Make Room for God: Clearing Out the Clutter
By Susan K. Rowland. St. Anthony Messenger Press (Cincinnati, 2007).130 pp., $10.95.

Love in the Little Things: Tales of Family Life
By Mike Aquilina. Servant Books (Cincinnati, 2007).127 pp., $12.95.

Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life
By Margaret Kim Peterson. Jossey-Bass (San Francisco, 2007). 173 pp., $ 21.95.

Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping
Edited by Alice Peck. Skylight Paths Publishing (Woodstock, Vt., 2007).193 pp., $19.99.

Early on in Susan K. Rowland's book, "Make Room for God: Clearing Out the Clutter," she points to a fact that almost every person living in our society can affirm: Our culture places some unfair demands on us. The external demands of career, family, social commitments and children pull against each other, ruining our interior tranquillity and peace.

While we are trying to keep up with these demands, the author asks some poignant questions for today's believer: "Do these demands coincide with what our faith tells us?" "Are they interfering with the fulfillment of the promise of our faith?"

Rowland does a wonderful job of tying the clutter of our lives to our spiritual life and offers practical steps to give priority to what really matters in our lives. She weaves various quotes from Scripture and spiritual writers with her life experience and then artfully gets a hold on the root of the problem that causes the stress or "clutter" in one's life. Each short chapter concludes with selected reflection questions and practical activities that the reader will not find burdensome.

In "Love in the Little Things: Tales of Family Life," author, husband and father Mike Aquilina shares his experience of living his Catholic faith in the providence of his everyday life. In the spirit of the Little Flower, St. Therese of Lisieux, Aquilina points to the little revelations he has experienced as a father and husband in which he has noticed the hand of God at work.

In one chapter titled "Lego Pain," he muses that "I know my fatherhood is just a dim reflection of the only true fatherhood, which belongs to God." The book offers an insight into the author's faith life but provides little direction for the reader other than the last few pages where he offers four suggestions to bring Christ into the home.

"Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life," by Margaret Kim Peterson is rooted in Scripture, theology, and spiritual and pastoral wisdom as she challenges the reader to reflect on what makes a Christian home.

Peterson's gift is pointing out and reclaiming the dignity of everyday household chores. She connects Jesus' teaching on the corporal works of mercy in Chapter 25 of Matthew with cleaning and keeping house as she writes, "But housework is all about feeding and clothing and sheltering people who, in the absence of that daily work, would otherwise be hungry and ill-clad and ill-housed."

In an age where designer magazines and television shows glorify the extravagant and opulent exterior and interior of the physical house, the author maintains that a Christian home "involves constructing and maintaining an environment in which people can flourish in ways in which God desires for people to flourish."

"Keeping House" proposes many ways we can extend the analogy of meals, home, housekeeping and food with our immediate family and expand it to our global, human society.

"Next to Godliness: Finding the Sacred in Housekeeping," edited by Alice Peck, offers an assortment of anecdotes, reflections, quotes and personal reflections concerning the tasks involved in housekeeping.

Drawing from an eclectic array of authors, poets and spiritual and religious figures, the stories and insights bring light into an often mundane subject matter. Her hope in compiling this collection of literary passages where "religion and housekeeping connect" is that the insights from many different traditions and cultures will resonate with the reader.

Whether it's a comment by Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta on showing hospitality by silently picking up a broom with a big smile and cleaning another's room, a story of a soldier calling home to hear his wife dealing with an out-of-control family dog in contrast with his own dreadful daily tasks of cleaning or a poem by Allen Ginsberg, the reader will find enough to provoke thought or a smile and to bring the realization that some things, like the chores involved in housekeeping, are indeed universal.

---CNS Allan F. Wright is the author of "Jesus in the House: Gospel Reflections on Christ's Presence in the Home" and "Silent Witnesses in the Gospels: Bible Bystanders and Their Stories."