Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness

A double book birthday!

Today’s the day!

I’m really excited for all of you to get your hands on Finding Peace Here and Now: How Ignatian Spirituality Leads Us to Healing and Wholeness. The invitation to and challenge of peace felt timely when I began work on this project two years ago; it feels even more so today.

Let me tell you a bit about this book’s journey.

This book was born out of my undergraduate work in international studies at Fairfield University, cultivated by my peacebuilding colleagues at Catholic Relief Services and now given a spiritual language through my work at the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States. I truly believe that Ignatian spirituality holds tools that can help our world heal, challenging us to seek out and reverence God in all people and all places—and in so doing, begin the work of peace.

I am not a professional peacebuilder or activist. Nor am I an academic or theologian. But I don’t think that matters. My own prayer has reminded me time and again that we are all called to the work of peace in our own places, in our way, in our own relationships. What begins in the deepest recesses of ourselves bubbles up and over and necessarily spills out into our wide world. Doing the work of peace starts here, now, in each of us—but it does not and can not end there.

In many ways, Finding Peace Here and Now is a sequel to my first book, Cannonball Moments: Telling Your Story, Deepening Your Faith (Loyola Press, 2022). In that book, I reflected on the importance of finding God at work in the stories of our lives and those of others. To engage that work of storytelling seriously demands that we also engage the work of peace; it demands a wrestling with uncomfortable truths and reconciling ourselves to them. It means discovering the potential that our small acts can play on a global scale.

I hope you enjoy Finding Peace Here and Now. And if you do, I hope you’ll leave a 5-star review! I hope you also share it with others—students, parishioners, friends and followers.

Let us together pray for peace in our lives and in our world.

Wanna know more? Click here to read an excerpt over at Jesuits.org.

Oh! And if that wasn’t enough, today is the pub day for the children’s book,

Shannon K. Evans

and I wrote, Our Mother Too: Mary Embraces the World. Check it out!