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Socio-Historical Examination of Religion and Ministry (SHERM journal) is a biannual, not-for-profit, free peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes the latest social-scientific, historiographic, and ecclesiastic research on religious institutions and their ministerial practices. SHERM is dedicated to the critical and scholarly inquiry of historical and contemporary religious phenomena, both from within particular religious traditions and across cultural boundaries, so as to inform the broader socio-historical analysis of religion and its related fields of study. The purpose of SHERM is to provide a scholarly medium for the social-scientific study of religion where specialists can publish...
April Stace, a happily-married thirty-five year-old mother, harpist, ordained pastor and aspiring tenure-track professor, thought she had finally "made it" when she accepted a dream job in New York City. Less than a year later, she found herself jobless, divorced, broke, and certain that she had failed in every way that mattered. In a last-ditch effort to support herself and her son, she began training as a chaplain at an urban hospital. As she encountered death day after day, she began to wonder: what would it mean to fall in love with being alive again? In White Knuckle Love, we encounter a spirit who learned to let go of the person she thought she should be in order to embrace life in unexpected places -- hospital rooms, long subway commutes, a lesbian dance club, mundane moments of parenthood, and even in her own checkered past. Can we find our way by losing ourselves? Prepare to fall in love with your life again, too.
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Millennials and progressive Christians are continuing their work of creating alternative spaces for spiritual and religious expressions in North America. The practices and beliefs of progressive Christian movements like the emerging church and millennials, who tend toward spirituality over and against religion, have been the targets of much criticism. Yet millennials and progressive Christians continue to both curate spaces for self- and collective expression while also engaging within contexts often critical or hostile. This collection analyzes these movements from theological, religious-studies, and social-scientific perspectives to provide a more holistic view of what is taking shape in religious and spiritual trends, and it ventures to project what may lie ahead for the progressive Christianity that is emerging and enduring.
This book explores the ways in which music can engender religious experience, by virtue of its ability to evoke the ineffable and affect how the world is open to us. Arguing against approaches that limit the religious significance of music to an illustrative function, The Extravagance of Music sets out a more expansive and optimistic vision, which suggests that there is an ‘excess’ or ‘extravagance’ in both music and the divine that can open up revelatory and transformative possibilities. In Part I, David Brown argues that even in the absence of words, classical instrumental music can disclose something of the divine nature that allows us to speak of an experience analogous to contem...
High on God offers a fascinating study of the rise of megachurches and the reasons that these churches have conquered the American church market. The authors reveal the emotional and social dynamics that pull thousands of people into megachurches and keep them there.
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More than seven years have passed since the first monograph on viroids was published. At that time, the existence of viroids as a novel type of pathogen far smaller than viruses had been amply demonstrated and some of their unusual molecular properties had been elucidated, but the entry of molecular biology into viroid research was still in its infancy. Since that time, our knowledge of the molecular properties of viroids has increased exponentially and viroids have become even more fasci nating than was the case seven years ago. Today, aside from transfer RNA, viroids are probably the best known type of RNA-at least from a struc tural standpoint. Much less is known of the mechanisms of viro...
This book offers a historical assessment and balanced critique of contemporary church movements, especially in light of missional ecclesiology. An expert on Lesslie Newbigin and an expert on contemporary church models show how Newbigin's ideas have been developed and contextualized in three popular contemporary church movements: missional, emergent, and center church. In addition, the authors explain that some of Newbigin's insights have been neglected and need to be retrieved for the present day. This book calls for the recovery of the missionary nature of the church and commends church practices applicable to any congregation.
To survey harsh criticisms against Brian Douglas McLaren (1956‒), readers gain the inaccurate impression that he is a heretical relativist who denies objective truth and logic. While McLaren’s inflammatory and provocative writing style is partly to blame, this study also suspects that his critics base much of their analyses on only small portions of his overall corpus. The result becomes a caricature of McLaren’s actual philosophy of religion. What is argued in this book is that McLaren’s philosophy of religion suggests a faith-based intersubjective relationship with the divine ought to result in an existential appropriation of Christ’s religio-ethical teachings. When subjectively ...