Lent is not about giving up or taking up, but a radical opening up: the opening up of our lives to God's transformative kingdom. That is the challenge Trystan Owain Hughes sets in Opening Our Lives. Through practical daily devotions he calls on us to open our eyes to God's presence, our ears to his call, our hearts to his love, our ways to his will, our actions to his compassion and our pain to his peace.

What does it mean for music to be considered local in contemporary Christian communities, and who shapes this meaning? Through what musical processes have religious beliefs and practices once 'foreign' become 'indigenous'? How does using indigenous musical practices aid in the growth of local Christian religious practices and beliefs? How are musical constructions of the local intertwined with regional, national or transnational religious influences and cosmopolitanisms? Making Congregational Music Local in Christian Communities Worldwide explores the ways that congregational music-making is integral to how communities around the world understand what it means to be 'local' and 'Christian'. Showing how locality is produced, negotiated, and performed through music-making, this book draws on case studies from every continent that integrate insights from anthropology, ethnomusicology, cultural geography, mission studies, and practical theology. Four sections explore a central aspect of the production of locality through congregational music-making, addressing the role of historical trends, cultural and political power, diverging values, and translocal influences in defining what it means to be 'local' and 'Christian'. This book contends that examining musical processes of localization can lead scholars to new understandings of the meaning and power of Christian belief and practice.

A gift edition of Daily Prayer For All Seasons, with a bonded leather cover, two ribbon bookmarks, gilded edges, a presentation page, and shrink-wrapped in gift box. People in all kinds of religious traditions, including Judaism and Christianity, have been marking time with prayer for almost as long as we've divided the day into hours. "Praying the hours," as it's called, has always reminded us that God walks with us throughout each day; "praying the hours" is also a way that the community of faith comes together, whether we're united all in one place or scattered like raindrops. In the Episcopal Church, the Book of Common Prayer offers beautiful services for morning, noon, evening, and nighttime in a section called "The Daily Office" (pp 35-146). Daily Prayer for All Seasons offers a variation on that theme, where a complete service covers one or two pages, thereby eliminating the need to shuffle prayer books and hymnals. Daily Prayer for All Seasons works for individuals, small groups, and/or congregations. This prayer book presents a variety of images of God, uses inclusive and expansive language for and about God, and presents a rich variety of language, including poetry, meditation, and prayers from the broader community of faith.

A glimpse into the ideals and insights that have shaped one of the Episcopal Church's most widely known parishes, St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Rick Fabian, well known as one of the founding priests of St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, writes his "treatise in eleven parts" on the significant signs of communal life: the welcoming table, authority (human and biblical), baptism, mystery, marriage, children, the spirit, reconciliation, the worship year, beauty, and hospitality. This "revisionist approach to sacramental theology" offers a glimpse into the depth of thought behind the praxis that has shaped one of the Episcopal Church's most widely known parishes.

Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019.

Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019.

'An extraordinary travelogue, strange and brilliant' - i

In 2013 Guy Stagg walked from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the pilgrimage after suffering several years of mental illness, hoping the ritual would heal him. For ten months he hiked alone on ancient paths, crossing ten countries and more than 5,500 kilometres. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the charity of strangers.

The Crossway is an account of Stagg's extraordinary journey. It describes the dangers he faced on the road, captures the people he met and the landscapes he experienced, offers a unique insight into contemporary faith, and – most movingly – lays bare his struggle to escape the past and walk towards recovery.

It was a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' on publication.

An Anglican priest hands out brass knuckles to his congregation to guard his church from anti-Christmas fanatics. Fascists insist that the real Christmas is the Winter Solstice, while Communists stage atheist musicals outside of churches on Christmas Eve. Activists vandalize shops that set out holiday advertising in October and anti-consumerists sing parody carols in shopping malls. Is there such a thing as a War on Christmas? As Gerry Bowler demonstrates in this entertaining book, there is and always has been a War, or rather, several wars, on Christmas. Christmas, a global phenomenon adored by billions and a backbone of international trade, is the biggest single event on the planet. For Christians it is the second-most sacred date on the calendar. But whether one celebrates it or not, it engages billions of people who are caught up in its commercialism, music, sentiment, travel, and frenetic busyness. Since its controversial invention in the Roman Empire, Christmas has struggled with paganism, popular culture, fierce Christian opposition to its celebration, its abolition in Scotland and New England, and its neglect and near-death experience in the 1700s, only to be miraculously reinvented in the 1800s. The twentieth century saw it opposed by Bolsheviks, twisted by Hitler, and appropriated by every special interest group in the industrialized world. Lately it has been caught up in the cultural struggles between the left and the right in America, often misinterpreted as a war on Christmas, when the fight is really over whether religion in general will be allowed a public face. Gerry Bowler tells the fascinating story of the tug-of-war over Christmas, replete with cross-dressing priests, ranting Puritans, atheist witches, the League of the Militant Godless, aesthetic terrorists in Quebec and rap-singing Santa killers in Spain.

The issue of baptism has troubled Protestants for centuries. Should infants be baptized before their faith is conscious, or does God command the baptism of babies whose parents have been baptized? Popular New Testament scholar Scot McKnight makes a biblical case for infant baptism, exploring its history, meaning, and practice and showing that infant baptism is the most historic Christian way of forming children into the faith. He explains that the church's practice of infant baptism developed straight from the Bible and argues that it must begin with the family and then extend to the church. Baptism is not just an individual profession of faith: it takes a family and a church community to nurture a child into faith over time. McKnight explains infant baptism for readers coming from a tradition that baptizes adults only, and he counters criticisms that fail to consider the role of families in the formation of faith. The book includes a foreword by Todd Hunter and an afterword by Gerald McDermott.

OVER 2.5 MILLION COPIES IN PRINT Discover the secrets to new joy and sexual fulfillment in marriage that have helped millions of Christian couples maximize their intimacy. Here are the insights into your spouse's body, psychosexual makeup, and need for tender, unselfish affection that can help you discover new depths of intimacy. It's the perfect book for: Engaged couples and newlyweds who want to make lovemaking a joy from the start Couples who have been married for years and want to maintain the flame or rekindle the embers Every husband or wife who wants to be a better lover The Act of Marriage enriches you and your spouse's physical relationship by offering biblical principles, goals, guidelines, and charts that cover an array of vital topics, such as: The sanctity of sex What sex means to a woman What sex means to a man The art of lovemaking Sane family planning Practical answers to common sex questions And more! Plus, this updated and expanded edition features sections that discuss "sex after sixty" and five reasons why God created sex, all supported by the very latest findings in the fields of medicine and sociology.

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' - conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today - to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals' experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

When the story of modernity is told from a theological perspective, music is routinely ignored-despite its pervasiveness in modern culture and the manifold ways it has been intertwined with modernity's ambivalent relation to the Christian God. In conversation with musicologists and music theorists, this collection of essays shows that the practices of music and the discourses it has generated bear their own kind of witness to some of the pivotal theological currents and counter-currents shaping modernity. Music has been deeply affected by these currents and in some cases may have played a part in generating them. In addition, Jeremy Begbie argues that music is capable of yielding highly effective ways of addressing and moving beyond some of the more intractable theological problems and dilemmas which modernity has bequeathed to us. Music, Modernity, and God includes studies of Calvin, Luther, and Bach, an exposition of the intriguing tussle between Rousseau and the composer Rameau, and an account of the heady exaltation of music to be found in the early German Romantics. Particular attention is paid to the complex relations between music and language, and the ways in which theology, a discipline involving language at its heart, can come to terms with practices like music, practices which are coherent and meaningful but which in many respects do not operate in language-like ways.

The Order of St Gilbert was the only specifically English religious order founded in the Middle Ages. The edition gathers together fragments surviving in Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 115 (A.5.5); Cambridge, St John's College, MS N. 1; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 36 (SC 1678), f. 110v; Cambridge, Pembroke' College, MS 226. The first part is volume 59 of the present series.

Saiva liturgy is performed in a world that oscillates: a world permeated by the presence of Siva, where humans live in a condition of bondage and where the highest aim of the soul is to attain liberation from its fetters. In this account of Indian temple ritual, Richard Davis uses medieval Hindu texts to describe the world as it is envisioned by Saiva siddhanta and the way daily worship reflects and acts within that world. He argues that this worship is not simply a set of ritualized gestures, but rather a daily catechism in which the worshiper puts into action all the major themes of Saiva philosophy: the cyclic pattern of cosmic emission and reabsorption, the human path of attaining liberation, the manifestation of divinity in the world, and the proper interrelationship of humanity and god. In re-creating the convictions and intentions of a well-versed worshiper of the twelfth century, Davis moves back and forth between philosophical and ritual texts, demonstrating the fundamental Saiva belief that the capacities of humans to know about the world and to act within it are two inter-related modalities of the unitary power of consciousness.

Originally published in 1991.

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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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.

The complete text in Latin and English of the Catholic Roman Rite Triduum Masses (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Vigil) as well as Easter Sunday according to the 1962 Missale Romanum.

With the twelve-volume series Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press offers one of the most extensive and well-respected resources for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes will cover all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions.The page layout is truly unique. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essaysA'aEURO"one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume will also contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents. The printed volumes for Ordinary Time include the complementary stream during Year A, the complementary stream during the first half of Year B, the semicontinuous stream during the second half of Year B, and the semicontinuous stream during Year C. Beginning with the season after Pentecost in Year C, the alternate lections for Ordinary Time not in the print volumes will be available online at feastingontheword.net.