Prayer & The Sacraments. Including: The Eucharist, The Sacrament of Reconciliation

 In this first book, The Dependent God, Michael Mahony relates in a radical way (the word Dependent is not a metaphor) his understanding of the Incarnation and the Atonement, along with the journeys of two ‘containers’ which God brought about in history so as to prepare the way for God to become One of Us. The first container was the ancient Hebrew people, and the second was the evolution of human language. What began as a personal ‘little project’ by the author to articulate a particular spiritual journey which God challenged him to undertake, gradually developed into a set of books which he hopes will be of interest to others. 

 In this second book, The Great Collaboration, Michael Mahony explores the variety of ancient manuscript types which constitute the Bible, illustrating this topic by a study of 21 specific manuscripts embracing both the Old Testament (OT) and the New Testament (NT). This is followed by a comprehensive ‘Case Study’ of every piece of manuscript evidence in the NT which undergirds the historical reliability of the Resurrection of Jesus. This evidence is based upon the 1432 distinct manuscripts which underpin today’s accepted NT Greek text. The book concludes with three chapters which face the controversial topics of the inspiration, authorship, and ‘inerrancy’ of biblical texts head-on. 

 With this third volume of the collection, Soiling the Hands, Michael Mahony completes his trilogy on the Word of God with a study on the Canon of Scripture. In the process, he tackles the historically thorny subject of the relationship between the Authority of the Church and the Authority of Scripture by examining the ways in which Catholic and Evangelical scholarship have approached a topic which, the author claims, “tells us more about the Church than it does about the Scriptures.” 

 In The Jigsaw Puzzle Church Michael Mahony takes us upon a journey alongside the extraordinary variety of early Christian communities which emerged in the years immediately following the Resurrection of Jesus. During the first thirty years, AD 33-67, the Church had effectively no written New Testament Scriptures, and for the second thirty years, AD 67-100, virtually no leadership by the original Apostles. Nonetheless, these communities survived to become the Church of the 2nd Century. In this, the fourth book in the collection, the author draws heavily from seminal works by Edwin Hatch in the 19th Century and Raymond E. Brown in the 20th to identify how this came about. The insights prove to be remarkably applicable to The Church of the 21st Century. This is the fourth in a collection of seven books which are one ordinary person’s exploration of the relationship between God and the human race, centered around the revelation of Jesus Christ who became One of Us in order that humanity could, in turn, share in the life within God. 

 With Book Five of this collection, Michael Mahony introduces his Trilogy on the Eucharist. His objectives in this present volume include exposing a wider Christian audience to the Framework and Theology of the Eucharist, and to the role which the Eucharist plays in God’s plan to sustain the Church over time, not least in our present age of “The Runaway Church”. At the same time, he challenges Catholic readers to take a fresh look at the much neglected Concluding Rites of the Eucharist, claiming that the link therein between the Eucharist and the Kerygma is central to achieving the purposes of the New Evangelisation, particularly with regard to the laity’s role in such evangelisation. 

 The Eucharist is the great Act of Sustainable Covenant, and here in his sixth book, The Worship of All Nations, Michael Mahony demonstrates that the Eucharist in every age and in every place manifests a consistent theology, incorporating both in its Architecture (Shape) and in its detailed contents, certain essential characteristics of this Jesus-given act of divine worship. He does so by taking us upon a journey through a particular Eucharistic missal originating from the year 793 AD, and he shows how it parallels Eucharistic liturgies from every century right back to the sub-apostolic age, just as it is does with the Eucharist of the twenty-first century as celebrated today in Bauchi, Northern Nigeria (and in New York, Cairo, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Calcutta, Kiev, Soweto, Hobart and Reykjavik…) 

 This collection of seven books is one ordinary person’s exploration of the relationship between God and the human race, centred around the revelation of Jesus Christ who became One of Us in order that humanity could, in turn, share in the life within God.
Any person who participates daily in the Mass of the Catholic Church will, over the 2 & 3 year Lectionary cycle, hear, pray, and acclaim Scripture passages from every single book of the Bible, both OT and NT. But in addition, the length, breadth, and depth of Scripture which permeates both the Architecture of the Eucharist and the thousands of prayers expressed in its Liturgy is a topic which Michael Mahony takes up in the final book of his trilogy on the Eucharist, From Bruised Reeds to Patmos Island. In doing so, he challenges and recalibrates the term, “A Bible-believing Church,” and draws upon seminal research by Cistercian Abbot Emeritus, Fr. Denis Farkasfalvy, to explore the symbiotic relationship between the Eucharist and Scripture in a refreshingly new way, one which throws surprising light upon the provenance of NT texts.