An overview of the nature of Anglican worship and the inherent simplicity within the rites and rubrics gleaned from primary and secondary sources in the tradition, combined with a good dose of reason.

Thomas of Edessa flourished as a teacher at the School of Nisibis, an important Christian intellectual centre in sixth-century Persia. He accompanied the later patriarch Mar Aba on his travels around the Mediterranean and followed him to Nisibis. Thomas's only surviving writings are two lectures in Syriac ('Explanations') on the feasts of the Nativity and Epiphany. These discourses were later incorporated into a collection of Explanations of the Feasts covering the whole ecclesiastical year. This volume presents an edition of Thomas of Edessa's Syriac text of Nativity and Epiphany, accompanied by a facing-page English translation. These discourses, with the editors' introduction and notes, elucidate Thomas's place in the theological development of the Church of the East. He is the earliest author after Narsai to draw extensively upon the theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but earlier Syriac traditions are also reflected in his work, and his Christology is not yet the doctrine characteristic of Babai and later East Syriac authors.

The SCM Studyguide: Liturgy, 2nd Edition is an introduction to liturgy that considers the basic 'buliding blocks' needed to grasp the subject area. It outlines the essential shape and content of Christian worship and explores a range of liturgical dynamics of which both students of liturgy and leaders of liturgy need to be aware. This 2nd edition of the popular Studyguide is fully revised, updated and expanded. The book takes account of new developments in scholarship, engages with new contexts for liturgical celebration (notably, fresh expressions as part of a mixed economy of church), encompasses recent revisions in liturgy and seeks to broaden the engagement beyond the British context to consider the wider global context.

A novena is a term used to describe a continuous praying of a formula nine consecutive times, usually nine consecutive days or once a week for nine weeks. The number nine derives from the time Mary and the Apostles waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit between Ascension and Pentecost. (from the Catholic Encyclopedia) This purse-sized prayer guide contains many of the Church's treasured petitions to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saints, including Saint Anthony, Saint Peregrine and Saint Therese of Lisieux. A section devoted to American Saints includes a prayer to the North American Jesuit Martyrs. A new ?quick novena? from Blessed Teresa of Calcutta appears here for the first time in print. Illustrated throughout with art and religious images, each prayer in The Church's Most Powerful Novenas includes the history of that particular novena. A listing of shrines connected with novenas in the book is included. Although the practice of praying novenas has only been around since the 1600s, believers have embraced this commitment of devotion as a unique aspect of our Catholic identity.

Based on the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, this second in a series of three volumes provides resources for an entire year of sermons and offers practical help for preachers and others who use the Revised Common Lectionary. Beginning with Advent, this unique and comprehensive resource deals with lectionary texts for Year C. Each of the four texts--the Old Testament, Psalter, Gospel, and Epistle--for each Sunday and important festival day, including Christmas, Ash Wednesday, and Good Friday, is treated. A brief introduction for the day indicates the general thrust of the texts and the relationships among them, emphasizing in interpretation of the texts themselves. Also included are suggestions concerning the implications of the texts for life today.

God calls humans to be creative. The human drive to represent transcendent truths witnesses to the fact that we are destined to be transfigured and to transfigure the world. It is worth asking, then, what truthful representations, whether in art, spirituality, or theology, teach us about the one who is our truth, the one who made us and the one in whose image we are made. All Things Beautiful: An Aesthetic Christology is an experimental and constructive aesthetic Christology sourced by close readings of a wide array of artistic works, canonical and popular-including poems, films, essays, novels, plays, short stories, sculptures, icons, and paintings-as well as art criticism and passages from the Christian Scriptures. From first to last, these readings engage in conversation with the deep, broad wisdom of the Christian theological tradition. The liturgical calendar guides the themes of the book, beginning with Advent and Christmas; carrying through Epiphany, Ash Wednesday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, and Ascension; and ending with Pentecost and Ordinary Time. Chris Green brings together these readings to create a mosaic-like impression of Jesus as the one through whom God graces and gives nature to all things, his life and death redeeming the whole creation, including human creativity and artistic endeavor, and transfiguring it into the full, free flourishing that God has purposed. This vision of Christ holds promise for artists and theologians, as well as preachers and teachers, revealing how our compulsions to create-and the meanings with which we endow our creations-become a site of the Spirit's presence, opening us to the goodness and wildness of God.

The Church of Jerusalem, the 'mother of the churches of God', influenced all of Christendom before it underwent multiple captivities between the eighth and thirteenth centuries: first, political subjugation to Arab Islamic forces, then displacement of Greek-praying Christians by Crusaders, and finally ritual assimilation to fellow Orthodox Byzantines in Constantinople. All three contributed to the phenomenon of the Byzantinization of Jerusalem's liturgy, but only the last explains how it was completely lost and replaced by the liturgy of the imperial capital, Constantinople. The sources for this study are rediscovered manuscripts of Jerusalem's liturgical calendar and lectionary. When examined in context, they reveal that the devastating events of the Arab conquest in 638 and the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 did not have as detrimental an effect on liturgy as previously held. Instead, they confirm that the process of Byzantinization was gradual and locally-effected, rather than an imposed element of Byzantine imperial policy or ideology of the Church of Constantinople. Originally, the city's worship consisted of reading scripture and singing hymns at places connected with the life of Christ, so that the link between holy sites and liturgy became a hallmark of Jerusalem's worship, but the changing sacred topography led to changes in the local liturgical tradition. Liturgy and Byzantinization in Jerusalem is the first study dedicated to the question of the Byzantinization of Jerusalem's liturgy, providing English translations of many liturgical texts and hymns here for the first time and offering a glimpse of Jerusalem's lost liturgical and theological tradition.

Following the success of Hymn Miniatures 1, Rebecca Groom te Velde presents a second collection of twenty-eight practical arrangements for organ. These short pieces, each based on a well-known hymn tune, are ideal for use as service interludes, hymn introductions, communion meditations, and short preludes, offertories, and postludes. Suitable for use throughout the year, te Velde's accessible arrangements will prove invaluable to the church musician looking for fresh repertoire to enhance services.

'the highest matter in the noblest form' John Donne's description of the Psalms celebrates not only the perfection of the biblical psalms but their translation into poetic form by the Sidneys, who turned them into some of the most accomplished lyric poems of the English Renaissance. Although it was not printed until the nineteenth century, the Sidney Psalter was widely read in manuscript and influenced poets from Donne and Herbert to Milton and beyond. It turned these well-known and well-loved Psalms into sophisticated verse, selecting or inventing a different stanza form for each one. This variety of forms matches the appeal of their content: there are Psalms of praise and blame, Psalms of cursing and lamentation, Psalms of joy and exaltation, Psalms that recount history, and Psalms that describe Creation or divine law. This is the first complete edition of the Psalter for over forty years. The Psalms are provided in an authoritative modernized text, with helpful glosses and notes illuminating points of interpretation, and an introduction setting the Psalms in their literary and cultural contexts. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Armenian Church Synaxarion is a collection of saints' lives according to the day of the year on which each saint is celebrated. Part of the great and varied Armenian liturgical tradition from the turn of the first millennium, the first Armenian Church Synaxarion represented the logical culmination of a long and steady development of what is today called the cult of the saints. This book is the second in a twelve-volume series-one for each month of the year-and is ideal for personal devotional use or as a valuable resource for anyone interested in saints.

This book is in commemoration of my father who died in February this year. It is a hymn-book and I have entitled it Arthurs Favourite Hymns. Easy to play versions of favourite hymns including spirituals, carols, sacred songs and well-known hymns. Arranged for piano and guitar with full words and Thoughts for the Day by Arthur Goddard, edited and arranged by Paul R Goddard with a foreword by Revd Rod Symmons, vicar of Redland Parish Church. 35 hymns and sacred songs

Art is an outworking of God's creative process, a tangible participation in the shaping of the world. Through our artistic endeavors, we both express our understanding of creation and imbue that creation with new meaning. Four artists in particular-the poet Czeslaw Milosz, filmmaker Terrence Malick, novelist Marilynne Robinson, and lyric essayist Annie Dillard-actively wrestle with a world that reflects God's glory while remaining at times deeply and troublingly obscure. In Lyric Theology, Thomas Gardner unfolds the ways these four important contemporary figures, drawing on modes of thinking rooted in lyric poetry, explore what the world looks like when seen as created and received as a gift. Lyric thinking, he argues, dramatizes a mind and spirit reaching toward a beauty and complexity that can never be fully grasped but yet can be lifted up in praise and wonder, bafflement and song. The specific lyric responses on display here- resisting meaninglessness, wrestling with contrary impulses to both celebrate and turn away, embracing as revelatory the failure to see fully, and redeeming the world by lifting its particulars into song-can be seen as acts of theological thinking, deepening and extending the doctrine of creation by living out its implications in the world. If the world were created out of nothing save the desire to extend the love expressed within the Trinity to creatures who might reflect it back in wonder and praise, lyric ways of making sense of the world-breaking free of straightforward conceptualization and argument and exploring inward, nuanced, and continually made and remade responses to the world's particulars-bring this idea forward as a living thing. Drawing on his own work as a literary scholar and a lyric essayist, Gardner here gives us the tools to both understand and join in performing creative theological explorations of great subtlety, beauty, and originality.

The majority of full-time Christian workers are not missionaries or pastors. They are in the so-called secular workplace. They are teachers, accountants, farmers, factory workers, and store clerks. They are no less called to ministry than their pastors, deacons, or elders, but carrying out that ministry is not easy.

With 31 short, easy-to-digest chapters, R. Larry Moyer provides encouragement and inspiration for living out your faith, regardless of where you work. With real-life examples, suggestions for how to pray, and Scripture passages to study, this book will equip any Christian to spread the good news every day.

Check out Dr. Moyer's and EvanTell's latest project act111.org

This concise, easy-to-use resource from a team of fresh new voices provides spiritual nourishment and encouragement to help extraordinary ministers of Holy Communion prepare for their role during liturgy or visits to the sick and homebound. By focusing on the Sunday gospels and the Communion minister's own personal reflection, this indispensable aid helps those involved to reverently and prayerfully prepare and carry out their ministry. Living Liturgy (TM) for Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion begins with the First Sunday of Advent 2019 and includes the following: Sunday-by-Sunday gospels Personal reflections for Communion ministers A brief theology of the ministry A separate insert card with the rite for Administration of Communion to the Sick by an Extraordinary Minister A page for inscription of the minister's name and church

A complete prayer book in the Slavonic language printed with the Cyrillic (old orthography) alphabet. Includes morning and evening prayers, the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, various Akathists and Canons annd much more besides.

The sacred Spanish-language hymns known as alabados originated in colonial New Spain in the eighteenth century. The Alabados of New Mexico includes a selection of the most beloved and most often sung hymns, in English and Spanish, as well as a basic explanation of the alabado. Introductory material discusses the sources of alabados and the form's origin in late medieval spirituality. Thomas Steele defines terms and discusses the alabado as poetry, music, and oral tradition. The 126 bilingual alabados are organized by theme, including the Christ child and holy family, passion narratives, sacraments, and prayers, etc. Steele includes complete texts and extensive commentaries. He has devoted decades to collecting and studying New Mexico's alabados and his annotations are enriched by his access to many versions of each hymn.

Missal text with notes and commentary: a fundamental tool for the study of both insular and continental medieval mass-books. The manuscript edited in these volumes is a fine and elaborate missal of Westminster Abbey, given by Nicholas Lytlington (abbot 1362-1386) and often referred to by his name. As well as its importance as a particularly full missaltext from a royal abbey (it includes an extensive coronation ritual), it is also the only monastic representative of a `Sarum' type of sacramentary to have received a modern edition. John Wickham Legg's publication of this manuscript was an early milestone in the Henry Bradshaw Society programme, and is particularly notable for its extensive critical notes: employing over fifty other manuscripts, as well as printed sources, Legg provided a commentary whichgives an extraordinarily comprehensive view of texts for the celebration of mass in the middle ages. His work remains, over a century after its publication, a fundamental and indispensible tool for the study of medieval mass-books, both insular and continental. Reissue; First published 1891, 1895 and 1897 in three separate volumes.

This imaginative and comprehensive book offers an abundance of resources and guidelines for one of the most important and difficult things any church can do: running a family service. Drawing on her extensive work in the theatre and church, Sarah Lenton shares with infectious enthusiasm her tried and tested ideas for conducting eucharistic celebrations for all ages with confidence and joy. At the heart of the book is a series of ready-to-use sermons for the feasts and seasons of the Christian year. These include dialogue, props, jokes, and ideas for engaging every member of the congregation. In addition, it provides practical guidance for: * Creating a welcoming, worshipful space for all * Developing rapport with children and holding their attention * Channelling children's natural energy into learning and worship * Using music and props creatively * Interacting with adults and children simultaneously * Managing noise * Making the most of the resources you have. Complete outlines for a children's mass, a children's liturgy for Good Friday and an illustrated Stations of the Cross are also included.

In a rich survey encompassing music, art, literature, and architecture, Professor Davies studies the revolution in religious thought and worship in England during the Victorian era. One main trend, the return to conservatism, is revealed in the renascence of Roman Catholic worship, the Oxford Movement, and the search for traditional architecture and liturgy. This impetus was balanced by the drive toward innovation, through the Social Gospel, the Church's confrontation with science, and the new forms of worship sought by the Baptists, Congregationalists, and others. This is the fourth in a five-volume series. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In a rich survey encompassing music, art, literature, and architecture, Professor Davies studies the revolution in religious thought and worship in England during the Victorian era. One main trend, the return to conservatism, is revealed in the renascence of Roman Catholic worship, the Oxford Movement, and the search for traditional architecture and liturgy. This impetus was balanced by the drive toward innovation, through the Social Gospel, the Church's confrontation with science, and the new forms of worship sought by the Baptists, Congregationalists, and others. This is the fourth in a five-volume series. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.