I am excited to announce that my latest book, Holiness for Everyone, has just been released! Yesterday I received a box full of the book (an author’s most joyous moment), and am shipping them out to all who have ordered them this week. What’s that? You haven’t ordered a copy yet? Well, waste no time and get to it.

In case you are hestitating, asking yourself, “Will this book help me?” and “Am I really included in ‘Everyone’?”, let me give you a few points to consider.

First, let me say what this book is NOT about:

• It is not a biography of St. Josemaría Escrivá.
• It is not a book about Opus Dei.
• It is not a book about how holy I am (as that would be quite a tall tale).
• It is not a history of how people have become holy.

So, what is this book about? I’m glad you asked:

• It is a book about how YOU can become holy.
• It is a book which helps resolve the tension between our “church life” and our “secular life,” and how both can be used to draw us closer to God.
• It is a book for literally everybody – businessman, stay-at-home mom, construction worker, etc. Every life situation can be a means to holiness.
• Since I am not holy, it is a book which uses the proven guidance of a canonized saint to help you develop a practical plan to achieve holiness.
• It is a book which Scott Hahn has called “wonderful.”

In a nutshell, Holiness for Everyone is a guide that takes you step-by-step through a practical means for becoming exactly what God wants you to be: a Saint!

If you are still not convinced, feel free to download the Introduction and Chapter 1 to get a taste for the book.

Order now!

EWTN has posted my interview on The Journey Home to YouTube. Contrary to the thumbnail used, I didn’t take a quick nap during the show:

I’ll be on Deep in Scripture on EWTN radio at 2pm EST today. We will be discussing Acts 8:26-40. I believe a video stream will also be available on their website. Be sure to tune in!

On Monday, April 23rd I’ll be the guest on EWTN’s The Journey Home. The show airs at 8pm EST and streams live on EWTN.com. As is usual for that show, I’ll be discussing my conversion to Catholicism.

If you just can’t wait, though, below is a talk I recently gave to a Men’s Conference on Catholic Evangelization. In this talk, I use the story of my own conversion to bring out principles for successful evangelization. Interestingly, I gave this talk on February 25, 2012, which was the 20th anniversary of the day I decided to convert!

A couple of updates on the book front:

My first book, Who is Jesus Christ? Unlocking the Mystery in the Gospel of Matthew, is now available on the Kindle! Purchase the Kindle version here.

My latest book, Holiness for Everyone, was supposed to be published in early March, but it has been delayed. Fortunately, it is now at the printer and so it should be available in late April.

Have a blessed Holy Week!

Check out this commercial our Diocese will be running on prime-time TV this Lent to promote the Sacrament of Confession:

My conversion story is currently featured on Why I’m Catholic. If you look closely enough, you’ll also find some long-lost pictures of me from my high school and college days!

I’m sure you all are thinking, “Eric isn’t blogging much anymore, so how can I get my fix of his writing?” Well, if you are a fan of delayed gratification (and who isn’t?), you can now pre-order my next book, Holiness for Everyone, and it will be shipped to you in just a few short months (i.e. March 2012). You can buy it either from me (a signed copy) or from Amazon (boring non-signed copy).

What is this book about? I’m glad you asked! From the back cover:

God intends nothing less than sainthood for you!

The early Church held that all believers could achieve holiness. Over time this conviction was largely forgotten. Sainthood seemed to be an honor only intended for a select few among the priests and religious.

Eric Sammons tells how twentieth century Spanish priest—and canonized saint—Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, recovered the message of the universal call to holiness.

Declared “the saint of ordinary life” by Pope John Paul II, St. Josemaría developed a spirituality directed toward the sanctity of every man and woman. His legacy is the belief that each of us can, by God’s grace, achieve holiness through the course of our ordinary life and work.

The heart of Sammons’ practical guide to the spiritual life is a detailed examination of the steps in St. Josemaría’s thoughtful plan for building a saintly life in spite of your hectic work and home life – in a world filled with distractions and temptations.

Strive for your own personal holiness as you implement your daily plan to:

• Be a Contemplative in the Midst of a Busy World
• Live a Life of Prayer
• Recognize the Presence of God
• Make a Plan of Life
• Make Your Work a Way to Heaven

Holiness for Everyone! will inspire you as it sets your feet on the path to sainthood.

“Eric Sammons shows that St. Josemaría has recovered the most powerful truth of classic Christianity and restated it in a way that is compelling for men and women of our time.”
From the Foreword by Scott Hahn

Pre-order your copy now!

In the December 11th edition of OSV Newsweekly, I wrote an article on welcoming estranged Catholic back to the Church:

As Christmas approaches, there is one thing we can be as sure of seeing as Santa Claus and incessant ads for holiday deals: full Catholic churches. As predictable as the swallows returning to San Juan Capistrano, Catholics of all stripes return to their parish every Christmas, many visiting for the first time since the previous Easter. The Catholics in attendance at a typical Christmas Mass run the gamut from daily Mass communicants to irregularly attending families to those who are estranged from the Church but come out of familial obligation.

As practicing Catholics, what can we and our parishes do to reach out to those who are estranged from or perhaps just uninterested in the Catholic Church? While this question has many possible answers, it will be helpful to review some basic principles that should form the foundation of any outreach to lapsed Catholics.

Continue reading…

Also, be sure to read the sidebar for the article titled “The Mercy of God” – it is a great story of God’s great love for us!

In the latest issue of OSV Newsweekly, I examine the adulation given to Steve Jobs and compare his life to a true modern-day saint, St. Josemaría Escrivá:

If the secular world had a way to canonize someone, then surely the recent death of Apple founder Steve Jobs would have caused a hasty completion of that process. Jobs was one of the most revered businessmen of our time, and the ubiquity of Apple’s “i”-products — the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad — made him a cultural phenomenon, too. After his death, there was such an outpouring of grief and adulation from all corners of the world that one could not help but recall the worldwide reaction to Pope John Paul II’s death six years ago.

In many ways, the cultural status Jobs attained was unrivaled. Even Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and his only true rival, does not stir up the passion and cult following that Jobs did. People joke about the “cult of Mac,” but in all seriousness the strong devotion that many people have to Apple’s products and even to Jobs personally is striking.

And, for better or worse, Jobs did change the world. Think about life just a dozen years ago: no iPods, touchscreen smartphones or tablet computers. In just a short time, Jobs was able to push his company to create multiple products that defined their categories and changed the way we interact with music and information. It is not surprising that the secular world recognized Jobs’ greatness.

Continue reading…

The latest issue of OSV Newsweekly includes an article I wrote titled, “How to Handle Awkward Conversations with Family Members.” As the holidays approach, it might be good to prepare ourselves for those inevitable situations in which our way of life conflicts with the way of life of our loved ones:

As my wife and I prepared to leave a family gathering, saying our goodbyes to everyone, one of our young nephews asked, “Well, we’ll see you tomorrow, right?” An awkward pause worthy of the TV show “The Office” followed.

The next day one of our relatives was getting married outside the Church, and we were the only family members not attending. Our extended family had come to an unspoken agreement that there would be no public debates on this topic, deciding that no discussion was better than a heated argument, but, of course, our innocent young relative had no idea of the enactment of this familial policy. We quietly mumbled something to satisfy our nephew and then beat a hasty retreat to our car.

This scene is anything but atypical in Catholic families today. Not uncommon are brothers who proudly announce their vasectomies, cousins who are practicing homosexuals, and adult children who cohabitate before marriage; almost every Catholic has some family member openly defying Church teaching in some area of his life — with no trace of shame or guilt.

Continue reading…

Today is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and October is the month of the Rosary. This is a great time to restart our devotion to the Rosary if it has been lax, or to strengthen our resolve if we have been faithfully using this powerful weapon. I wrote an article for my diocesan paper about the Rosary, so I wanted to share it here:

The rosary: its history, use and power

There is perhaps no object more distinctively Catholic than the rosary. Yet many Catholics are no longer personally familiar with this form of prayer. As such, Bishop Frank J. Dewane has called upon our Diocese to rediscover this beautiful heritage and reawaken our love for it. As we celebrate the Month of the Rosary in October, we should take this opportunity to deepen our understanding and appreciation of one of the most common prayers of the Church. Where did we get the rosary? Why do we pray it? Why do some object to the praying of the rosary, claiming that it is unbiblical or antiquated?

Continue reading…

Also, the Rosary had a powerful impact on my own conversion to the Catholic Faith, which you can read about here.

I’ll be moving to Florida next week, and the next few weeks are going to be crazy, so I don’t think I’ll be posting much here (if at all) during that time. And after I begin my new position as the Director of Evangelization for the Diocese of Venice, FL, I’m not sure what my blogging status will be – I hope to blog for the diocese, but it might be a while until I’m settled in. But whatever happens, I’ll let everyone here know.

A couple of links for your perusal in my absence:

• I often reflect on the dangers of getting consumed by today’s technology. Here is a good article about the importance of time alone, away from such technology.
• Two weeks ago I was on Radio Maria discussing my book Who is Jesus Christ? Unlocking the Mystery in the Gospel of Matthew. Here is a podcast of the interview.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput has a hard-hitting, insightful column this week on the Archdiocese of Denver website. In it, he challenges us to consider how we spend our free time: do we vegetate in front of the boob tube, or do we meditate on the divine Word of God? Our choice determines who we are:

In Muslim countries like Pakistan, many of the young men begin studying the Koran as soon as they can read. In fact, many of them learn to read using the Koran. They read and discuss the Koran every day, for hours each day, every day of the week until they know it by heart. Many of them can recite whole sections of the Koran without thinking. Little by little, like water dripping on a stone, it shapes their whole view of the world—what’s right and what’s wrong; what’s important and what’s not.

Here in America, we have a similar kind of training. It’s called television.  The typical American spends between three and seven hours a day watching TV and sees well over 2 million commercials in the course of a lifetime.

That’s a form of education. And most of what we see on TV teaches us that buying a lot of products makes us happy; that young is good and old is bad; that we should eat whatever we want but that we also need to be thin; that suffering doesn’t have any meaning; that relationships never last; that most families are dysfunctional; that authority is dangerous; and that religious people are hypocritical.

None of us lives forever. Or rather, all of us live forever, but only for a very short time in this world.  If we lose our money, we can often earn it back.  But if we misuse our time, we can never get it back.  Where we put our time shows the world what we really value and believe. What we really believe shapes our choices.  And our choices shape our eternity.

Muslims didn’t develop their admirable piety in a vacuum.  They borrowed their reverence from Jews and early Christians, who had a profound love for the written Word of God in the Old and New Testaments.  The lesson for us today is simple.  American Catholics have the one true Word of God in the Bible.  If we took just one hour of the time we waste on television every day and used it to study and pray over the Gospels, we’d be fundamentally different people, and our country and our world would be transformed.

We were made for better things than silver and gold.  We’re more than what we own or think we want.  We’re children of God bought back from slavery by the blood of God’s son.  Somebody infinitely good, willingly died to make us free.  That’s how precious we are in the eyes of God.  God loves us infinitely.  That’s the source of our faith and hope.

God’s love is not something anyone can buy.  It’s a free gift.  But it comes with consequences.  If we really believe that God raised his son from the dead in order to raise us along with him, then we need to act like it.  We need to submit our time and our actions to what we claim to believe.  A meaningful life is a life conformed to imperishable things.  And a futile life is a life that puts its time in the wrong places—into things that perish; things that lead us away from conforming our lives to Jesus Christ.

Those are the two options.  We get to choose.

TV is such an accepted part of our culture that such an article appears radical. But the truth is that we have become so enslaved to television that it is difficult to see the wisdom in Archbishop Chaput’s words. What is especially true about his article is when he says that what we do shapes who we are. Almost four years ago I got rid of my television, and it was only after that act that I realized what an impact TV had on me. It shaped me and formed me in ways I would never have imagined.

For example, recently I went to a movie at the theater and saw the inevitable commercials before the main feature. Of course some were offensive, but what struck me was how inane and devoid of any value they all were. They presented the world in a way completely at odds with reality, yet everyone simply imbibes them with little or no thought – and I would never had noticed this myself if not for the fact that I almost never see commercials anymore. This is what Archbishop Chaput means when he says that TV is a form of education – it forms how we look at the world, even when we don’t realize it.

So what do we want forming us – TV or the Word of God?

Today we celebrate the feast of St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism. St. Benedict is most famous for organizing monks into a community, thus establishing the basic form in which all Western monks have lived ever since then. But St. Benedict originally wanted to be a solitary monk – i.e. a hermit – not someone who lived in community. It was only after other men followed him that he begin to establish an order for them to live in community.

That got me thinking about the difference between solitude and community, and which is the calling which leads us closer to God.

• On the one hand, many saints, such as St. Benedict and St. John of the Cross, craved solitude so that they could be alone with God – with no distractions and nothing to keep them from intimacy in prayer. Compare that to today’s culture which inundates us with noise and constant chatter, thus preventing us from entering into real meditation and contemplation.

• On the other hand, we are to be the one Body of Christ, a community which works and prays together in order to glorify God and be with him in heaven. Catholicism does not value the “lone ranger” who pulls himself up by his own bootstraps – it sees us as a united people who pray to “Our Father”, not “My Father”. Compare that with today’s culture which glorifies individualism and preaches the doctrine of self-sufficiency.

So which is it? Are we to strive for solitude or community? Each seem to have both their strengths and their dangers. I think the solution is found in communion, which is the proper integration and ordering of solitude and communion.

Communion always begins with our union with God. No human gathering can be a true union unless it is first based in union with God. This is why the saints craved solitude, because they wanted to strengthen their communion with God. This is also why the world screams so loudly today, to distract us from this communion with a flurry of the irrelevant.

From this union with God flows communion with our fellow men. A merely human group – such as the Elks club or a political party – might have a certain value, but ultimately it is meaningless without being based in our one common Father. Those who think that they can make it to heaven on their own are just kidding themselves. We need each other, but we can only help ourselves in proportion to our own communion with God.

This need for communion is universal across all vocations. The contemplative nun might spend eight hours in personal prayer a day, and a stay-at-home mom might only get in 30 minutes in a day, but they both need to base all their work on a deep and personal union – a communion – with God. Likewise, all of their dealings with others – whether it be other nuns, their children, or those in their parish – will only be fruitful and unitive if it is based on this communion with God.

God, in His great mercy, has given us a beautiful way to strengthen both types of communion – the Eucharist, which of course we call “communion.” In the Eucharist, we are personally and directly united to our Lord in the deepest way possible in this life. And in the Eucharist, we are also mystically united with our fellow brothers and sisters who receive this great sacrament. What a great gift God has given us!

No matter our vocation, let us pray for a deep communion with God which will then lead to a deep communion with others.

St. Benedict, pray for us!