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.

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.

* 2nd installment in the "Celebrating" series - an overview of liturgical theology and praxis * Written by a well-known liturgical scholar * Includes history, theology, and practical information Celebrating Liturgical Time continues the standard of scholarship set by Patrick Malloy's Celebrating the Eucharist. It is ideal for students, clergy, and church members who seek to strengthen their knowledge-and parochial practice-of liturgical time- keeping and the Daily Office.

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.

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."

Learn strategic principles for intercessory prayer that will change lives, empower churches and shape futures. In Seasons of Intercession, you will discover how to be a prevailing intercessor, individually and how to become a powerful intercessory church.

Edited Gigi Taylor. Book features easy to flip pages and fits in your pocket. Each page corresponds to each bead of the Rosary. Reflections on each mystery. Includes Luminous Mysteries. Size: 4 x 6. 78 pages. Spiral Bound. Color.

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.

Analysis of Latin sacred music written during the century illustrates the rapid and marked change in style and sophistication. Winner of the 2007 AMS Robert M. Stevenson prize The arrival of Francisco de Penalosa at the Aragonese court in May 1498 marks something of an epoch in the history of Spanish music: Penalosa wrote in a mature, northern-oriented style, and his sacred music influenced Iberian composers for generations after his death. Kenneth Kreitner looks at the church music sung by Spaniards in the decades before Penalosa, a repertory that has long been ignoredbecause much of it is anonymous and because it is scattered through manuscripts better known for something else. He identifies sixty-seven pieces of surviving Latin sacred music that were written in Spain between 1400 and the early 1500s, and he discusses them source by source, revealing the rapid and dramatic change, not only in the style and sophistication of these pieces, but in the level of composerly self-consciousness shown in the manuscripts. Withina generation or so at the end of the fifteenth century, Spanish musicians created a new national music just as Ferdinand and Isabella were creating a new nation. KENNETH KREITNER teaches at the University of Memphis.

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.

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.

First full-scale survey and examination of liturgical practice and its fundamental changes over four centuries. At the heart of life in any medieval Christian religious community was the communal recitation of the daily "hours of prayer" or Divine Office. This book draws on narrative, conciliar, and manuscript sources to reconstruct the history of how the Divine Office was sung in Anglo-Saxon minster churches from the coming of the first Roman missionaries in 597 to the height of the "monastic revival" in the tenth century. Going beyond both the hagiographic "Benedictine" assumptions of older scholarship and the cautious agnosticism of more recent historians of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, the author demonstrates that the early Anglo-Saxon Church followed a non-Benedictine "Roman" monasticliturgical tradition. Despite Viking depredations and native laxity, this tradition survived, enriched through contact with varied Continental liturgies, into the tenth century. Only then did a few advanced monastic reformers conclude, based on their study of ninth-century Frankish reforms fully explained for the first time in this book, that English monks and nuns ought to follow the liturgical prescriptions of the Rule of St Benedict to the letter. Fragmentary manuscript survivals reveal how monastic leaders such as Dunstan and AEthelwold variously adapted the native English liturgical tradition - or replaced it - to implement this forgotten central plank of the "Benedictine Reform". Jesse D. Billett is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Divinity, Trinity College, Toronto.

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.

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.