Böcker utgivna av Spectrum Publications

As the U. S. A. Provincial of the Blessed Sacrament Congregation shuffled the responses of the delegates at the General Chapter in Chicago on the desk before him, it dawned on him that one of the delegates was quite unlike the others, that he was in effect, a mystic and worse, a POET! That delegate, dear reader was none other me. See page 41-42 , IN THE LAND OF GOD to see what the fuss was about."

This collection includes a large number of previously unpublished poems, as well as poems published on my website and my two previous collections, In The Water Was The Fire and Souvenirs of Spirit. It also reprints a number of prayers and blessings related to Mercy, some of which were commissioned by Mercy International Centre, Dublin. These poems and prayers are essentially about encounter: encounter with the Divine, the natural world, the Celtic landscape and spirit, and those whose lives the poet has shared through journeys of birth and death, dementia and abuse.Exploration of the meaning of Mercy is at the heart of many of the works.

This book opens up a fresh dialogue about marrying and raising a family. To make clear the newness of his approach the author has used the verb "marrying" in the title for this book rather than the abstract noun "marriage".Don Burnard shifts the emphasis from defending marriage to exploring how a dynamic and committed partnering can become a psychologically rich life style. Because marrying is the most individualistic and personal behaviour a human being is capable of choosing, this book focuses on the skills needed for active ongoing engagement.Don Burnard directs our attention to the human qualities needed to connect with our fellow human being without surrendering our uniqueness. He challenges beliefs such as that there is only one right person. He argues that in marrying, people need the expertise of bridge builders.Marrying summarises and explains difficult matters in clear prose. While drawing on thinkers such as Victor Frankl, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow, Don Burnard relies above all on his years of experience and the insights he has gained from workshop participants.

With familiar candour and colour, John Bodycomb excoriates church leadership for evading, and layering over with platitudes, two huge questions:• What future for organised religion in Western societies? and (in light of this) • What future for the so-called 'religious professional'?Fifty years a sociologist of religion, specialising in the ups and downs of organised religion, Bodycomb is plain-spoken and provocative. Institutional Christianity as we have known it began to decline 600 years ago, and with it a model of religious professional. We are entering a new era, in which people must still make sense of existence with some kind of meaning system - but the old ones are obsolete.The defenders of tradition, theologians, institutional power brokers and thought police will hate 'Two Elephants', he predicts.