about US culture, education and politics--but about God and the Bible. Despite 70 years of enforced atheism, Russians are keenly interested to know Jesus.