In this engaging book, priest, poet, and professor Jose Tolentino Mendonca helps us to think about the meaning and relevance of friendship in various situations: in our personal lives, in the context of communities and believers, in social relationships. Friendship is a universal experience and represents for each individual an irreplaceable process of humanization and hope. Nevertheless, we also need wisdom, including a spiritual wisdom, which will enable us to live it more fully. "'Our friends are part of our life,' wrote Raissa Maritain. But there is more to it than that: they widen our lives, helping to make them more luminous and authentic; they offer us lightness and depth; they purify it with the truth, leaven it with humor, and insist that it is made for the future. Friends bear witness to our heart that there is always a journey to be undertaken and that no journey will be too long." From the preface "This theme is explored with a rare range of reference, a deep immersion in the Word of God, this word of friendship which never ceases to summon us on the way, but also a rich understanding of the classical roots of our own civilization, a sensitivity to poetry, too often lacking in theology, and the insights that can be welcomed from other cultures. It is a deeply civilised book, to be savored. Timothy Radcliffe, OP