In Binding Earth and Heaven, Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd use early nineteenth-century Mormonism as a case study to examine questions about how new religious movements may, as rare exceptions, survive and even eventually become successful in spite of intense opposition. Initial scorn and contempt for Mormonism--the fledgling creation of the young Joseph Smith--quickly elevated to mob violence as both Smith's innovative teachings and converted followers proliferated, resulting in the widely held perception that the Mormons constituted a social menace. This book examines how Mormonism attracted and maintained the loyalty of increasing numbers of people despite mounting hostilities and severe hardships.

The book focuses on the unique Mormon ritual (and accompanying doctrinal underpinnings) of "patriarchal blessings." Patriarchal blessings were an innovative adaptation of the Old Testament practice of fathers making quasi-legal pronouncements over the heads of their sons--a way of verbally conferring rights, promises, admonition, and guidance to heirs. Binding Earth and Heaven shows how the organizational complexities of this practice contributed to strengthening and sustaining member faith and fealty, thereby bolstering the continuity and development of Mormonism.

Communication theory provides a compelling way to understand how people of faith can and should work together in today's tumultuous world. In A Communication Perspective on Interfaith Dialogue, fifteen authors present their experiences and analyses of interfaith dialogue, and contextualize interfaith work within the frame of rhetorical and communication studies. While the focus is on the Abrahamic faiths, these essays also include discussion of Hinduism and interracial faith efforts. Each chapter incorporates communication theories that bring clarity to the practices and problems of interfaith communication. Where other interfaith books provide theological, political, or sociological insights, this volume is committed to the perspectives contained in communication scholarship. Interfaith dialogue is best imagined as an organic process, and it does not require theological heavyweights gathered for academic banter. As such, this volume focuses on the processes and means by which interfaith meaning is produced.

Modern church leaders need to cultivate innovative and creative leadership skills, as they navigate today s post-Christian world, and as their congregations look to them for insight and guidance. Gil Stafford takes a fresh look at this vital need, drawing upon his experience as a college coach, university president, and parish priest, and interweaving them with ancient spiritual practices found within the discipline of spiritual direction. Personal anecdotes help the reader envision their own life-transforming pilgrimage, as they develop into the type of adaptive leader that churches need in today s rapidly changing world. This book challenges church leaders to foster sacred safe space, holy listening, silence, and wisdom storytelling, in order to create a discerning church community. These techniques of spiritual direction can be applied to every aspect of the church, from small group studies to conducting parish business. Gradually the leader will be able to delegate some of his responsibilities to the congregation, liberating them to be leaders, and rescuing him from trying to be all things to all people."

Dieci racconti ambientati a Napoli. Storie bizzarre, tragiche e ironiche di una Napoli dura a morire e dei suoi figli che hanno sete di risorgere, anche attraverso lo sport. Il terzo scudetto e stato un sogno vissuto a meta, il vero scudetto del Napoli e l'azzurro del suo cielo, del suo mare e dei colori sociali del calcio Napoli, esso vale piu dell'oro.

Al leer este libro podras informarte acerca de lo que se mueve por causa de la iniquidad hasta nuestros dias. Como se trasmiten las maldiciones generacionales y como ser libre de ellas. Podras saber que se esconde detras de los tatuajes y por que hoy, mas que nunca, estan de moda asi como el perforarse la lengua, labios y distintas partes del cuerpo con piercings. Todo esto sin lugar a duda, va cautivando progresivamente a los seres humanos. "Detras de la iniquidad" es un libro que no puedes dejar de leer, porque en el entenderas la Nueva Era y las diferentes organizaciones que promueven y que estan operando hoy con gran auge. Se han seleccionado las mas importantes para que entiendas como opera la maldad detras de ellas entretejiendose sutilmente como una gran red de engano y de maldad. En este libro podras informarte acerca de: Que es la iniquidad? Apostasia en la iglesia. Que es la Nueva Era? Como se extienden en sus ramas operativas. Las organizaciones y sectas religiosas. Tatuajes y simbologias. Perforaciones en el cuerpo. Como ser libre y no esclavos.

Occupy Religion introduces readers to the growing role of religion in the Occupy Movement and asks provocative questions about how people of faith can work for social justice. From the temperance movement to the Civil Rights movement, churches have played key roles in important social movements, and Occupy Religion shows this role is no less critical today.

The Knights of the white cross
The Order of Knights Hospitallers-or Knights of St John-originated in the times of the Crusades in 1119, though the foundation of a hospital for pilgrims in Jerusalem can be dated to 600 AD. It rose to be one of the most powerful Christian groups in the Holy Land. Its actions against Muslim forces were legendary but eventually Islam drove Christianity out and the order retreated to Cyprus. In 1309 Rhodes was subdued and became the order's new home. Battles with Barbary Corsairs and the Ottoman Turks followed culminating in the great siege and defeat at Rhodes by Suleiman in 1522. Malta then became the headquarters and it too withstood a gruelling assault in 1565. Further action included a decisive sea victory against the Corsairs at Lepanto and this history concludes with the siege of Vienna as the Knights came to the end of their real influence and military power.

In diesem Werkbuch fr Seelsorgerinnen und Seelsorger werden Erkenntnisse aus der Anthropologie, der Theologie und der pastoralen Praxis in Schaubildern und komprimierten Texten prsentiert, um sie fr die Aufgaben in der Seelsorge - vor allem fr Vielbeschftigte - vom Hintergrund her zu beleuchten und fr die Praxis handhabbar zu machen. Dahinter steht eine Erfahrung, die der Autor in einer langen Praxis gewinnen konnte: -Als katholischer Priester -Studienrat am Gymnasium -Bundesseelsorger der Katholischen Landjugendbewegung Deutschlands -Mitglied der Dizesansynode Augsburg 1990 -Vorsitzender der Sozialstation fr das Obere Allgu -Stadtpfarrer und Dekan im Allgu -Mitglied des Priesterrates der Dizese Augsburg Das Werkbuch versteht sich als Handreichung fr die Seelsorge und auch als Aufforderung an Wissenschaftler und Praktiker, an diesem Ansatz weiterzuarbeiten und ihn zu vertiefen.

No pastor can lead a congregation to renewal alone. it requires a complete change of heart for the whole congregation. Congregational renewal occurs when people engage communally in a transition in their very understanding of the nature and purpose of their church. This goes far beyond a simple retooling of the mission statement or addition of a few programs. Authors Mary Sellon and Daniel Smith lead congregations through this process of renewal, breaking down into understandable components what is happening in the people themselves that makes renewal efforts successful. Pathway to Renewal offers pastors and congregational leaders a framework for understanding and addressing the deep cultural shift facing the people of a congregation during congregational renewal. This book will help leaders make sense of where their congregation could get stuck and guide them in thinking through what needs to be addressed next as a congregation seeks renewal. The realigning of a congregation's heart and sense of purpose can be a long process, but one that ultimately all congregations must experience in order to fully live out the world-transforming mission that God has given them to do.

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems.

Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism.

After decades of official atheism, a religious renaissance swept through much of the former Soviet Union beginning in the late 1980s. The Calvinist-like austerity and fundamentalist ethos that had evolved among sequestered and frequently persecuted Soviet evangelicals gave way to a charismatic embrace of ecstatic experience, replete with a belief in faith healing. Catherine Wanner's historically informed ethnography, the first book on evangelism in the former Soviet Union, shows how once-marginal Ukrainian evangelical communities are now thriving and growing in social and political prominence. Many Soviet evangelicals relocated to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union, expanding the spectrum of evangelicalism in the United States and altering religious life in Ukraine. Migration has created new transnational evangelical communities that are now asserting a new public role for religion in the resolution of numerous social problems. Hundreds of American evangelical missionaries have engaged in "church planting" in Ukraine, which is today home to some of the most active and robust evangelical communities in all of Europe. Thanks to massive assistance from the West, Ukraine has become a hub for clerical and missionary training in Eurasia. Many Ukrainians travel as missionaries to Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union. In revealing the phenomenal transformation of religious life in a land once thought to be militantly godless, Wanner shows how formerly socialist countries experience evangelical revival. Communities of the Converted engages issues of migration, morality, secularization, and global evangelism, while highlighting how they have been shaped by socialism. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem)-a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries-and the generous support of the Pennsylvania State University. Learn more at the TOME website, available at: openmonographs.org. The open access edition is available at Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.

In a time when churches are focusing on finding strategies and techniques to guarantee success, a movement toward the missional church is emerging. Missional churches are communities created by the Spirit with a unique nature and identity. Purpose and strategies of the church are derivative dimensions, the activities that flow naturally from the church that is focused on Spirit-led ministry.
"The Ministry of the Missional Church" leads pastors, ministry leaders, and laypersons through three simple arguments--the church is; the church does what it is; the church organizes what it does--in order to make sense of how missional churches work. And by focusing the work of the church as the work of the Triune God, this unique book will change the way readers think about the church and the world.

Dramatic elements have always been apparent in the historic Christian liturgy. Because the liturgy is a structured action and not merely a verbal narrative, it has historically been both illuminated by and confused with other types of performance, such as theatre and drama. This confusion has been compounded by the fact that much analysis of liturgy has focused on the linguistic and theological aspects of the event and not on its elements of performance. In Do This: Liturgy as Performance, Richard D. McCall presents a systematic approach to the liturgy as event rather than text, using tools made available by contemporary performance theory. McCall follows the rise of dramatic interpretation of the early Christian liturgy from its beginnings through such elements as costumes, interpretative text, and gesture. He then examines the development of performance theory, focusing on the work of Victor Turner and Richard Schechner, and asks if it can be applied to the liturgy. Three views of liturgical theology, especially that of Aiden Kavanagh's, which holds that the liturgy as enacted is liturgy properly presented, set the stage for McCall to construct a definition of liturgy as a mode of performance. In chapter 4, McCall brings Aristotle's categories in the Poetics to bear on liturgical action. In the final chapter he analyzes an actual liturgical enactment: the celebration of the Mass at Rome in the early eighth century according to the Gregorian Sacramentary and the actions described in Ordo Romanus I. Do This: Liturgy as Performance bridges the work of performance scholarship and liturgical studies in a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary way. The book will interest seminarians and liturgical scholars in a variety of fields, including theology and the arts, early Christian liturgy, Church history, and liturgical theology.

Only in recent centuries have Catholic and Protestant women begun the practice of creating formal groups for the express purpose of operating schools, hospitals, and the like. Yet, there is evidence that this period of active organizational involvement may already be coming to an end. The resulting effect of denominational groups losing their institutional identities has been greatly overlooked in past research. Wittberg aims to redress this omission in this noteworthy work. From Piety to Professionalism D and Back? argues that the dissolution of institutional ties has greatly affected denominations D especially specific denominational subgroups such as Catholic religious orders, Protestant deaconesses, or women's missionary societies D in profoundly important ways: shifting or obliterating their recruitment bases, altering the backgrounds and expectations of their leaders, and often causing fundamental transformations in the very identity and culture of the groups themselves. Using the theoretical lens of organizational sociology, Wittberg has created an important and engaging work that will appeal to scholars of sociology and religion.

An understanding of The Salvation Army, its doctrines, ethical articles and position statements.

At the close of the twentieth century the United States was, by all accounts, among the most religious of modern Western nations. Pillars of Faith describes the diversity of tradition and the commonality of organizational strategy that characterize the more than 300,000 congregations in the United States, arguing that they provide the social bonds, spiritual traditions, and community connections that are vital to an increasingly diverse society. Nancy Tatom Ammerman follows several traditions--Mainline Protestant, Conservative Protestant, African American Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, Jewish, Sectarian, and other religions--as they establish discernible patterns of congregational life that fit their own history, tradition, and relationship to American society. Her methodologically sophisticated study balances survey research with interviews conducted with people from ninety-one different religious traditions and ethnographic observations that yield new information on many dimensions of American congregational life. Her book is the first to depict the complex resource base supporting American congregations, the enormous web of partners with whom congregations work, and the range of institutional patterns they exhibit. Contrary to many gloomy forecasts, Pillars of Faith: American Congregations and Their Partners argues that organized religion in the United States is robust and vigorous--and that it can handle the increasing demands of escalating diversity and mobility the future is sure to bring.

Faced with crisis, lack of direction, or just plain "stuckness," many congregations and their leaders are content to deal only with surface issues and symptoms only to discover that the same problems keep recurring, often in different, and more serious, ways. In The Hidden Lives of Congregations, Christian educator and consultant Israel Galindo takes leaders below the surface of congregational life to provide a comprehensive, holistic look at the corporate nature of church relationships and the invisible dynamics at play. Informed by family systems theory and grounded in a wide-ranging ecclesiological understanding, Galindo unpacks clearly the factors of congregational lifespan, size, spirituality, and identity and shows how these work together to form the congregation s hidden life. He provides useful tools for diagnosing and understanding how one s congregation fits into the various categories he names and suggests what leadership skills are necessary to get beyond the impasse of surface issues and help the congregation achieve its mission. The Hidden Lives of Congregations provides one of the most far-reaching looks into the invisible nature of faith communities written in recent years. For seminaries and divinity schools, it provides a standard text for getting a solid start in congregational practices; for experienced pastors, it provides support for renewing ministry; for lay leaders and committees, it offers insight to deepening mutual ministry. Israel Galindo has written an indispensable manual that leaders will return to repeatedly for new wisdom and guidance"

A daring study that uncovers the real nature of the Priory of Zion, one of the secret societies that is still alive nowadays and that dominated medieval politics from behind. Given the numerous absurdities which have been written lately about this society, the author reveals the other secret reality of this Priory. Its alleged Templar heritage the secret archives, the gnosis ( a Church of John, superior to Peter's) and the claim for P.Plantard, of arguable blood & lineage.