An introduction to the practice of Christian meditation, this book offers a twelve step programme in learning meditative prayer. This classic book explores how stepping aside from the busyness of our daily lives and being still in the presence of God is the key to discovering our true selves.
This winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and listed by the New York Times as one of the best 100 non-fiction books of the century, gives timeless reflections on solitude, writing and faith amid the beautiful though sometimes brutal world of nature on the author's doorstep in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.
Theology, says Brian McLaren, is at its best when it is in conversation with the wild world that flourishes beyond our walls and outside our windows and cities. In God Unbound, McLaren follows his love of nature all the way to the Galapagos Islands, where the natural world awakens his soul in a way that organized religion cannot.
Walsingham in Norfolk is England's premier place of pilgrimage for Anglicans and Roman Catholics alike. Also known as 'England's Nazareth' its famous Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham dates back to the eleventh century. This pocket sized illustrated guide to Walsingham offers practical information for visitors and background historical material.
This title is a travelling companion to the Assisi region of Italy. It blends historical background, practical tourist information, illustrations, maps and street plans. Areas covered include: Assisi itself, Gubbio, Greccio, La Verna, Cortona and Trasimeno Lake.
The Saints' Prayer Book contains the prayers of some 150 saints, drawn from every age and from around the world.
At the age of 30, Julian of Norwich had a series of intense visions of Jesus which she recorded in what became the first book written in English by a woman. Her message remains relevant today and is strikingly apparent in this fresh and contemporary rendering of the text. An enticing read, that stimulates unique realizations about spirituality.
Includes general hymns; hymns for feasts, seasons and saints' days; office hymns for the liturgical year; an enlarged eucharistic section; responsorial psalms, and a new English folk mass setting.
Williams explores the true depths of meaning of three classic icons of Mary: the Hodegetria, the Eleousa and the Orans. He also makes contemporary sense of one of the many legends of Mary to show how all Christians can model themselves on her.
The Ascension is a key Christian doctrine that receives very little attention in the textbooks on Christian doctrine most widely used in ministerial training. There are almost no books focusing solely on this topic and this dearth also affects those who preach at the Ascension - a major feast day that concludes the Easter season - and also at the Feast of Christ the King which concludes the Christian year and which has a central focus on the Ascension. After more than twenty years of teaching ordinands and readers in training, Moira Astin provides a comprehensive and readable book that also covers the required academic ground for those in training. In straightforward language, it considers: - the Ascension in the gospels - in Paul's letters and in Hebrews and Revelation - its heavenly and earthly meanings - theological understandings over the centuries - why the Ascension matters today - its importance for understanding other key doctrines such as the incarnation and resurrection.
The Bible is a book of stories par excellence and is completely realistic about human nature. Hero, Lover, Daughter, Queen retells ten timeless biblical stories of archetypal figures, enabling readers to see themselves and help them make sense of their lives, including: Solomon - how to create your legacy The lover in the Song of Songs - what makes you beautiful? Goliath - what makes you strong? The paralytic man - finding true friendship Jezebel - what it's like to be thrown to the dogs Paul - understanding human sexuality and more. In their stories we are offered a mirror. By gazing into it and learning from their experiences we are offered a way forward in our own lives. These characters were real people who, like us, grappled with the reality of the human condition. Even when they 'called on the Lord 'and reached beyond themselves for understanding, they did so from within the messy confines of lives like ours. For that reason we can turn to them and find genuine insights and wisdom that and can help us in our own times.
Great Sacred Music, a free lunchtime concert of church music for choirs and congregations, is a regular feature of the life at witness of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Once a month, a themed programme is offered which, in addition to the music, includes stories of how the music and hymns came to be written and some reflections on the theme. As well as a celebration of music, it has proved to be instrumental in the mission of St Martin's attracting many people to the church. Great Sacred Music offers 52 complete and ready-to-use choral music-themed programmes for occasional celebrations in local churches, or as an alternative to evensong. All the sheet music chosen is available from the RSCM, or recordings can be downloaded from YouTube for churches which do not have choirs. Scripts for introducing the theme and stories about the music are included. Choral music is one of the great treasures of the Anglican tradition. Great Sacred Music will support the missional work of the church in drawing in people who would not ordinarily attend a service, but who enjoy its rich musical heritage.
The season of Advent traditionally involved meditation upon the 'Four Last Things' heaven, hell, death, and judgement, encouraging Christians to evaluate their lives through the prism of endings. In a time of permacrisis - environmental degradation; disinformation and the rise of populism; widening economic inequality and deep racial divisions, The Love That Moves the Sun revives this ancient practice and marries it with contemporary concerns, recovering the hope and belief that all things are moving towards union with God. Contemplating our final ends gives hope and direction in a chaotic world of uncertainty. The first advent began with an angelic messenger announcing the coming of Christ to Mary. The Love That Moves the Sun enables us to hear annunciations in our own time, calling us to the salvation of a groaning creation and the hope of a new earth where justice dwells.
Poetry, prayers, art and scripture meditations come together to create a reflective guide for personal and corporate devotion on the events at the heart of the Christian story from a contemporary, urban perspective. Focusing the death and resurrection of Christ, this is suitable for year-round use as an alternative form of the Stations of the Cross, but also with a special significance for Holy Week and Easter. Arranged in 14 sections, reflections by Joanne Grenfell and sonnets by Adam Atkinson explore discipleship in today's world, touching on contemporary themes such as identity, truth telling, violence, abuse, racism, and belonging in relation to being a follower of Jesus. Each is powerfully illustrated with original paintings by artist Ali Mulroy. The prayers are written in the first person as a devotional response to all that has gone before and each opens with a line from a fresh rendering of the Lenten Prose. The book springs from a series of talks given at St Paul's Cathedral in Holy Week 2023.
Mapping your spiritual journey is a technique used in spiritual direction, on retreats and pastoral work, as a way of recognising and interpreting God's presence in the highs and lows of your life experiences. This book offers creative ways to explore your own spiritual journey, helping you to trace your relationship with God from the beginning, whether looking at your entire life or exploring significant moments. It can be done in multiple creative ways - drawing, collages, timelines, maps, collections of objects or photographs, modelling, journaling, making a garden and more. It offers suggestions for ways to reflect on your journey by looking at parallels in the narratives of the Bible and in everyday life and to learn from these how to deepen your understanding of God's presence and actions in your life. This equips you to look forward and plan your future journey with God with confidence.
Many are familiar with the Orthodox 'Jesus prayer', but there is much more to discover about its tradition of contemplation as a grounding both for the interior spiritual life, and for compassionate action in the world. The author, an Anglican Franciscan friar and theologian, reflects on the wealth of Orthodox spirituality through the teachings of its key figures and texts: - Evagrius of Pontus (345 - 399) One of the first Orthodox theologians and desert father. - John of Sinai (c. 579 - 649) Abbot and writer of the highly influential The Ladder of Divine Ascent. - Isaac of Syria (7th century) A much-loved hermit - Maximos the Confessor (580 - 662) A philosopher, theologian, martyr and teacher. - Symeon the New Theologian (949 - 1022) A monastic reformer, with deep mystical experiences of God's radiant light. - Gregory Palamas (1296 - 1359) A theologian, monk, and teacher of practice of silent prayer. The aim is to enable readers to gain a sense of connection with the saints of Eastern Christianity as spiritual guides for today.
Women over the age of 40 are by far the biggest and the most active demographic in the Church of England. A huge proportion of any given congregation will likely have experienced menopause and yet it is almost entirely taboo as a topic of conversation in churches. Writing with refreshing frankness, Jayne Manfredi uses biblical reflection, prophetic storytelling and prayer to journey with those experiencing "the dreaded m word". Facing the taboo head-on and by turns hilarious and moving, Waking the Women offers a challenge to destigmatize women's experiences by opening up the conversation around midlife and ageing in churches and other faith spaces.
This is a book about the present and future of the church in our present challenging context; a secular age, decline, stretched resources, complex and fragmented communities requiring diverse missional approaches. Weaving together parable, storytelling, travelogue history and poetry, Paul Bradbury journeys from rural Norfolk to inner-city London, from a radical missional community in Lincolnshire, to a traditional village parish in Dorset, to explore what the church looks like today, and how local parish communities are wrestling with the tensions between the value of inherited church, and the need to look to the future.
Jane Austen - novelist, forthright letter writer, daughter and sister of Anglican clergy - had a rarely-matched insight into human character. Like Lent itself, she exposes frailty, caprice and pomposity without losing a profound and compassionate understanding of human nature. Her life was profoundly shaped by the church and Christian spirituality, making her writings an ideal accompaniment for the 40 days of Lent.Rachel Mann introduces Jane Austen, her world and her ideas, and, for each day of Lent, offers commentary on a short excerpt from her writing to explore how her faith can illuminate ours. She brings Jane's novels into conversation with biblical and spiritual ideas and also with today's questions about class, sexuality and race. Themes explored include: The Triumph of Love, Learning Wisdom, Seeing Beyond the Surface to the Truth, Knowing Where Your Treasure Lies, The Temptation to be Prideful and Prejudiced, The Pomposity of Religion, Privilege and its Limitations, Duty and Good Manners, and much more.
In fifty pithy and engaging daily reflections from Ash Wednesday to Easter and beyond, Rob Marshall leads us on a pilgrim journey to the Mountain of the Transfiguration.The story of Jesus displaying the overwhelming glory of God to three chosen disciples is one of the most potent yet mysterious stories in the gospels, and a prelude to all that will occur in Jerusalem. Popular broadcaster Rob Marshall explores the many layers of the Transfiguration and relates them to ordinary human experiences - journeying, prayer, revelation, tiredness, sleep, fear, doubt, waiting, questioning, listening, suffering, vision and much more. Mountaintop encounters with the divine are transformative, but like the disciples we are not meant to stay there. Instead, we return to the realities of daily life, changed forever by glimpsing the glory of the God. Transfiguration will help you take the power of divine revelation into your ordinary daily Christian life.
The back page column of the Church Times, famously occupied for many years by Ronald Blythe, continues to be a breath of fresh air in the hands of poet and priest Malcolm Guite. His acute observations of the local, the everyday, moments of conversation and life's simple pleasures are doorways into a bigger reality of a world suffused with the meaning and beauty that lies beneath surface appearances. His lucid, perceptive and imaginative musings follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned. In his own words, he treats these 500 word essays 'a little in the spirit of the sonnet, with a sense of development, of a 'turn' or volta part way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the opening'.These draw together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, and fuses them to create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar that at the same time opens the way to an enchanted world.
See the Biblical story in an unusual light - from the perspective of a devil who took up arms against heaven under the leadership of Satan. With eternity to ponder why God emerged triumphant from the struggle, this rebel angel has turned to the Bible, the record of God's dealings with 'the humans' to find out why his side was defeated.In twelve chapters, he considers a dozen of God's significant encounters with humanity - each take placing on a mountain top. From Mount Ararat where Noah's ark pitched up, to the Mount of Ascension where Jesus returns to heaven, each reveals an aspect of God's inexplicable and unfathomable love for humans. Beneath their conversational and sardonic surface style, these infernal reflections engage deeply with the reality of a loving God who is made visible and vulnerable in Christ. The Infernal Word began as a series of addresses preached on Good Friday in Canterbury Cathedral. They make ideal seasonal reading for anyone who wishes to explore the story of salvation - although perhaps not if you are a devil.
January 2024 marks the 20th anniversary of the start of the Fresh Expressions movement which spread internationally and denominationally from its origins in the Church of England. Graham Cray was its first National Leader. Countless new forms of church have emerged through Fresh Expressions, the Church Army, New Wine, and various pioneer network. On Mission with Jesus offers a theological understanding of the missional nature of the church, which will undergird and inform local practice and assist ministerial and pioneer training. Its central argument is that the Church's inherited understanding of itself imprisons the imagination of local congregations and in ten chapters, Graham Cray seeks to establish a new self-understanding for local congregations: 1. Updating Default Settings 2. Sharing in the Mission of God3. Making Disciples 4. Following the Spirit5. Shaping the Church 6. Anticipating the Future7. Joining the family Business 8. Being a Pilgrim People9. Recognising Jesus in the Church 10. Becoming a Jesus on Mission-Shaped Church
This new poetry collection from Scottish poet Kenneth Steven captures small moments of revelation or epiphanies, which come unexpectedly as gifts amid the ordinary. An uncleared breakfast table, the sight of someone working outdoors, an old photograph, and the features and sounds of the Scottish landscapes that so inspire his work, all become, in the poet's words, portals to a greater reality: 'the small moments that make up the whole story. This is the sudden going through the door into the bigger world.' Many of them are written in the sonnet form, whose brevity and economy of expression mirror the essence of this book, and whose very form turns from the ordinary to the extraordinary in a moment.
In The Vanishing Song, trans Christian poet Jay Hulme goes in search of what is all but lost in contemporary faith, the 'beautiful and holy and wild' way of the saints, and the alluring, perplexing mystery of the places they chose for themselves - forests, caves, rocky outcrops in the sea. Revelling in the untamed nature of creation and the holiness that is to be found there, these poems celebrate and summon the spirit of those who did unhinged things for God, in order that we might recover a sense of uncontrollable wonder and the danger of the divine as well as its beauty. The Vanishing Song is a call of the wild to faith that is adventurous and unafraid.
As one of today's outstanding preachers, Samuel Wells understands the importance of proclamation in the life of the church and in the public sphere. In this practical and inspiration manual, he considers the essentials of preaching in a wide range of contexts: Preaching on the Times: preaching about politics, the planet, economics, justice and truth; Preaching on the Seasons: preaching at Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Harvest and All Saints;Preaching Texts: preaching on Old Testament Narratives, on Old Testament Poetry on the Gospels, on the Parables, and on Paul; Preaching Contexts: preaching at baptisms, weddings, funerals, after a tragedy, and preaching at short notice without a text. Each section considers styles of preaching, what the occasion demands, practical advice for preparing, two sample sermons and a list of dos and don'ts.
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