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Books > Christianity > Christian Worship
Each chapter gives material for the members of the group to read in
advance. There is a framework or plan for a group meeting, with
detailed ideas for activities and discussion. There is also general
advice about group processes, including recruiting and running such
groups. There is a framework for prayer, and biblical themes to be
considered in context. The sessions are equally for seekers and
confirmation candidates, and for teenagers as well as adults.
Found in Common Worship: Times and Seasons, The Way of the Cross is
a series of scripture-based devotions for personal or group use in
Lent and Holy Week. Similar in intent to the traditional Stations
of the Cross, it focuses wholly on the biblical narrative of the
passion, death and resurrection of Jesus. This seasonal companion
provides the sequence of fifteen meditations appears in full,
including opening and concluding prayers. Each is accompanied by
three short reflections from different perspectives by three of
today's very best spiritual writers: - Paula Gooder offers
reflections on the scriptural narratives; - Stephen Cottrell
considers the story from the perspective of personal discipleship;
- Philip North explores the story's challenge to mission and
witness.
Prayer, the greatest fringe benefit of being a Christian, is God's
enticement to get our attention. He likes our company. Access to
God means access to ultimate power. We are all on level ground
here. Whether you are middle class, aristocratic, royal, rich,
poor, red, yellow, black, or white, you are valued by your heavenly
Father as much as anybody who has ever lived. God will take on your
case as if you were the most important person who ever lived.
Prayer gives you that privilege--access to ultimate power. God can
make anything happen. He can heal. Solve any problem. Change your
financial situation. Vindicate. Open doors. Cause everything that
has happened in your past (whether it was right or wrong or whether
you were right or wrong) to work together for good (Rom. 8:28).
Prayer is one of the most fundamental practices of the Christian
faith, yet how many of us really commit adequate time to talking to
God? As R. T. Kendall points out in Did You Think to Pray? we can
only benefit from spending more time with Him.
In the year 726 C.E., the Byzantine emperor Leo III issued an edict
declaring images to be idols, forbidden by Exodus, and ordering all
such images in churches to be destroyed. Thus commenced the first
wave of Byzantine iconoclasm, which ran its violent course until
787, when the underlying issues were temporarily resolved at the
Second Council of Nicaea. In 815, a second great wave of iconoclasm
was set off, only to end in 842 when the icons were restored to the
churches of the East and the iconoclasts excommunicated. The
iconoclast controversies have long been understood as marking major
fissures between the Western and Eastern churches. Thomas F. X.
Noble reveals that the lines of division were not so clear. It is
traditionally maintained that the Carolingians in the 790s did not
understand the basic issues involved in the Byzantine dispute.
Noble contends that there was, in fact, a significant Carolingian
controversy about visual art and, if its ties to Byzantine
iconoclasm were tenuous, they were also complex and deeply rooted
in central concerns of the Carolingian court. Furthermore, he
asserts that the Carolingians made distinctive and original
contributions to the whole debate over religious art. Images,
Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians is the first book to provide a
comprehensive study of the Western response to Byzantine
iconoclasm. By comparing art-texts with laws, letters, poems, and
other sources, Noble reveals the power and magnitude of the key
discourses of the Carolingian world during its most dynamic and
creative decades.
This book delineates the individualist "interpretation problem"
that has long beset Protestant biblical interpretation, and engages
theological resources that could serve to move beyond it. Lauren
Smelser White argues that readers of Scripture-specifically those
who long to submit their lives to God's transforming Word, which
they believe the Bible discloses-ought to reckon with the
participatory role that human bodies (corporeal and corporate) play
in producing revelation's norms. Such a reckoning need not entail
giving up on Scripture delivering the life-changing address of a
divine Other. In support of that claim, White distills a picture of
revelation as a divine-human discursive encounter: a process
wherein our hermeneutic constructions are incorporated into the
Word's self-disclosure, and whereby interpreters who embrace this
venture in vulnerability may experience graced transformation. The
work concludes by proposing that this "Christomorphic"
interpretation process is analogous to a mother's embodied
responsiveness in caring for her child. Such a hermeneutic paradigm
suggests distinctive commitments from communities who desire to
cooperate with the Holy Spirit in interpretive acts.
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