David Brown is a widely-respected British theologian who initially made his mark in analytic discussions of Christian doctrine, such as the Trinity. However, with the publication of Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (1999) his career entered a distinctly new phase, focused on theology, imagination, and the arts. Four related volumes followed, dealing with biblical interpretation, Christian discipleship, art and icons, place and space, the body, music, metaphor, drama, liturgy, the sacraments, religious experience, and popular culture. According to Brown, the fundamental thesis underlying all five volumes is that both natural and revealed theology are in crisis, and the only way out is to give proper attention to the cultural embeddedness of both.
Theology, Aesthetics, and Culture is the first attempt to assess the significance of this remarkable series, and its contributors include some of the most prominent philosophers, theologians, historians, biblical scholars, literary scholars, and cultural critics writing today. Aside from its exceptional interdisciplinary range and ecumenical line-up, a distinctive feature is sustained consideration of Brown's analysis of popular culture. Given the stature of the contributors, this volume is not merely of interest as a commentary on Brown's work, but also makes an important original contribution to our understandings of theology, aesthetics, and culture as they relate to the life of the Church, academy, and human society.

How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be? Thirteenth and fourteenth century Christian Aristotelians thought the answer had to be "transubstantiation."
Acclaimed philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, investigates these later medieval theories of the Eucharist, concentrating on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, with some reference to Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. She examines how their efforts to formulate and integrate this theological datum provoked them to make significant revisions in Aristotelian philosophical theories regarding the metaphysical structure and location of bodies, differences between substance and accidents, causality and causal powers, and fundamental types of change. Setting these developments in the theological context that gave rise to the question draws attention to their understandings of the sacraments and their purpose, as well as to their understandings of the nature and destiny of human beings.
Adams concludes that their philosophical modifications were mostly not ad hoc, but systematic revisions that made room for transubstantiation while allowing Aristotle still to describe what normally and naturally happens. By contrast, their picture of the world as it will be (after the last judgment) seems less well integrated with their sacramental theology and their understandings of human nature.

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.

You've chosen the godparents, dressed the baby in yards of white, and headed to church for the christening. Now what?What does the sacrament of baptism mean in your child's life - and yours? In Taking the Plunge, parents explore how the Baptismal Covenant helps to shape the experience of raising children. What are you promising when you baptize your child? Why are "please" and "thank you" theological words, not simply polite things to say? Anne Kitch writes with a light touch and includes plenty of real-life stories."

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.

During study of the scriptures for his previous book, Alpha and Omega, it became apparent to the author that when the Lord talked to the disciples about His coming for Israel, He also intimated that there is likely to be a period of delay between the signs of His expected coming, and His actual appearance for them as their Messiah. In the light of this the author decided to follow through and find out what this period may involve, and his conclusions are set out in this book. Whilst Israel, the Lord's people, remain special to Him, even more important is that His Word and promises will be kept, and that His Father's will is completed in its perfection. This book is an attempt to interpret how Israel will be expected to play its part, and how in the process it will be proved faithful before the Lords return.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.

Contains sections from the Order of Christian Funerals

Vigil for the Deceased and Rite of Committal. It also

includes General Norms for Catholic Funerals.

With the decision to provide of a scholarly edition of the Works of John Wesley in the 1950s, Methodist Studies emerged as a fresh academic venture. Building on the foundation laid by Frank Baker, Albert Outler, and other pioneers of the discipline, this handbook provides an overview of the best current scholarship in the field. The forty-two included essays are representative of the voices of a new generation of international scholars, summarising and expanding on topical research, and considering where their work may lead Methodist Studies in the future.
Thematically ordered, the handbook provides new insights into the founders, history, structures, and theology of Methodism, and into ongoing developments in the practice and experience of the contemporary movement. Key themes explored include worship forms, mission, ecumenism, and engagement with contemporary ethical and political debate.

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 culture.

While We Wait takes group participants deeper into their own journey toward God by providing weekly readings and group session plans. The first two chapters focus on the questions asked by Tamar, Zechariah, and Ruth, while the later chapters focus on the questions of Elizabeth, Mary, and the Magi. Coming from a fresh angle, While We Wait provides new territory for connecting readers with their own faith questions.

While We Wait addresses Advent as God's deepening search for us. The chapters move readers into the different levels in which we engage God. Redding helps readers understand that real-life struggles and questions are a legitimate part of Advent's spiritual exploration.

While We Wait takes group participants deeper into their own journey toward God by providing weekly readings and group session plans. A complete Advent study, While We Wait offers readers a unique perspective, clear instructions for small-group use, daily scripture accompanied by questions, and spiritual disciplines.

The next installment in the critically praised lectionary series that focuses on women's stories. In this second volume of the three-volume Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church, widely praised womanist bible scholar and priest Wil Gafney selects scripture readings that emphasize women's stories. Focusing especially on the Gospel of Mark, Year B of A Women's Lectionary features Gafney's fresh, inclusive, and thought-provoking translations of every reading, alongside commentary on each reading. Designed for liturgical use or scriptural study, this resource offers a new perspective on the Bible and the liturgical year. “Gafney's paradigm-shifting scholarship will influence biblical preaching and teaching for generations to come." —National Catholic Reporter

The dramatic events of the days leading up to Easter Sunday are expressed through biblical readings and the reflections of several well-known Iona Community members: Ruth Burgess - Jan Sutch Pickard - Tom Gordon - Brian Woodcock - Peter Millar - Kathy Galloway - Leith Fisher - Joy Mead - John Davies - Yvonne Morland Connecting the denials, betrayals, suffering and eventual new dawn of this life-changing week with what is happening in our own world today, this book accompanies the reader as an insightful guide. To travel through Holy Week with awareness leads to a greater understanding of God and ourselves.

From the moment that Tsars as well as hierarchs realized that having their subjects go to confession could make them better citizens as well as better Christians, the sacrament of penance in the Russian empire became a political tool, a devotional exercise, a means of education, and a literary genre. It defined who was Orthodox, and who was 'other.' First encouraging Russian subjects to participate in confession to improve them and to integrate them into a reforming Church and State, authorities then turned to confession to integrate converts of other nationalities. But the sacrament was not only something that state and religious authorities sought to impose on an unwilling populace. Confession could provide an opportunity for carefully crafted complaint. What state and church authorities initially imagined as a way of controlling an unruly population could be used by the same population as a way of telling their own story, or simply getting time off to attend to their inner lives. Good for the Souls brings Russia into the rich scholarly and popular literature on confession, penance, discipline, and gender in the modern world, and in doing so opens a key window onto church, state, and society. It draws on state laws, Synodal decrees, archives, manuscript repositories, clerical guides, sermons, saints' lives, works of literature, and visual depictions of the sacrament in those books and on church iconostases. Russia, Ukraine, and Orthodox Christianity emerge both as part of the European, transatlantic religious continuum-and, in crucial ways, distinct from it.

The Sacraments of baptism and confirmation are called the sacraments of enlightenment. They are called this because they illuminate the Christian heart and invite us into a community of enlightenment and wisdom. They are the essential passages through which Christians pass in their progressive understanding of the divine. In Come to the Light, Richard Fragomeni meditates on the meaning of the elements that make up baptism and confirmation: water, fire, and oil. Water is the wave into which we are plunged that brings both life and death, that draws us down deep into God. Fire is the refining purity and the passion for God that transforms our souls. The oil is the balm that soothes us and anoints us as we move to a different state in our relationship with God.

How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be? Thirteenth and fourteenth century Christian Aristotelians thought the answer had to be "transubstantiation."
Acclaimed philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, investigates these later medieval theories of the Eucharist, concentrating on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, with some reference to Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. She examines how their efforts to formulate and integrate this theological datum provoked them to make significant revisions in Aristotelian philosophical theories regarding the metaphysical structure and location of bodies, differences between substance and accidents, causality and causal powers, and fundamental types of change. Setting these developments in the theological context that gave rise to the question draws attention to their understandings of the sacraments and their purpose, as well as to their understandings of the nature and destiny of human beings.
Adams concludes that their philosophical modifications were mostly not ad hoc, but systematic revisions that made room for transubstantiation while allowing Aristotle still to describe what normally and naturally happens. By contrast, their picture of the world as it will be (after the last judgment) seems less well integrated with their sacramental theology and their understandings of human nature.