Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Library of Paradise
Contemplative reading is a spiritual practice developed by Christian monks in sixth- and seventh-century Mesopotamia. Mystics belonging to the Church of the East pursued a form of contemplation which moved from reading, to meditation, to prayer, to the ecstasy of divine vision. The Library of Paradise tells the story of this Syriac tradition in three phases: its establishment as an ascetic practice, the articulation of its theology, and its maturation and spread. The sixth-century monastic reform of Abraham of Kashkar codified the essential place of reading in East Syrian ascetic life. Once established, the practice of contemplative reading received extensive theological commentary. Abraham'...
Expectations
Fairacres Publications 130 In these addresses, the expectations – true and false – of newly-ordained clergy are identified. Stressing the need for constant thanksgiving as the bedrock of a pastor’s life, the author examines the role of the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, in providing practical and spiritual support to ministry.
Seasons of my Soul
SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 12 This collection speaks about the experience of nature, religion, thought, ideas and people; sometimes with the anxiety that those relationships can bring, but also with plenty of celebration. There are thoughtful ponderings, gazing into the beauty and rawness of nature, from wide sweeping beaches or forests, to tiny stones and fleeting birds. Fractured meaning is celebrated, even in its incompleteness, alongside the pleasure of wholeness, inner certainty and realization.
TIME
Fairacres Publications 208 This book brings together essays by two outstanding Orthodox theologians to examine the paradox of time in relation to the eternity of God: Dumitru Stăniloae’s, ‘Eternity and Time’, a talk given to the Sisters of the Love of God in 1971, was expanded in the first volume of his Teologia dogmatica ortodoxa (3 vols., Bucharest, 1978). The preface to the 1994 English translation of that work, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, written by Kallistos Ware, was based on his essay, ‘Time: Prison or Path to Freedom?’, which was first published in 1989 by SLG Press. These reflections, brought together for the first time here, remain at the forefront of modern theology....
Theology and Spirituality
Fairacres Publications 55 For centuries theology and spirituality have been divorced, as if mysticism were for the saintly and theological study for the practical but unsaintly (to paraphrase Thomas Merton). So Archpriest Louth writes: ‘The theologian is one who prays, and one who thinks about the object of his loving prayer. So, part of the formation of a theologian is the study of spirituality, not just as another branch of the history of doctrine, or whatever, but as a deepening of their own life of prayer.’ This book seeks to show that theology—even the rigorous ‘academic’ theology—and spirituality belong together and, isolated, suffer disintegration and atrophy. It does this by suggesting that contemplation lies at the heart of both theology and spirituality, and includes an examination of the place of the contemplative in the thought of Diadochus of Photicé.
Bringing Forth Christ
Fairacres Publications 90 The short though profoundly mystical work, The Five Feasts of the Child Jesus, which is presented here in a new translation, came from the pen of St Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, and one of the most renowned followers of St Francis of Assisi. We are given five meditations on scenes in the life of Christ. Contrary to what one might expect from the title, however, the theme of these meditations is spiritual motherhood, namely the doctrine concerning the mystical birth of God’s Word in the soul and the vocation of every Christian to become a mother of Christ. Men and women alike are invited to fashion their spiritual lives on Mary, the Mother of the Lord and the image of the Church, and to develop the maternal element in their nature. St Bonaventure brought the skills of a poet and a theologian to his task; his work belongs to the rich heritage of Franciscan spirituality, it is also a minor classic of the spiritual tradition of western Christianity and has a message pertinent to our times.
God Under my Roof: Celtic Songs and Blessings
IN THIS introduction to songs and blessings collected from the oral tradition of the Hebrides, Esther de Waal uses the poems themselves to evoke a vision of the wholeness of life. We are seen to belong to a common creation, responsible for the natural world but essentially at peace with it; secure in the knowledge that wherever we go we are under God’s heaven, and that God can be found close at hand, under our very roofs. We are encouraged to make some of the prayers included here our own, to find ourselves befriended by God and the saints as we talk to them with unforced simplicity and candour. So we discover that ‘it is through the rites of ordinariness that the rhythm of eternity penetrates’ our days and nights.
Pearls of Life: A Life-Belt for the Spirit
In 1996 Bishop Martin Lönnebo (1930–2023), recently retired after fifteen years as Lutheran Bishop of Linköping in Sweden, was exploring the Aegean when his boat was overtaken by a storm and he and his fellow-passengers had to take refuge on a tiny island with a single guest house. While the storm blew itself out Bishop Martin set about designing what he described as a ‘prayer ribbon’ that could summarize the message of the Christian faith. The result was a bracelet known as Frälsarkransen. The word means ‘life-belt’—hence the sub-title for this short book, which provides an introduction to Bishop Martin’s thinking behind the beads, and suggestions for using them for prayer and contemplation.
The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies
The essays in this provocative collection exemplify the innovations that have characterized the relatively new field of late ancient studies. Focused on civilizations clustered mainly around the Mediterranean and covering the period between roughly 100 and 700 CE, scholars in this field have brought history and cultural studies to bear on theology and religious studies. They have adopted the methods of the social sciences and humanities—particularly those of sociology, cultural anthropology, and literary criticism. By emphasizing cultural and social history and considerations of gender and sexuality, scholars of late antiquity have revealed the late ancient world as far more varied than ha...
Poems of Faith and Doubt
SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 1 This translation has sought to reproduce the plain, rhymed forms of Nervo’s poems to convey the direct, yet complex, ideas of faith and doubt of the original texts. Nervo believed each of his poems—a prayer, an expression of comfort, praise or questioning—to be an act of love: the job of the translator is to hand on, undimmed, that belief to the reader. ‘Pleasant words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones’ (Proverbs 16:24).
