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All of life is liturgy. People encounter God as they live, work, and play in human communities and as they work to sustain the health of communities and the ground on which communities are built. Liturgy is distilled from everyday life when we peer through the mist and see the sacramental and spiritual dimensions of daily actions, objects, conversations, and events. In When I in Awesome Wonder, Jill Y. Crainshaw explores this dimension of spirituality and celebrates the ways God's sacramental gifts and presence arise from and return to everyday human experiences.
Invites readers to use their own voices to enliven personal and collective worship. What ideas, hopes, dreams, and laments do the words of worship stir in our hearts and minds? What images of God swirl up out of our communal prayers and hymns to shape what we believe and who we are as people of faith? We know that words can heal and draw us together, or words can hurt and divide. Christian communities proclaim and embody this wisdom each time we celebrate God’s Word made flesh in Jesus. Words for worship that arise from worshiping communities themselves, that give voice to their particular laments and joys, hold an oft-overlooked power. These communal words are both shaped by and spiral out to speak to global concerns. Leaders and worshipers in differing contexts write and speak in a wide variety of ways. As such, this book is for pastoral leaders, chaplains, and other ministers who imagine, craft, and offer worship words for each Sunday—and in the diversity of everyday moments.
Would many believers consider a wake or funeral an act of worship? What does it mean to say that in anointing the sick or administering Viaticum to the dying humans are healed? Such questions plumb the biblical and traditional depths of the paschal mystery. Just as Jesus' ministry at the social-religious margins revealed the center of his faith in God'??s reign, so also the church's ministry to sickness and death reveals much about the baptismal and Eucharistic worship so central to its entire life. In Divine Worship and Human Healing Bruce Morrill turns to the rites serving the sick, dying, deceased, and grieving to show why sacramental liturgy is so fundamental to the life of faith. Readers will appreciate both his compelling narratives from actual pastoral experience and his engagement with biblical, theological, historical, and social-scientific resources. Morrill invites readers to discover how the liturgical ministry of healing discloses God's merciful love amid communities of faith. Jesuit Father Bruce Morrill discusses new book on Liturgical Theology from Jesuit Conference USA on Vimeo.
Thomas W. Mann is a biblical scholar and retired parish minister and the author of numerous books and articles. He is particularly interested in how experiences in nature prompt theological reflection based in the Bible, shaping our sense of sacred time and place, and how the lectionary readings of the church year also provide a spiritual calendar for the seasons of our lives. The result is a conversation inspired by poets and writers like Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and John Muir, but also by philosophers and theologians ranging from Abraham Joshua Heschel to David Kelsey. Along the way, we enter “beach time” and take backpacking trips in the Sierras, but also join the “triumphal entry” parade on Palm Sunday and listen to the stable animals on Christmas Eve. We perceive the beauty of creation through the eyes of science as well as religion, sensually as well as intellectually. We celebrate our communion with all creatures, from fungus to forests, inspired with awe and reverence, and with a responsibility to care for the earth, so threatened by climate change.
Biblical proclamation is central to Christian worship. The Bible witnesses to the foundational experiences of the Church. Its proclamation invites worshippers into encounter with Christ, the living Word. "The Bible in Worship" seeks to make visible how the Bible is encountered in the worship of mainstream Western churches. Focusing in turn on the Roman Catholic, Reformed and Anglican traditions, Victoria Raymer offers a detailed and lively consideration of the contemporary practices of proclamation in each, considers their respective patterns of reading the Bible as part of public worship, and reflects on the place the Bible takes in daily prayer. Raymer also draws our attention towards the role the psalms play in contemporary formal liturgy, and offers a chapter on how the Bible is weaved into less formal forms of worship, including contemporary sung worship. Offering a truly holistic study of the scripture in worship, the book will resource readers to reflect on how proclamation invites response in understanding and resolve, and to consider how it might do so more effectively.
As the second book in the Explorations in Theological Field Education series,Empower is a toolkit for mentors working with beginning ministers. Chapters from ministry practitioners and field education program directors offer lessons gained through hundreds of hours of mentoring experience. Seasoned practitioners reveal how to do the work of mentoring in ways that are “fitting” to the particular needs of students with whom they have worked. This volume, then, is not a cookbook or a manual. It is itself a mentoring guide to those who wish to deepen and expand the craft of mentoring. Its goal is to meet ministry mentors in their journey towards skillful mentoring, and to provide guidance and support to help them hone their craft.
Many Christians view the Bible as an instruction manual. While the Bible does provide instruction, it can also captivate, comfort, delight, shock, and inspire. In short, it elicits emotion--just like poetry. By learning to read and love poetry, says literature professor Matthew Mullins, readers can increase their understanding of the biblical text and learn to love God's Word more. Each chapter includes exercises and questions designed to help readers put the book's principles and practices into action.
"This is a story about Christian women. It is a story of martyrs, mystics, missionaries, leaders, preachers, theologians, saints, and prophets." For most of its two-thousand-year history, Christianity has told its stories from the perspective of men, mostly powerful men, and almost always men in control of the "official" narrative. These masculine narratives tell only part of the story because they obscure the rich and essential contributions, large and small, of Christian women throughout time. If the stories of women have been overlooked generally, stories of women from outside the Western tradition have been even more seriously overlooked. In this exciting, readable, and fresh new history of Christianity, Jennifer Hornyak Wojciechowski foregrounds the story of Christian women for a new era. Be they powerful or nameless, saintly or flawed, women across two millennia and six continents are lifted up and allowed to speak fully to their part in the spread of the faith. Wojciechowski's book works perfectly as a classroom text while welcoming general readers of all backgrounds and interest levels.
How can Catholic leaders effectively train and form members of our institutions in the Gospel values that are the ultimate foundation of Catholic identities? Internationally recognized author, educator, and facilitator Gerald A. Arbuckle argues that it is time to acknowledge that the programs and processes used in the past are inadequate to our postmodern age. The systems previously used to educate the staffs of our hospitals, universities, schools, and other institutions rarely succeed today. Although didactic teaching and discursive learning have their place, they cannot be the primary method for forming identities. Catholic Identity or Identities? will assist a wide range of people- bishops, theologians, pastoral workers, institutional leaders and staffs, and more-in their various ministries. Arbuckle draws on several disciplines, including Scripture, theology, and history, but in particular cultural anthropology, to explain the importance of refounding adult formation for Catholic ministries and the practical ways to achieve it.
How can one believe in a God of love amid all the evil and suffering found in the world? How does one do theology 'after Auschwitz', while vast numbers of people still have to endure violent oppression every day? This book seeks to address such questions from a standpoint informed by life in Africa, which in the face of extraordinary difficulties bears witness to Gospel hope by demonstrating forgiveness in action and promoting reconciliation. The work unfolds in two parts. In the first part, a description of the misery that characterises much of life in Africa in the recent past opens up to a theological consideration of the underlying causes and of God's response to them. In the second part, the joy which is so characteristic of life in Africa even in places of immense suffering sets the scene for detailed reflections on liturgy, memory, forgiveness and hope.