In Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War David J. Fine offers a surprising portrayal of Jewish officers in the German army as integrated and comfortably identified as both Jews and Germans. Fine explores how both Judaism and Christianity were experienced by Jewish soldiers at the front, making an important contribution to the study of the experience of religion in war. Fine shows how the encounter of German Jewish soldiers with the old world of the shtetl on the eastern front tested both their German and Jewish identities. Finally, utilizing published and unpublished sources including letters, diaries, memoirs, military service records, press accounts, photographs, drawings and tomb stone inscriptions, the author argues that antisemitism was not a primary factor in the war experience of Jewish soldiers.

Based on the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), "Feasting on the Word Worship Companion: Liturgies for Year A, Volume 1" is an invaluable aid that provides liturgical pieces needed in preparing for worship each week. Written and compiled by a team of eleven ecumenical and seasoned liturgy writers under the creative leadership of Kimberly Bracken Long, this resource offers a multitude of poetic prayers and responsive readings for all parts of worship and is meant to complement existing denominational resources. In addition, the weekly entries include questions for reflection and household prayers for morning and evening that are drawn from the lectionary, allowing churches to include them in their bulletin for parishioners to use throughout the week.

During times of the year when two different tracks of Old Testament texts are offered by the RCL, this resource offers an entire set of materials for each track. Also, a CD-ROM is included with each volume that enables planners to easily cut and paste relevant readings, prayers, and questions into worship bulletins.

Christianity Today's Book of the Year Award of Merit What happens when a diverse church glorifies the global God? We live in a time of unprecedented intercultural exchange, where our communities welcome people from around the world. Music and media from every culture are easily accessible, and our worship is infused with a rich variety of musical and liturgical influences. But leading worship in multicultural contexts can be a crosscultural experience for everybody. How do we help our congregations navigate the journey? Innovative worship leader Sandra Maria Van Opstal is known for crafting worship that embodies the global, multiethnic body of Christ. Likening diverse worship to a sumptuous banquet, she shows how worship leaders can set the table and welcome worshipers from every tribe and tongue. Van Opstal provides biblical foundations for multiethnic worship, with practical tools and resources for planning services that reflect God's invitation for all peoples to praise him. When multiethnic worship is done well, the church models reconciliation and prophetic justice, heralding God's good news for the world. Enter into the praise of our king, and let the nations rejoice!

The Gospel Coaltion Award of Distinction-Arts and Culture ECPA Top Shelf Award Winner For practitioners and fans, jazz expresses the deepest meanings of life. Its rich history and its distinctive elements like improvisation and syncopation unite to create an unrepeatable and inexpressible aesthetic experience. But for others, jazz is an enigma. Might jazz be better appreciated and understood in relation to the Christian faith? In this volume, theologian and jazz pianist William Edgar argues that the music of jazz cannot be properly understood apart from the Christian gospel, which like jazz moves from deep lament to inextinguishable joy. By tracing the development of jazz, placing it within the context of the African American experience, and exploring the work of jazz musicians like Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong, Edgar argues that jazz deeply resonates with the hope that is ultimately found in the good news of Jesus Christ. Grab a table. The show is about to begin.

In the past 20 years, a new paradigm has emerged around the study of festive dining as a seminal social practice that functioned as the matrix for the social formation of a variety of groups in the Greco-Roman world, including earliest Christianity and pre-Rabbinic Judaism. Most recently, an international team of scholars, organized as the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Meals in the Greco-Roman World, has developed this paradigm in a series of groundbreaking studies. This volume provides a collection of those studies in four areas of focus: The Typology of the Greco-Roman Banquet; The Archeology of the Banquet; Who Was at the Greco-Roman Banquets?; and The Culture of Reclining. Together they establish festive meals as an essential lens into social formation in the Greco-Roman world.

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

Prepare for your guests this Easter with a wonderful evangelistic booklet by Nicky Gumbel. Like Gumbel's Why Jesus?, this booklet is a concise and easy-to-read study of the very real questions surrounding Jesus that people might be thinking about at Easter: Who is Jesus? Why do we need him? Why did he have to die? Why does he matter to my life today? With hearts particularly open in the Easter season, these booklets are an effective evangelistic tool to pass out to guests at your services, sharing the Gospel in a warm and relevant way. Alpha is based on a pattern found in the New Testament of people bringing their friends, family, and work colleagues to meet Jesus. Alpha is an easy way to say to friends, "Come and see, come and explore your questions, come and hear about Jesus, come and see for yourself." Everyone is welcome at Alpha, but the program is designed especially for people who would not describe themselves as Christians or church-goers.

Lent is traditionally a time of repentance and penitence but it also offers an opportunity to see the world afresh, with a new sense of wonder. These readings, up to Easter and beyond, encourage us not only to regard ourselves with a healthy realism and accept responsibility for our shortcomings, but also to recognise the nature and purposes of God and the never-ending renewal of possibility, both within ourselves and in the world.

The Black Church is an institution that emerged in rebellion against injustice perpetrated upon black bodies. How is it, then, that black women's oppression persists in black churches that espouse theological and ethical commitments to justice? The book engages the Chalcedonian Definition as the starting point for exploring the body as a moral dilemma. It reveals how the body of Christ has historically posed a problem for the church, and has produced a Christian trajectory of violence that has resulted in the breaking of the body of Christ. A survey of the black body as an American problem provides the lens for understanding how the theological problem of body has functioned as a social dilemma for black people. An exploration of the black Social Gospel as the primary theological trajectory that has approached the problem of embodied difference reveals how body injustice, namely sexism, functions behind the veil of race in black churches.

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

Invites readers to use their own voices to enliven personal and collective worship. What ideas, hopes, dreams, and laments do the words of worship stir in our hearts and minds? What images of God swirl up out of our communal prayers and hymns to shape what we believe and who we are as people of faith? We know that words can heal and draw us together, or words can hurt and divide. Christian communities proclaim and embody this wisdom each time we celebrate God's Word made flesh in Jesus. Words for worship that arise from worshiping communities themselves, that give voice to their particular laments and joys, hold an oft-overlooked power. These communal words are both shaped by and spiral out to speak to global concerns. Leaders and worshipers in differing contexts write and speak in a wide variety of ways. As such, this book is for pastoral leaders, chaplains, and other ministers who imagine, craft, and offer worship words for each Sunday-and in the diversity of everyday moments.

In the face of religious and cultural diversity, some doubt whether Christian faith remains possible today. Critics claim that religion is irrational and violent, and the loudest defenders of Christianity are equally strident. In response, Desire, Faith, and the Darkness of God: Essays in Honor of Denys Turner explores the uncertainty essential to Christian commitment; it suggests that faith is moved by a desire for that which cannot be known. This approach is inspired by the tradition of Christian apophatic theology, which argues that language cannot capture divine transcendence. From this perspective, contemporary debates over God's existence represent a dead end: if God is not simply another object in the world, then faith begins not in abstract certainty but in a love that exceeds the limits of knowledge. The essays engage classic Christian thought alongside literary and philosophical sources ranging from Pseudo-Dionysius and Dante to Karl Marx and Jacques Derrida. Building on the work of Denys Turner, they indicate that the boundary between atheism and Christian thought is productively blurry. Instead of settling the stale dispute over whether religion is rationally justified, their work suggests instead that Christian life is an ethical and political practice impassioned by a God who transcends understanding.

A pocket-sized illustrated version of the Francis Thompson's classic poem, "The Hound of Heaven."

This book offers a systematic, chronological analysis of the role played by the human senses in experiencing pilgrimage and sacred places, past and present. It thus addresses two major gaps in the existing literature, by providing a broad historical narrative against which patterns of continuity and change can be more meaningfully discussed, and focusing on the central, but curiously neglected, area of the core dynamics of pilgrim experience. Bringing together the still-developing fields of Pilgrimage Studies and Sensory Studies in a historically framed conversation, this interdisciplinary study traces the dynamics of pilgrimage and engagement with holy places from the beginnings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition to the resurgence of interest evident in twenty-first century England. Perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, from history to neuroscience, are used to examine themes including sacred sites in the Bible and Early Church; pilgrimage and holy places in early and later medieval England; the impact of the English Reformation; revival of pilgrimage and sacred places during the nineteenth and twentieth Centuries; and the emergence of modern place-centred, popular 'spirituality'. Addressing the resurgence of pilgrimage and its persistent link to the attachment of meaning to place, this book will be a key reference for scholars of Pilgrimage Studies, History of Religion, Religious Studies, Sensory Studies, Medieval Studies, and Early Modern Studies.

The Miracle of Amsterdam presents a "cultural biography" of a Dutch devotional manifestation. According to tradition, on the night of March 15, 1345, a Eucharistic host thrown into a burning fireplace was found intact hours later. A chapel was erected over the spot, and the citizens of Amsterdam became devoted to their "Holy Stead." From the original Eucharistic processions evolved the custom of individual devotees walking around the chapel while praying in silence, and the growing international pilgrimage site contributed to the rise and prosperity of Amsterdam. With the arrival of the Reformation, the Amsterdam Miracle became a point of contention between Catholics and Protestants, and the changing fortunes of this devotion provide us a front-row seat to the challenges facing religion in the world today. Caspers and Margry trace these transformations and their significance through the centuries, from the Catholic medieval period through the Reformation to the present day.

In 1986, the remains of a man dressed as a pilgrim, complete with boots, a stout staf and a cockleshell, were accidentally uncovered in Worcester Cathedral. Who was he? Why had he been accorded burial in this place? What do his grave-goods mean? We can never know for sure, but sufficient evidence exists to suggest that the man was Robert Sutton, a wealthy dyer, and that he had been on the long pilgrimage to Compostela. Using a whole range of resources, Kathering Lack vividly brings to life Sutton's journey across war-torn and plague-ridden medieval Europe to the tomb of St James. Her exhilarating book will be of value not only to those concerned with medieval spirituality, but to the great number of people drawn to pilgrimages old and new. "Everystage of that first day's walk remained for ever etched on his mind. He had travelled this road before, several times, but mounted, as a solidly affluent citizen. Now he was on foot, conspicuously dressed and making such low progress that at times the view hardly changed from one hour to the next." The Cockleshell Pilgrim

These papers are the proceedings of the third international Exeter symposium, and promote an interdisciplinary approach to the understanding of the medieval mystical tradition in England. This is an area of study which does not fruitfully lend itself to any single academic discipline in isolation; here, theologians, historians, literary crtitics, textual scholars, those engaged in the study of semiotics and those involved in the practice of psychiatric medicine exchange ideas and explore together the differing aspects which engage them in this field of study. CONTRIBUTORS: R. BRADLEY, R. ALLEN, R. COPELAND, M. MOYES, J. HOGG, F. WOHRER, A. BALDWIN, S. DICKMAN, D. WALLACE

This book examines the collection of prayers known as the Qumran Hodayot (= Thanksgiving Hymns) in light of ancient visionary traditions, new developments in neuropsychology, and post-structuralist understandings of the embodied subject. The thesis of this book is that the ritualized reading of reports describing visionary experiences written in the first person "I" had the potential to create within the ancient reader the subjectivity of a visionary which can then predispose him to have a religious experience. This study examines how references to the body and the strategic arousal of emotions could have functioned within a practice of performative reading to engender a religious experience of ascent. In so doing, this book offers new interdisciplinary insights into meditative ritual reading as a religious practice for transformation in antiquity.

This book is the first to examine the depth, complexity and uniqueness of global Christian pilgrimage, travel and tourism, and how they manifest in terms of both supply and demand. It explores the places and spaces of production and consumption of this increasingly important tourism phenomenon. The volume considers the foundational elements of the attractiveness of places according to Christian thinking - spirit of place, scriptural connections, art and architecture, contrived/themed environments, programmed events, volunteer travel opportunities, and visiting local communities by way of solidarity tourism and mission work. It includes a wide range of examples from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America and will be of interest to researchers and students in religious studies, tourism, pilgrimage studies, geography, anthropology and Christianity studies.

This book is the first to examine the depth, complexity and uniqueness of global Christian pilgrimage, travel and tourism, and how they manifest in terms of both supply and demand. It explores the places and spaces of production and consumption of this increasingly important tourism phenomenon. The volume considers the foundational elements of the attractiveness of places according to Christian thinking - spirit of place, scriptural connections, art and architecture, contrived/themed environments, programmed events, volunteer travel opportunities, and visiting local communities by way of solidarity tourism and mission work. It includes a wide range of examples from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Latin America and North America and will be of interest to researchers and students in religious studies, tourism, pilgrimage studies, geography, anthropology and Christianity studies.

This volume of the Jerusalem Talmud publishes the first two tractates of the Second Order, Sabbat and 'Eruvin. These tractates deal with discussion of all regulations regarding Shabbat, the weekly day of rest, including the activities prohibited on Shabbat. The tractate 'Eruvin covers questions of definition of what is allowed to do on Shabbat. The Second Order is the last one to be published in Heinrich W. Guggenheimer's edition of the Jerusalem Talmud.

During the Nineteenth-Century a major revival in religious pilgrimage took place across Europe. This phenomenon was largely started by the rediscovery of several holy burial places such as Assisi, Milano, Venice, Rome and Santiago de Compostela, and subsequently developed into the formation of new holy sites that could be visited and interacted with in a wholly Modern way. This uniquely wide-ranging collection sets out the historic context of the formation of contemporary European pilgrimage in order to better understand its role in religious expression today. Looking at both Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Europe, an international panel of contributors analyse the revival of some major Christian shrines, cults and pilgrimages that happened after the rediscovery of ancient holy burial sites or the constitution of new shrines in locations claiming apparitions of the Virgin Mary. They also shed new light on the origin and development of new sanctuaries and pilgrimages in France and the Holy Land during the Nineteenth Century, which led to fresh ways of understanding the pilgrimage experience and had a profound effect on religion across Europe. This collection offers a renewed overview of the development of Modern European pilgrimage that used intensively the new techniques of organisation and travel implemented in the Nineteenth-Century. As such, it will appeal to scholars of Religious Studies, Pilgrimage and Religious History as well as Anthropology, Art, Cultural Studies, and Sociology.

Contemporary worship music shapes the way evangelical Christians understand worship itself. Author Monique M. Ingalls argues that participatory worship music performances have brought into being new religious social constellations, or "modes of congregating". Through exploration of five of these modes-concert, conference, church, public, and networked congregations-Singing the Congregation reinvigorates the analytic categories of "congregation" and "congregational music." Drawing from theoretical models in ethnomusicology and congregational studies, Singing the Congregation reconceives the congregation as a fluid, contingent social constellation that is actively performed into being through communal practice-in this case, the musically-structured participatory activity known as "worship." "Congregational music-making" is thereby recast as a practice capable of weaving together a religious community both inside and outside local institutional churches. Congregational music-making is not only a means of expressing local concerns and constituting the local religious community; it is also a powerful way to identify with far-flung individuals, institutions, and networks that comprise this global religious community. The interactions among the congregations reveal widespread conflicts over religious authority, carrying far-ranging implications for how evangelicals position themselves relative to other groups in North America and beyond.

Preaching and music are both regular elements of Christian worship across the theological spectrum. But they often don't interact or inform each other in meaningful ways. In this Dynamics of Christian Worship volume, theologian, pastor, and musician Noel A. Snyder considers how the church's preaching might be helpfully informed by musical theory. Just as a good musical composition employs technical elements like synchrony, repetition, and meter, the same should be said for good preaching that seeks to engage hearts and minds with the good news of Jesus Christ. By drawing upon music that lifts the soul, preachers might craft sermons that sing. The Dynamics of Christian Worship series draws from a wide range of worshiping contexts and denominational backgrounds to unpack the many dynamics of Christian worship-including prayer, reading the Bible, preaching, baptism, the Lord's Supper, music, visual art, architecture, and more-to deepen both the theology and practice of Christian worship for the life of the church.