God thinks the world is worth saving and invites us to believe this too. For anyone who thinks Lent is a seemingly endless time of self-sacrifice and introspection, this 6-week study offers a breath of fresh air. Author George Donigian challenges readers to connect their inner spiritual life with outward actions of compassion in the world. He inspires readers to pray about daily news events and respond to the needs around them by serving others, feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, offering healing, and extending friendship. Give up apathy for Lent this year

Existing books on Christian ritual and the sacraments tend to presuppose a good acquaintance with Roman Catholic thought and practice. Today, however, even at Catholic institutions students tend to lack even a basic knowledge of Christian ritual. Moreover, for many modern people the word "ritual" carries negative connotations of rigidity and boredom. In this accessibly-written book two noted authors offer an engaging introduction to this important topic. Their goal is first to demonstrate that celebration, ritual and symbol are already central to the readers' lives, even though most do not see their actions as symbolic or ritualistic. Once this point has been made, the book connects central Christian symbols to the symbols and rituals already present in the readers' lives. The Christian theology of symbol, ritual, and sacrament is thus placed in the context of everyday life. The authors go on to discuss such questions as how rituals establish and maintain power relationships, how "official" rituals are different from other "popular" Christian rituals and devotions, and how Christian rituals function in the process of human "salvation." Their lively yet solidly grounded work will appeal to intelligent lay readers and discussion groups, as well as being useful for courses in ritual and the sacraments at the undergraduate and seminary level.

One of the great achievements of twentieth-century theology, Joseph Jungmann's work is a comprehensive study of the origins, evolution, and theology of the Mass from its earliest forms to the dawn of Vatican II. With a revised chapter previously unavailable in the two-volume edition.

Bryan Spinks is one of the world's leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author's previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship. This book will be aimed at undergraduate and graduate theology students, clergy and theologically literate laity. It will assume some technical knowledge (i. e. it is not an introduction to liturgy or introduction to sacraments), but will attempt to outline what the evidence is, and what current scholars think. On occasions it will advance or argue for why one interpretation is preferable to another.

Anne Fedele offers a comprehensive ethnography of alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Drawing on more than three years of extensive fieldwork, she describes how pilgrims from Italy, Spain, Britain, and the United States interpret Catholic figures, symbols, and sites according to spiritual theories and practices derived from the transnational Neopagan movement. Fedele pays particular attention to the life stories of the pilgrims, the crafted rituals they perform, and the spiritual-esoteric literature they draw upon. She examines how they devise their rituals; why this kind of spirituality is increasingly prevalent in the West; and the influence of anthropological literature on the pilgrims. Among these pilgrims, spirituality is lived and negotiated in interaction with each other and with textual sources: Jungian psychology, Goddess mythology, and ''indigenous'' traditions merge into a corpus of theories and practices centered upon the worship of divinities such as the Goddess, Mother Earth, and the sacralization of the reproductive cycle. The pilgrims' rituals present a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and the medical establishment and have critical implications for contemporary discourses on gender. Looking for Mary Magdalene is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in ritual and pilgrimage.

"A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey" gives you the opportunity to walk around the Abbey church and cloisters with suggestions for reflection and prayer. If you have not visited the Abbey it is an excellent tool with which to help visualise the sites of Iona. Included are some stories about the Abbey and life in the community from the perspective of Iona Community members. At each point of your pilgrimage around the Abbey and the Abbey grounds you will find: some background information; a reflection; and a simple prayer. 'Iona is a place where people come looking for answers - to get in touch with their spiritual needs and find a new vision of themselves and their lives, and of our lives together.' From "A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey": Candles in the Abbey Some candles flickered in a downdraft; some stood still, lighting, in orange flame, the precious dark. Their silence created silence; their dimness in so vast a space soothed the restless soul. Their light was a quiet presence that spoke of the light, the real presence, come to meet us at the appointed place. He was there, though human eyes are not given to see him. Hearts, open to receive him, rested awhile in a circle of peace. David Levison is a member of the Iona Community.

Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including Browning's Christmas-Eve and Tennyson's In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by Dissenting, Broad Church and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book features major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings are studied in detail here. Form and Faith presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.

Christians frequently come into conflict with themselves and others over such matters as music, popular culture, and worship style. Yet they usually lack any theology of art or taste adequate to deal with aesthetic disputes. In this provocative book, Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive, 'ecumenical' approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has 'teeth but no fangs'.

While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in the making of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline? In exploring the complex relation between taste, religious imagination, and faith, Brown offers a new perspective on what it means to be spiritual, religious, and indeed Christian.

Isho'yabh IV was a schoolmaster of very high repute and later became the Catholicos of the Church of the East. He wrote tracts on liturgical matters in the first two decades of the eleventh in order to restore the traditions of his church. In Nestorian Questions of the Administration of the Eucharist, Willem Cornelis van Unnik gives a comprehensive research of the liturgical writings of Isho'yabh IV in the context of the 'Nestorian' liturgical tradition based on the manuscript tradition. After an analysis of the text, the author gives an annotated English translation of the text and a reproduction of the original Syriac text with a critical apparatus.

The Advent season is filled with rich themes that have fascinated poets. In Run, Shepherds, Run, Bill Countryman presents a poem a day for devotional reading during Advent and the twelve days of Christmas. Readers will find classic poets they know and love, including George Herbert, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as contemporary poets, known and unknown. Run, Shepherds, Run includes helpful hints for reading poetry, for those who have less experience reading it than others, as well as useful annotations to help readers with older language that may not have easily apparent meanings for today's readers.

In this engaging series of Advent meditations, David Rhodes uses stories and experiences from the streets of the inner city to help us rediscover the startling message of the gospel. Sometimes humorous, often moving, the book makes adventurous reading. If we run the risk of loving, we soon learn the meaning of vulnerability. Mary knew from the beginning that life with the Christ-child was not going to be easy. Perhaps we should expect it to be no less challenging to live as Christ's disciples today. Lisa Friend, who worked as a prostitute before coming to faith, writes: 'How can you believe you are worth anything if you have been told all your life that you are less than nothing? David Rhodes writes about us, the outcasts. He communicates the radical challenge of God's love to the Church and to Christians everywhere.' 'If you buy only one book this Christmas, then this is the one to go for.' Reform magazine. ' . . . urges us to look beyond the brightly lit shops and glitter of lights to see the true angels of Christmas, many of whom wear 'ragged trousers'.' The War Cry. "'This book may disturb, it may infuriate, but it may lead to a new realisation of Christmas and if that sounds trite, believe me it is not.'" Digest

Winner - Edward Stanford Travel Memoir of the Year 2019. Shortlisted - Rathbones Folio Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize, and Somerset Maugham Award 2019. In 2013 Guy Stagg made a pilgrimage from Canterbury to Jerusalem. Though a non-believer, he began the journey 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. The Crossway is an account of this extraordinary adventure. Having left home on New Year's Day, Stagg climbed over the Alps in midwinter, spent Easter in Rome with a new pope, joined mass protests in Istanbul and survived a terrorist attack in Lebanon. Travelling without support, he had to rely each night on the generosity of strangers, staying with monks and nuns, priests and families. As a result, he gained a unique insight into the lives of contemporary believers and learnt the fascinating stories of the soldiers and saints, missionaries and martyrs who had followed these paths before him. The Crossway is a book full of wonders, mixing travel and memoir, history and current affairs. At once intimate and epic, it charts the author's struggle to walk towards recovery, and asks whether religion can still have meaning for those without faith. A BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week' in 2018.