This sequel to "Baptism, the New Testament and the Church" (JSNT Supplements 171) brings together work by J. Ramsey Michaels, Joel Green, Howard Marshall, Bruce Chilton, Craig Evans and the editors, as well as several others, and deals with aspects of baptism from the New Testament and beyond The first section covers baptism in the New Testament, including the meaning of the word 'baptize', the baptism of John, Paul's own baptism and his theology of it, and baptisms in John 13, Acts and Hebrews. The second section deals with baptism in the Early Church, including essays on Jesus's blessing of th children, and baptism in the Epistle of Barnabas and in Gregory of Nyssa. The third section addresses baptism in contemporary theology, embracing ecumenical perspectives, baptism as a trinitarian event, and baptism as memorial, as m1iracle and as falling into and out of power.Nyssa . The third section addresses baptism in contemporary theology, embracing ecumenical perspectives, baptism as a trinitarian event, and baptism as memorial, as miracle and as falling into and out of power.

This is the third edition of this popular guide book to the biblical sites in both Israel and Jordan. It has been revised and rewritten, with new pictures, illustrations, maps, and plans. The Pilgrim Books team has conducted or accompanied more than forty pilgrimage groups to the Holy Land and have produced a book that is concise and informative. It contains a mine of practical information on both countries and is profusely illustrated, so that it becomes a colorful souvenir, the stimulant to a host of happy memories for years after your return.

Here is a summons to pray with twenty great women of faith_from Hildegard of Bingen to Dorothy Day. Brief biographies are followed by commentary, prayer experiences, questions for reflection, and suggestions for action. Meehan brings these women to life, allowing their example to inspire, encourage, and empower you. Meet women who will change your life and enrich your spiritual journey with new possibilities of self-discovery, wisdom, creativity, and friendship. Reminding us that abundance is all around us, and challenging us to make a difference, this book is filled with stories of visionary women with whom we can share the longings that lie deep within us for divine love, deep tranquility, and human intimacy.

The message of the kingdom of God: an ecology of equality and peace, and an economy of justice. Hope from beyond, sent to the present, is what Advent asks us to reckon with. Hope consists of God’s jump leads sent from the future through time and space, wired right into our present pains, panics, and predicaments. How can the light of Christ illuminate this present darkness? This book engages with two great Christmas hymns: the Magnificat and Benedictus. It is also rooted in poets, prophets and the theology and devotional writing of the black theologian and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., Howard Thurman. Using the lectio divina approach to passages drawn from Isaiah and Luke, An Advent Manifesto is an invitation to pray and practise that most ancient Advent prayer, ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come.’

Walking the Stations of the Cross, the Christian faithful re-create the Passion, following the sorrowful path of Jesus Christ from condemnation to crucifixion. While this devotion, now so popular in the Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations, first emerged in Jerusalem and began spreading through Western Europe in the fourteenth century, it did not assume its current form, and earn the Church's formal recognition, until almost three centuries later. It was at this time, in the last decades of the seventeenth century, that a Franciscan friar in colonial Mexico translated a devotional guide to the Stations of the Cross into the native Nahuatl. This little handbook, Fray Agustin de Vetancurt's Via crucis en mexicano, proved immensely popular, going through two editions, but survives today only in a copy made by a native scribe from Central Mexico. Reproduced here in Nahuatl and English, Vetancurt's handbook offers unique insight into the history, the practice, and the meaning of the Stations of the Cross in the New World and the Old. With the Via crucis en mexicano as a starting point, John F. Schwaller explores the history of the development and spread of the Stations of the Cross, placing the devotion in the context of the Catholic Reformation and the Baroque, the two trends that exalted this type of religious expression. He describes how the devotion, exported to New Spain in the sixteenth century, was embraced by Spanish and natives alike. For the native Americans, Schwaller suggests, the Via crucis resonated because of its performative aspects, reminiscent of rituals and observances from before the arrival of the Spanish. And for missionaries, the devotion offered a means of deepening the faith of the newly converted. In Schwaller's deft analysis-which extends from the origins of the devotion, to the processions and public rituals of the Mexica (Aztecs), to the text and illustrations of the Vetancurt manuscript-the Via crucis en mexicano opens a window on the practice and significance of the Stations of the Cross-and of private devotions generally-in Mexico, Hispanic America, and around the world.

Christians have often admired and venerated the martyrs who died for their faith, but for a long time thought that the bodies of martyrs should remain undisturbed in their graves. Initially, the Christian attitude towards the bones of the dead, saint or not, was that of respectful distance. The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics examines how this attitude changed in the mid-fourth century. Robert Wisniewski investigates how Christians began to believe in the power of relics, first over demons, then over physical diseases and enemies. He considers how the faithful sought to reveal hidden knowledge at the tombs of saints and why they buried the dead close to them. An essential element of this new belief was a strong conviction that the power of relics was transferred in a physical way and so the following chapters study relics as material objects. Wisniewski analyses how contact with relics operated and how close it was. Did people touch, kiss, or look at the very bones, or just at tombs and reliquaries which contained them? When did the custom of dividing relics begin? Finally, the book deals with discussions and polemics concerning relics, and attempts to find out the strength of the opposition which this new phenomenon had to face, both within and outside Christianity, on its way to become an essential element of medieval religiosity.

An updated and revised version of a book that has impacted thousands of churches: Are you tired of how consumerism has stolen the soul of Christmas? This year, take a stand! Join the groundswell of Christ-followers who are choosing to make Christmas what it should be-a joyous celebration of Jesus' birth that enriches our hearts and the world around us, not a retail circus that depletes our pocketbooks and defeats our spirits. Advent Conspiracy shows you how to substitute consumption with compassion by practicing four simple but powerful, countercultural concepts: Worship Fully-because Christmas begins and ends with Jesus. Spend Less-and free your resources for things that truly matter. Give More-of your presence: your hands, your words, your time, your heart. Love All-the poor, the forgotten, the marginalized, and the sick in ways that make a difference. Find out how to have a Christmas worth remembering, not dreading. Christmas can still change the world when you, like Jesus, give what matters most-your presence. This updated and revised version, with some all-new content, will share stories of the impact this movement has made around the globe as well as giving individuals and churches even better, more practical help in planning the kind of Christmas that truly can change the world. New introduction, new chapter and changes throughout.

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.

The Order of St Gilbert was the only specifically English religious order founded in the Middle Ages. The edition gathers together fragments surviving in Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 115 (A.5.5); Cambridge, St John's College, MS N. 1; Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 36 (SC 1678), f. 110v; Cambridge, Pembroke' College, MS 226. The second part is volume 60 of the present series.

Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe re-examines the alterations in Western European life that followed widespread conversion to Christianity-the phenomena traditionally termed "Christianization". It refocuses scholarly paradigms for Christianization around the development of mandatory rituals. One prominent ritual, Rogationtide supplies an ideal case study demonstrating a new paradigm of "Christianization without religion." Christianization in the Middle Ages was not a slow process through which a Christian system of religious beliefs and practices replaced an earlier pagan system. In the Middle Ages, religion did not exist in the sense of a fixed system of belief bounded off from other spheres of life. Rather, Christianization was primarily ritual performance. Being a Christian meant joining a local church community. After the fall of Rome, mandatory rituals such as Rogationtide arose to separate a Christian commonwealth from the pagans, heretics, and Jews outside it. A Latin West between the polis and the parish had its own institution-the Rogation procession-for organizing local communities. For medieval people, sectarian borders were often flexible and rituals served to demarcate these borders. Rogationtide is an ideal case study of this demarcation, because it was an emotionally powerful feast, which combined pageantry with doctrinal instruction, community formation, social ranking, devotional exercises, and bodily mortification. As a result, rival groups quarrelled over the holiday's meaning and procedure, sometimes violently, in order to reshape the local order and ban people and practices as non-Christian.

A star, a stable, angels, shepherds, kings, and at the heart of it all a mother and her baby. In The Art of Christmas Jane Williams' meditations on the birth of Jesus take you deep into the story of the original Christmas as depicted in some of the world's greatest paintings. A beautiful book for Advent 2021, these profoundly perceptive reflections on the different ways in which artists have imagined the Nativity will deepen and refresh your appreciation of the real meaning of Christmas, and the message of love, joy and peace that it speaks to all the world. Illustrated in stunning full colour, with famous and lesser-known Western masterpieces, and presented in a small, easily portable format, The Art of Christmas is ideal Advent reading for all art lovers, but also makes a wonderful Christmas gift. Jane Williams' insightful meditations will not only help you rediscover the spiritual heart of Christmas, but will also give you a deeper, expanded appreciation of the skill and mastery behind these masterful paintings. You'll gain a fuller and more spiritual understanding of Christian art, and see Christmas as never before.