This essential handbook for the preparation of worship presents the authorised Bible readings (references only) for the liturgical year beginning Advent Sunday 2021. It includes: - a full calendar of the Christian year; - a simple code indicating whether celebrations are mandatory or optional; - complete lectionary references to the Principal, Second and Third services for Sundays, Principal Feasts and Holy Days; - lectionary references for Morning and Evening Prayer; - the Additional Weekday Lectionary; - general readings for saints days and special occasions; - a guide to the liturgical colours of the day. A must-have reference guide for every vestry and parish office. This is the larger-format edition.

The Way of Prayer is a 10-week resource designed to help people expand their understanding of the nature and practice of prayer. Many Christians grow up with a limited vision of what prayer is and how to pray. The Way of Prayer offers many forms to explore and practice, both individually and as a group. People with different temperaments, spiritual types, and learning styles will each find expressions of prayer that draw them closer to God. They will also learn to integrate body, mind, and spirit in prayer, and to live a more creative rhythm between the inner life and the outward journey of service. This resource can help bring greater scope and vitality into the prayer life of your congregation. Topics include:
How do you Pray?
Images of God?
Praying by Heart
Praying with Music
Praying by Gazing
Praying with Our Bodies
Scriptural Prayer
Contemplative Prayer
Praying with and for Others
Prayer and Social Transformation
- Small groups in local churches
- Companions in Christ customers

The hunger for modern, relevant resources for the Christian seasons and celebrations is deep. Here is a book that will help to fill this need. Suitable for group worship or personal reflection, and with material for Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Mothering Sunday, Palm Sunday and Holy Week, it is a collection to accompany readers through Lent and Easter for many years. Eggs and Ashes includes a Lent discipline for those who care about the environment, liturgies, responses, prayers, poems, reflections, meditations, stories, stations of the cross, sermons, monologues and songs, with some all-age resources - written by Iona Community members, associates, friends and others. Ruth Burgess is the author of A Book of Blessings and Friends and Enemies, both published by Wild Goose Publications. Chris Polhill is a frequent contributor to Wild Goose books.

The Reformation changed forever how the sacrament of the Eucharist was understood. This study of six canonical early modern lyric poets traces the literary afterlife of what was one of the greatest doctrinal shifts in English history. Sophie Read argues that the move from a literal to a figurative understanding of the phrase 'this is my body' exerted a powerful imaginative pull on successive generations. To illustrate this, she examines in detail the work of Southwell, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan and Milton, who between them represent a broad range of doctrinal and confessional positions, from the Jesuit Southwell to Milton's heterodox Puritanism. Individually, each chapter examines how Eucharistic ideas are expressed through a particular rhetorical trope; together, they illuminate the continued importance of the Eucharist's transformation well into the seventeenth century - not simply as a matter of doctrine, but as a rhetorical and poetic mode.

This volume, long delayed in its publication, furnishes an edition of two codexes discovered in 1910 by Dom Germain Morin. Bernhard Bischoff assigned the first of them [A] to the work of the bishop's scriptorium at Freising under the episcopate of either Hitto [811-836] or Erchambert [836-854], and the second [B] to the same origin, but around the year 900. Benedictiional A [ff. 1-14] contains 29 ans Benedictional B [ff. 15v-87v] 159 blessings of the episcopal type now introduced as Benedictiones Sollemnes into the Roman Rite. Like their modern cousins, many blessings on Clm 6430 are quadripartite, though a good number have more numerous members. A loose printed sheet addressed to members by Francis Wormald, Chairman of Council, spoke of the grave difficulties and delays that had attended publication, and warned that it had not been possible to take account of a study and partial edition of Benedictional A by Walter Durig, "Das Benedictionale Friburgense vetus", published in Archiv fur Liturgiewissenschaft 4 [1956] 223-244.

A wartime prayerbook written for dangerous days like ours - made to fit in pocket or purse Our parents before us understood that strife is rarely far from even the best of us, and they girded themselves for warfare, actual and spiritual. Among the wisest of men who shepherded them was Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who won their hearts with his warm, engaging broadcast personality . . . but in secret he put on the armor of God. World War II thrust temptation, fear, danger, and death on the men and women Archbishop Sheen had formed through his popular radio shows in the 1930's. Knowing that many of his listeners were now beyond the sound of his voice, fighting and dying on battlefields afar, he wrote this pocket-sized prayerbook so that they, too, could put on the armor of God as they faced their new trials, physical and spiritual. Recently, a friend showed us his tattered World War II copy. We recognized immediately that with the new dangers we face since September 11, the time had come to draft this old prayer book back into service. Yes, it's for soldiers (and you should send it to every soldier you know so he will have have it in his breast pocket when he needs it), but it's for you and me, too. Archbishop Sheen knew that no matter what our circumstances may be, the deadliest enemy we face is armed not with a gun but with temptation. In dangerous, uncertain times like ours, the Devil lures us quickly into lust, anger, hatred, and despair. Fulton Sheen's Wartime Prayer Book will help keep you from these vices so that you, too, can put on the armor of God and triumph over evil in our day.

A prized possession of the Cistercian convent of Marienbrunn in Rulle near Osnabruck in northern Germany was its richly illuminated gradual dating to c. 1300, which is of great significance in the history of medieval art for several reasons. With 52 historiated initials iconographically complex in their literary quotations from the liturgy, the manuscript ranks as one of the most lavishly decorated books of its type to survive. Painted in an elegant courtly Gothic style, it is ascribed in a prefatory inscription to the nun Gisela von Kersenbroeck, who wrote, notated, and decorated the manuscript "with golden letters and beautiful images." Such an encyclopedic listing of a scribe-artist's labors is unparalleled in medieval scribal colophons. The high quality of the miniatures ranks her among the most gifted women artists of the Middle Ages. Gisela is depicted in two self-portraits within the manuscript, in one of which she is leading the nuns of Rulle in singing the Christmas hymn, visual evidence that she was the choirmistress at this convent. The manuscript's images reflect the intellectual ambience of encloistered nuns who were steeped in the annual liturgical cycle of feasts with its associated bible readings, theological commentary, sermons, music, dramatic ritual, and artistic decoration. As it was used in the nuns' daily celebration of the mass, the book is an eloquent witness of the communal religious life of medieval women rather than their private meditations or mystical experiences.This study explores the imagery and texts associated with major feasts of the liturgical year and the novel ways in which music and text are woven into the artistic program of Gisela's manuscript. In particular, her book shows the seminal importance of the Easter celebration for convent life, as well over half of its illustrations are clustered in the Easter season; and the manuscript repeatedly gives artistic expression to the nuns' hopes of heaven.

This book presents the complete texts of the gospel readings for every Sunday throughout the three-year cycle of the Sunday lectionary in the Catholic Church during the season of Ordinary Time, and for the solemnities and feasts which fall on Sundays. It may be used for personal study to enhance understanding and appreciation of the Sunday gospel. Each reading is accompanied by a short commentary, two questions for personal reflection and two prayers, to enable the gospels to be read in the contemplative tradition of Lectio Divina. These reflections have been written by the Revd Dr Adrian Graffy, a member of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The gospels are from the Revised New Jerusalem Bible, a bold new rendition of the scriptures designed for study and proclamation, and acclaimed for the richness, accuracy and inclusivity of its language. A companion to this volume, The Sunday Gospels for Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter, is to be released in November 2021.

Collection of prayers designed to help you pray more deeply during Eucharistic Adoration.

Sticky Situations is a devotional book for families with children ages 8 to 12 that offers short readings for each day of the year. Each reading begins with a kid who is facing a moral dilemma and ends with multiple-choice solutions for the family to discuss. Often there is more than one acceptable course of action to take. Parents will find tips in the back of the book that interpret the various choices made by the children and offer follow-up questions for further discussion on each topic. Scripture references are provided to give biblical insight into each situation. Sticky Situations is a great discussion starter that will give parents the chance to share their own values with their children.

Originally published in 1941, this book was originally intended as a popular guide to the Scottish Prayer Book. Perry explains the services in the order in which they appear in the Prayer Book while simultaneously attempting 'to justify the truths embodied in them'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of Scottish Protestantism.

The Book of Hours was a 'best-seller' in medieval and early modern Europe, the era's most commonly produced and owned book. This interdisciplinary study explores its increasing popularity and prestige, offering a full account of the Book of Hours as a book - how it was acquired, how it was read to guide prayer and teach literacy and what it meant to its owners as a personal possession. Based on the study of over 500 manuscripts and printed books from France, Virginia Reinburg combines a social history of the Book of Hours with an ethnography of prayer. Approaching the practice of prayer as both speech and ritual, she argues that a central part of the Book of Hours' appeal for lay people was its role as a bridge between the liturgy and the home. Reinburg describes how the Book of Hours shaped religious practice through the ways in which it was used.

A Bundle of Joy for Every Woman Whose Heart Longs to be a Mommy Ten million people each year suffer--often in private shame and pain--because they've been told that they can never conceive children of their own as a couple (literally billions of dollars are spent each year on fertility cures); or because they've been conditioned to believe that it's normal to struggle through a painful and difficult pregnancy; or because they fear whether they have what it takes to be affirming, joyful parents. Jackie Mize--who was told it was impossible for her to have a baby and who is now the mother of four beautiful children--provides readers with a supernatural answer. Filled with powerful and intimate scriptural prayers, this little book gives readers a way to come before Father God in faith with issues from having a difficult time getting pregnant to joyfully cradling that precious gift from God in their arms. By taking an expectant mother--or a women who desperately wants to be expecting--through God's promises for her and her baby's future, Prayers and Promises for Supernatural Childbirth is a bundle of joy that delivers hope and encouragement, while chasing away doubts and fears. Specific issues covered in the scriptural prayers include: fulfillment over barrenness; the threat of miscarriage; a joyful delivery day; and dedicating one's baby to God.

Many worlds meet on the romantic Hebridean island of Iona. With its breathtaking beauty and its ancient saints, it is a place where the material and the spiritual are closely interwoven. Every year, thousands of pilgrims come from all over the world to experience the striking simplicity of worship at its Abbey. This collection of prayers and meditations follows the themes which permeate daily worship in the Abbey, each day having a distinctive focus. Outlines are given for morning, midday and evening prayer to enable you to join your voice, your joys and your concerns with those who pray daily on Iona and with the friends of Iona around the world.

First published in 1896, this book presents the complete surviving Latin text of the Sacramentarium Leonianum, which was discovered in the Chapter library at Verona by Joseph Bianchini during the first half of the eighteenth century. The text includes a detailed introduction, extensive editorial notes and three photographs from the manuscript. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in sacramentaries and the history of Christianity.