Greg & Lisa Popcak
Greg & Lisa Popcak
"You are gods."
Blasphemy? No, those mysterious words, spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of John and alluded to in Psalm 82, point to a holy longing deep in our hearts that tells each of us that we were created for more.
“Imagine that you were to wake up tomorrow to discover that, by some miracle, you had become a god overnight,” writes Dr. Gregory Popcak. “Not THE God—omnipresent, all-knowing, all-powerful—but a god in the classic sense. That is to say, you woke to find that you were perfect, immortal, utterly confident in who you are, where you were going in life, and how you were going to get there. It might seem ridiculous to consider at first, but allow yourself to imagine this truly miraculous transformation. What would it be like to live without fear? How would it feel to be completely at peace with yourself and the people in your life? Imagine what it would be like to be able to resolve—once and for all—the tension that currently exists between all your competing feelings, impulses, desires, and demands. What would change in your life as a result of your having become that sort of divinely actualized person?”
Bold questions are in need of bold answers. And in Broken Gods, a work that is both practical and inspirational, Dr. Greg explores what our deepest desires--and even our darkest desires-- tell us about our ultimate destiny and reveals a commonsense approach to fulfilling our true purpose in life.
Common wisdom portrays sex and church to be at odds, yet studies show that Catholics have better sex, and more often. This witty, frank, and refreshingly orthodox book draws from the beautiful truths of Catholic teaching to show people of all faiths about rich and satisfying sexuality. Hailed by Christians across the spectrum from Christopher West and Janet E. Smith to John L. Allen, Jr., Holy Sex! includes dozens of questionnaires, quizzes, and valuable lessons from real-life stories.
"From this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do you part."
That all sounds great, we say, but is a "for better, forever" marriage even really possible? Especially today, in a world where even the definition of "marriage" is unclear.
In this new, revised and expanded edition of the best-selling book For Better...FOREVER, Dr. Greg and his wife Lisa Popcak answer the question with a resounding "yes." It IS possible, not just in theory, but in your own life, and your own marriage - whether it has just begun, or you've been married for years.
Not a "marriage master"? You can learn how to become one.
Don't know what a "for better FOREVER marriage looks like? It could be yours.
Wonder how you got "here" and where to go now? This book will show you the hidden pathway to happily ever after.
Have you "lost that lovin' feelin?" The road to intimacy is closer than you think.
For Better...FOREVER has helped couples all over the world discover the joy, intimacy, and satisfaction that can be achieved by integrating cutting-edge psychology with a clear articulation of the Catholic vision of love and marriage.
Get started on your own For Better...FOREVER marriage today.
Believe it or not, the Catholic family isn’t primarily a human institution. It’s a divine one. By uniting with the sacramental life of the Church, your common, ordinary, crazy family becomes something sacred, a “domestic church."
Family therapist and parent Gregory Popcak and his wife, Lisa, are back with Parenting Your Kids with Grace. Building on their best-selling book Parenting with Grace, first published twenty years ago, this new volume draws on the same parenting principles and provides up-to-date research to guide parents through each stage of child development from birth to age ten.
Practical, faithful, and humorous, Parenting Your Kids with Grace addresses four key questions:
Are Catholic families called to be different from other families in the way we relate to one another in the home? If so, how?
What does an authentic, family-based approach to Catholic spirituality look like in practice?
What can the latest research tell us about creating a faithful home and raising faithful kids?
How can Catholic families be outposts of evangelization and positive social change?
By checking our basic assumptions about parenting against both the Church’s vision and what science can teach about living out that vision in healthy ways, we can discover God’s plan for parenting healthy, godly kids.
Being a parent of adolescents is tough work. Trying to raise faithful teens and tweens can seem like an impossible mission. Today’s Catholic parents need access to the best tools and most up-to-date research to help them fully cooperate with God’s grace.
That’s what Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak seek to help you do in Parenting Your Teens and Tweens with Grace. Building on their best-selling book Parenting with Grace, first published twenty years ago, this new volume draws on the same parenting principles and provides up-to-date research to guide parents on how to raise preteens and teenagers with grace and joy.
Practical, faithful, and humorous, Parenting Your Teens and Tweens with Grace will help you:
Discover proven strategies for raising happy, faithful, loving preteens and teens
Overcome common parenting problems from ages 11 to 18
Create an uncommonly close, joyful family life
Experience your faith as the source of the warmth in your home
You can experience family life as the key to becoming the person God created you to be — and help your teens do the same! By integrating the Church’s vision for family life with what science can teach about living out that vision in healthy ways, you can feel confident that you have what it takes to raise great, godly teens and tweens.
About the Authors
Dr. Greg and Lisa Popcak are the authors of over twenty books and the hosts of More2Life, a call-in advice program airing weekdays on EWTN and SiriusXM 130. Together they direct CatholicCounselors.com, a Catholic tele-counseling practice serving couples, families, and individuals around the world. In collaboration with Holy Cross Family Ministries, Dr. Greg and Lisa founded the Peyton Institute for Domestic Church Life, which promotes family spirituality and family well-being through professional training and original research. The Popcaks are members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ National Advisory Board for Marriage and Family Ministry.
Dispensing candid, practical, and ever-faithful advice, this fully revised and updated resource provides individuals and families with clear tips and strategies for finding God’s direction when life takes unforeseen turns. With his familiar, assured voice, acclaimed counselor Dr. Gregory Popcak shares the real-life accounts of Christians who endured devastating financial, emotional, and professional setbacks in framing his F.A.I.T.H.-based, systematic plan for surviving hard times and returning to the light. With quizzes, directed reflection, and inspiring case studies, Christians and faith-seekers alike will learn how F.A.I.T.H.—Following the rules for healthy discernment, Acting even when in doubt, Investigating the causes of anxiety, Taking others into account, and Holding on through adversity—is the means toward hearing God’s voice once again.
In BeDADitudes, internationally known marriage and family expert Greg Popcak draws on more than twenty years as a counselor as well as his own experience as a father to show how the Beatitudes can be viewed as a practical guide to understanding the love of God and applying that love to being a better father.
In the first book to uniquely focus on the Beatitudes and fatherhood, Greg Popcak helps you stop focusing on yourself and instead focus on God, learning how to be the father God wants you to be by becoming a servant leader in your home.
As a father of three children, Popcak realized that Jesus’ call to be humble in the first Beatitude—Blessed are the poor in spirit—stands in direct opposition to what modern men learn growing up. Instead, they are taught they should live a life of unbroken success, defined by promotions at work and beautiful wives and honor students at home.
The Catholic author, speaker, counselor, and radio host will show that when you practice meekness, you will connect with your family by asking them questions and listening closely to their responses. By practicing mercy, you come to know your own sins, the difficulties that lie on the path to sainthood, and how your family needs to hear about God’s grace in their lives.
In BeDADitudes, you discover the profound love of God found in the Beatitudes and understand how that love can transform you into being an awesome dad.
Greg and Lisa Popcak—popular Catholic authors, radio hosts, and marriage and family experts—present this unique guide to caring for one’s baby, self, marriage, and spiritual life in the first three years of parenthood.
In Then Comes Baby: The Catholic Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the First Three Years of Parenthood, Greg and Lisa Popcak lend readers the benefit of their twenty-five years’ experience in parenting and marriage and family counseling to help them navigate the earliest years of parenthood. They recommend rituals, routines, and tips on how to manage feeding, fatigue, and finances and how also to prioritize marital bonding and faith life, suggesting that setting the pattern early will pay dividends later. The Popcaks coach Catholic couples as they become first-time parents as they adjust to their new identities and help them face the inevitable challenges of parenthood with ideas for bonding with babies and getting sufficient sleep and nutrition—all while seeing these everyday experiences through the lens of Catholic teaching on the purpose of family life.
God wants to fill your marriage with the love that comes from his very own heart. Praying for (and with) Your Spouse will show you how to let God take every part of your relationship to the next level from living each day with your joys and struggles to working out your decisions and disagreements to setting aside time for love and romance. Prayer, in marriage, is more than checking off a box. It is time spent in the presence of the Author of love himself. Every time we pray for and with our spouse, God gives us greater insight into what it takes to love each other better more deeply, more honestly, more authentically, and more passionately. Every time we pray for and with our spouse, we open our hearts to a love that can satisfy our deepest longings and allow our marriage to be a light to the world. This book will help you discover the simple steps you can take to invite God to renew and refresh your love for one another. As you pray together and for one another, you'll find out how much joy God has in store for you and your spouse in this life and in the next!
Nationally syndicated radio hosts and international family life speakers Greg and Lisa Popcak combine decades of counseling, the latest findings in marriage research, twenty-three years of marriage, and the wisdom of Catholic teaching to offer newlyweds a master plan for creating a strong bond in the first five years of marriage.
The Talk. It's one of the most daunting prospects parents face. Communicating the richness of Catholic teaching on sexuality in a faithful and effective way can be an overwhelming responsibility. But does it have to be so?
In this thoroughly revised version of Beyond the Birds and the Bees, Greg and Lisa Popcak empower you with the tools needed to move well beyond "The Talk" by offering a comprehensive guide to raising sexually whole and holy children. Using the riches of St. John Paul II's Theology of the Body, the Popcaks help you safely navigate your children from infancy through the teenage years and beyond.
This book answers the questions parents may have, including:
What lessons must my children learn at each stage to develop a healthy Christian sexuality?
How can I have age-appropriate conversations about sensitive issues with my children?
How can I teach my children what it takes to be a true Catholic man or woman?
How can I help my children have healthy, Christian dating relationships?
Research shows again and again that when families openly live and share their faith together, their marriages are stronger, children and parents get along better, and children are less likely to succumb to drugs, alcohol, promiscuity, or negative peer pressure.
In this book, experienced psychotherapists Greg and Lisa Popcak show how you can transform your family into a joyful place where each member experiences life as a gift from God.
From tapping into the rich beauty of Catholic traditions to mustering the motivation needed to deepen your spiritual life, you discover the practical, positive, and tangible difference our faith can make in your family life.
You'll also learn . . .
The five marks of a Catholic family. Are you missing the most important?
How to keep rituals fresh and alive rather than boring and routine.
The four characteristics of teaching your children to have the heart of a disciple.
The one thing children need to catch their faith on fire.
How to shepherd your kids through the seven stages of faith.
Six steps to helping kids develop individual prayer time
How to discern your family's charism and what to do with it.
How to foster your children's sense of mission.
God has put you and your spouse together for a reason and it's not to argue. You are bonded together to cultivate in each other those virtues that lead to sanctification. That's why this book isn't just about saving your marriage it's about transforming it into a joyful, loving relationship.
In these pages, acclaimed author and psychotherapist Gregory Popcak shows you how to heal the hurt in your marriage and develop the crucial habits necessary to resolve conflicts, renew the love you once had, and discover the passion you always wanted.
Dr. Popcak's clinical experience and recent research show that the difference between happy and unhappy marriages lays in the habits both good and bad that are practiced in the home. Here you'll discover the simple steps needed to root out behavior that leaves you resentful and demoralized, and to begin practicing positive habits that facilitate mutual respect and cultivate admiration.
Even if you feel lonely and abandoned in your marriage, Dr. Popcak offers sensible ways you can work alone at resolving conflict, repairing damage, building rapport, and maintaining intimacy. Because of the graces given to husbands and wives, you have tremendous untapped power to be a catalyst for change even if your spouse isn’t participating.
By following the wise advice in How to Heal Your Marriage, you'll take the guesswork out of building a stable, healthy marriage. You'll also learn:
Eight marriage-friendly habits that couples in healthy relationships exhibit
How to identify those areas of your marriage that require the most attention
What to do when you feel your spouse is out to get you
Simple ways to integrate prayer into the life of your marriage
How to make God part of healing your marriage
How your mind handles feelings and emotions and what you can do about it
Tips for keeping your conversations focused on solutions instead of emotions
How to see each of your spouse's faults as an opportunity for you to grow in holiness
Anxiety. It's practically an epidemic. Twenty percent of Americans suffer from anxiety disorders, and millions more wrestle with worry and stress on a daily basis. For us as Christians, all that worry gets mixed up with a lot of guilt. After all, Scripture tells us, "Have no anxiety at all" (Phil 4:6).
How can we stop worrying and start living an anxiety-free life? As you'll learn in Unworried: A Life Without Anxiety, the answer isn't "just pray more" or "just read more Scripture" or, worst of all, "just stop worrying." If we learn to respect how God made us, we can build new habits of thinking, communicating, and acting that will help set us free from worry.
How do you turn your home into a place where saints are made? By practicing the “little way” of family life at home, every day.
St. Therese of Lisieux’s “little way” shows us that we can achieve holiness by performing even the smallest acts with great love. For the family, every day is made up of many, many small acts – feeding hungry tummies, comforting a feverish child, getting a squirmy toddler dressed for mass – and in each one we have the opportunity to practice mercy and be a living example of how to love and follow God.
The Corporal Works of Mommy (And Daddy Too) gives parents practical suggestions, tips, and ideas for ways to practice the corporal works of mercy in the home, and reflection questions for delving deeper into the topics. Each chapter also includes a prayer for God’s guidance in our pursuit of the “little way” of the family. Let God set your family ablaze with his love when you practice The Corporal Works of Mommy (And Daddy Too).