Guided by Ignatian principles, this book looks at techniques for prayer, ways of focusing prayer, problems in prayer and ways of moving on.

Jan Johnson guides you through 61 carefully chosen selections from renowned author Dallas Willard's best selling book, Renovation of the Heart . With each selection, you'll progress through Dr. Willard's plan for renovating the complete person.
Each provocative reflection includes a thoughtful, meaty selection by Dallas Willard along with Jan's illuminating personal stories, plus suggestions for making the concepts come alive in your own experience.

Ritual has emerged as a major focus of academic interest. As a concept, the idea of ritual integrates the study of behavior both within and beyond the domain of religion. Ritual can be both secular and religious in character. There is renewed interest in questions such as: Why do rituals exist at all? What has been, and continues to be, their place in society? How do they change over time? Such questions exist against a backdrop of assumptions about development, modernization, and disenchantment of the world.Written with the specific needs of students of religious studies in mind, "Ritual: Key Concepts in Religion" surveys the field of ritual studies, looking at it both historically within anthropology and in terms of its contemporary relevance to world events.

In clear and often delightful prose, Casey brings out the personal techniques and practicalities involved in transforming prayer from an "activity" to a way of life. The freshness of his language reinforces the basic premise of this book that spiritual communion with God must be lived, not merely studied or repeated ritualistically.

Presents the late Cardinal's personal reflections on themes such as prayer, solitude, and living the Christian life today. A beautiful book with full colour photographs.

We often hear of the lack of and the need for, strong role models in our society. This worship service, about 10 biblical women who overcame seemingly impossible situations by being faithful to God, provides just such role models, The traumatic experiences and depths of faith of these women, though poignant, are rarely considered in today's society.
These 10 women came from various levels of society and had different types of problems. Yet, they all knew God as their only hope and refuge. An excellent resource for Mother's Day, it is also great for other special occasions.
Characters included are:
- Hagar
- Sarah
- Moses' mother
- Rahab
- Deborah
- Naomi and Ruth
- Hannah
- Esther
- Elizabeth
Lynda Pujado is a graduate of the University of Minnesota and has also studied at Moody Bible Institute and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. She has taught in schools in England and Spain as well as the United States. She currently resides in Palatine, Illinois, with her family.

Behind the universe with its multitude of suns and worlds and underlying all the cosmic activities, guiding the evolution of life itself, is a Power, Force or Mind which is recognized as First Cause. This Supreme Being is spoken of as God. Yet theology teaches that if one will pray, entreat, solicit or beg to this God vigorously enough and with sufficient faith, He may be persuaded to grant one's requests, irrespective of their merits. Dr. Kuhn makes it clear that the assumption that prayers are heard and answered by a Cosmic Divine Power is entirely groundless and should be abandoned for a saner hypothesis. He provides us a clue to such hypothesis.

Robert Frykenberg's insightful study explores and enhances historical understandings of Christian communities, cultures, and institutions within the Indian world from their beginnings down to the present. As one out of several manifestations of a newly emerging World Christianity, in which Christians of a Post-Christian West are a minority, it has focused upon those trans-cultural interactions within Hindu and Muslim environments which have made Christians in this part of the world distinctive. It seeks to uncover various complexities in the proliferation of Christianity in its many forms and to examine processes by which Christian elements intermingled with indigenous cultures and which resulted in multiple identities, and also left imprints upon various cultures of India.
Thomas Christians believe that the Apostle Thomas came to India in 52 A.D./C.E., and that he left seven congregations to carry on the Mission of bringing the Gospel to India. In our day the impulse of this Mission is more alive than ever. Catholics, in three hierarchies, have become most numerous; and various Evangelicals/Protestant communities constitute the third great tradition. With the rise of Pentecostalism, a fourth great wave of Christian expansion in India has occurred. Starting with movements that began a century ago, there are now ten to fifteen times more missionaries than ever before, virtually all of them Indian. Needless to say, Christianity in India is profoundly Indian and Frykenberg provides a fascinating guide to its unique history and practice.

Best-selling Catholic author Donna-Marie Cooper O'Boyle encourages Catholic families to reclaim a significant tradition: setting apart Sundays as a day of worship, true rest, teaching, and simply spending precious time together. In fifty-two creative chapters Donna-Marie presents fun and meaningful ideas for all fifty-two weeks of the year inspired by the seasons (both natural and liturgical), holidays, Saints days, and holy Scripture, to help keep Sundays holy, just as God said we should!

Father Brown reflects here not only on those annunciations of Jesus' forthcoming birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but also on the beautiful canticles, the Magnificat and the Benedictus, and on the origins of Jesus as given in the first words of the New Testament.

Amalar of Metz s "On the Liturgy" (the "Liber officialis," or "De ecclesiastico officio") was one of the most widely read and circulated texts of the Carolingian era. The fruit of lifelong reflection and study in the wake of liturgical reform in the early ninth century, Amalar s commentary inaugurated the Western medieval tradition of allegorical liturgical exegesis and has bequeathed a wealth of information about the contents and conduct of the early medieval Mass and Office. In 158 chapters divided into four books, "On""the Liturgy" addresses the entire phenomenon of Christian worship, from liturgical prayers to clerical vestments to the bodily gestures of the celebrants. For Amalar, this liturgical diversity aimed, above all, to commemorate the life of Christ, to provide the Christian faithful with moral instruction, and to recall Old Testament precursors of Christian rites. To uncover these layers of meaning, Amalar employed interpretive techniques and ideas that he had inherited from the patristic tradition of biblical exegesis a novel approach that proved both deeply popular and, among his contemporaries, highly controversial.

This volume adapts the text of Jean Michel Hanssens s monumental 1948 edition of Amalar s treatise and provides the first complete translation into a modern language."

Musical activity is one of the most ubiquitous and highly valued forms of social interaction in North America (to say nothing of world over), being engaged from sporting events to political rallies, concerts to churches. Moreover, music's use as an affective agent for political and religious programs suggests that it has ethical significance. Indeed, many have said as much. It is surprising then that music's ethical significance remains one of the most undertheorized aspects of both moral philosophy and music scholarship. Music for Others: Care, Justice, and Relational Ethics in Christian Music fills part of this scholarly gap by focusing on the religious aspects of musical activity, particularly on the practices of Christian communities. Based on ethnomusicological fieldwork at three Protestant churches and a group of seminary students studying in an immersion course at South by Southwest (SXSW), and synthesizing theories of discourse, formation, and care ethics oriented towards restorative justice, it first argues that relationships are ontological for both human beings and musical activity. It further argues that musical meaning and emotion converge in human bodies such that music participates in personal and communal identity construction in affective ways-yet these constructions are not always just. Thus, considering these aspects of music's ways of being in the world, Music for Others finally argues that music is ethical when it preserves people in and restores people to just relationships with each other, and thereby with God.

Of the many works he wrote during 1848, his "richest and most fruitful year," Kierkegaard specified "Practice in Christianity" as "the most perfect and truest thing." In his reflections on such topics as Christ's invitation to the burdened, the imitatio Christi, the possibility of offense, and the exalted Christ, he takes as his theme the requirement of Christian ideality in the context of divine grace. Addressing clergy and laity alike, Kierkegaard asserts the need for institutional and personal admission of the accommodation of Christianity to the culture and to the individual misuse of grace. As a corrective defense, the book is an attempt to find, ideally, a basis for the established order, which would involve the order's ability to acknowledge the Christian requirement, confess its own distance from it, and resort to grace for support in its continued existence. At the same time the book can be read as the beginning of Kierkegaard's attack on Christendom. Because of the high ideality of the contents and in order to prevent the misunderstanding that he himself represented that ideality, Kierkegaard writes under a new pseudonym, Anti-Climacus.

In this groundbreaking, interdisciplinary study, Andrew Walker White explores the origins of Byzantine ritual - the rites of the early Greek Orthodox Church - and its unique relationship with traditional theatre. Tracing the secularization of pagan theatre, the rise of rhetoric as an alternative to acting, as well as the transmission of ancient methods of musical composition into the Byzantine era, White demonstrates how Christian ritual was in effect a post-theatrical performing art, created by intellectuals who were fully aware of traditional theatre but who endeavoured to avoid it. The book explores how Orthodox rites avoid the aesthetic appreciation associated with secular art, and conducts an in-depth study (and reconstruction) of the late Byzantine Service of the Furnace. Often treated as a liturgical drama, White translates and delineates the features of five extant versions, to show how and why it generated widely diverse audience reactions in both medieval times and our own.