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In the second segment, Dr. Regis Martin delivers one of the meditations that he originally wrote and preached to a monastery of Cistercian monks. Those thirteen short conferences are gathered together into The Beggar’s Banquet: A Personal Retreat on Christ, His Mother, the Spiritual Life, and the Saints. In this essay, “The Best of Times and the Worst of Times,” he reflects on the challenges that the Church faces in our time and puts them in perspective of the early Church and of the Gospel.