The early Christian and medieval practice of spiritual marriage, in which husband and wife mutually and voluntarily relinquish sexual activity for reasons of piety, plays an important role in the development of the institution of marriage and in the understanding of female religiosity. Drawing on hagiography, chronicles, theology, canon law, and pastoral sources, Dyan Elliott traces the history of spiritual marriage in the West from apostolic times to the beginning of the sixteenth century.

"In a Different Place" offers a richly textured account of a modern pilgrimage, combining ethnographic detail, theory, and personal reflection. Visited by thousands of pilgrims yearly, the Church of the Madonna of the Annunciation on the Aegean island of Tinos is a site where different interests--sacred and secular, local and national, personal and official--all come together. Exploring the shrine and its surrounding town, Jill Dubisch shares her insights into the intersection of social, religious, and political life in Greece. Along the way she develops the idea of pilgrimage-journeying away from home in search of the miraculous--as a metaphor for anthropological fieldwork. This highly readable work offers us the opportunity to share one anthropologist's personal and professional journey and to see in a "different place" the inadequacy of such conventional anthropological categories as theory versus data, rationality versus emotion, and the observer versus the observed.

Dubisch examines in detail the process of pilgrimage itself, its relationship to Orthodox belief and practice, the motivations and behavior of pilgrims, the relationship between religion and Greek national identity, and the gendered nature of religious roles. Seeking to evoke rather than simply describe, her book presents readers with a sense of the emotion, color, and power of pilgrimage at this Greek island shrine.

Since the 1950s, millions of American Christians have traveled to the Holy Land to visit places in Israel and the Palestinian territories associated with Jesus's life and death. Why do these pilgrims choose to journey halfway around the world? How do they react to what they encounter, and how do they understand the trip upon return? This book places the answers to these questions into the context of broad historical trends, analyzing how the growth of mass-market evangelical and Catholic pilgrimage relates to changes in American Christian theology and culture over the last sixty years, including shifts in Jewish-Christian relations, the growth of small group spirituality, and the development of a Christian leisure industry.Drawing on five years of research with pilgrims before, during and after their trips, Walking Where Jesus Walked offers a lived religion approach that explores the trip's hybrid nature for pilgrims themselves: both ordinary--tied to their everyday role as the family's ritual specialists, and extraordinary--since they leave home in a dramatic way, often for the first time. Their experiences illuminate key tensions in contemporary US Christianity between material evidence and transcendent divinity, commoditization and religious authority, domestic relationships and global experience.Hillary Kaell crafts the first in-depth study of the cultural and religious significance of American Holy Land pilgrimage after 1948. The result sheds light on how Christian pilgrims, especially women, make sense of their experience in Israel-Palestine, offering an important complement to top-down approaches in studies of Christian Zionism and foreign policy.

Drawing on the riches of the Celtic tradition, a look at seven traditional sacred spaces and their meaning in our own lives There are many books that explore actual, physical, sacred space and pilgrimage sites. This is a different kind of book. It introduces seven traditional "sacred spaces" but then leads readers into a deeper reflection on what such "sacred space" means in our own lives and experience. The various sacred spaces explored are: the Celtic Cross; the infinite knot; hilltops; wells and springs; causeways and bridges; thresholds and burial grounds; and boundaries. In each chapter, the author introduces a "sacred space" as the main theme and then illustrates this by associating it with a particular stage of life and a particular sacramental experience. The ideas are then brought together by means of a scripture story.

Christian Character Formation investigates worship and formation in view of Christian anthropology, particularly union with Christ. Traditions which value justification by faith wrestle to some degree with how to describe and encourage ethical formation when salvation and righteousness are presented as gracious and complete. The dialectic of law and gospel has suggested to some that forgiveness and the advocacy of ethical norms contend with each other. By viewing justification and formation in light of Christ's righteousness which is both imputed and imparted, it is more readily seen that forgiveness and ethics complement each other. In justification, God converts a person, by which he grants new character. Traditional Lutheran anthropology says that this regeneration grants a new nature in mystical union with Jesus Christ. By exploring the Finnish Luther School led by Tuomo Mannermaa, Gifford A. Grobien explains how union with Christ imparts righteousness and the corresponding new character to the believer. Furthermore, as means of grace, the Word and sacraments are the means of establishing union with Christ and nurturing new character. Considering Oswald Bayer's "suffering" the word of Christ, Louis-Marie Chauvet's "symbolic order" and Bernd Wannenwetsch's understanding of worship as Christianity's unique "form of life," Grobien argues that worship practices are the foundational and determinative context in which grace is offered and in which the distinctively Christian ethos supports virtues consistent with Christian character. This understanding is also coordinated with Stanley Hauerwas's narrative ethics and Luther's teaching of virtue and good works in view of the Ten Commandments.

Worship leader Neil Bennetts and theologian Simon Ponsonby share a concern that modern worship is growing self-indulgent: more about performance, less about an encounter with the divine.

They believe that this is a real and worrying trend in modern worship. To correct it, they explore the Bible's teaching on worship, addressing four key concerns: Worship as entertainment; worship which lacks wonder and awe; worship as irrelevant to mission; and worship which gratifies the worshipper rather than honoring the Almighty.

The authors each contribute six chapters, tackling worship and holiness; worship with passion; worship and the danger of idolatry. How, they ask, can we rediscover the mystery of an encounter with God, in corporate worship? How can leaders open themselves and their congregations to the heart of God, releasing his presence and power? How should we craft the unique dynamic of a people gathered to sing to God?

Christmas is not everybody's favorite holiday. Historically, Jews in America, whether participating in or refraining from recognizing Christmas, have devised a multitude of unique strategies to respond to the holiday season. Their response is a mixed one: do we participate, try to ignore the holiday entirely, or create our own traditions and make the season an enjoyable time? This book, the first on the subject of Jews and Christmas in the United States, portrays how Jews are shaping the public and private character of Christmas by transforming December into a joyous holiday season belonging to all Americans.Creative and innovative in approaching the holiday season, these responses range from composing America's most beloved Christmas songs, transforming Hanukkah into the Jewish Christmas, creating a national Jewish tradition of patronizing Chinese restaurants and comedy shows on Christmas Eve, volunteering at shelters and soup kitchens on Christmas Day, dressing up as Santa Claus to spread good cheer, campaigning to institute Hanukkah postal stamps, and blending holiday traditions into an interfaith hybrid celebration called "Chrismukkah" or creating a secularized holiday such as Festivus.Through these venerated traditions and alternative Christmastime rituals, Jews publicly assert and proudly proclaim their Jewish and American identities to fashion a universally shared message of joy and hope for the holiday season.

In 1917, the Beijing silk merchant Wei Enbo's vision of Jesus sparked a religious revival, characterized by healings, exorcisms, tongues-speaking, and, most provocatively, a call for a return to authentic Christianity that challenged the Western missionary establishment in China. This revival gave rise to the True Jesus Church, China's first major native denomination. The church was one of the earliest Chinese expressions of the twentieth century charismatic and Pentecostal tradition which is now the dominant mode of twenty-first century Chinese Christianity. To understand the faith of millions of Chinese Christians today, we must understand how this particular form of Chinese community took root and flourished even throughout the wrenching changes and dislocations of the past century. The church's history links together key themes in modern Chinese social history, such as longstanding cultural exchange between China and the West, imperialism and globalization, game-changing advances in transport and communications technology, and the relationship between religious movements and the state in the late Qing (circa 1850-1911), Republican (1912-1949), and Communist (1950-present-day) eras. Vivid storytelling highlights shifts and tensions within Chinese society on a human scale. How did mounting foreign incursions and domestic crises pave the way for Wei Enbo, a rural farmhand, to become a wealthy merchant in the early 1900s? Why did women in the 1920s and 30s, such as an orphaned girl named Yang Zhendao, devote themselves so wholeheartedly to a patriarchal religious system? What kinds of pressures induced church leaders in a meeting in the 1950s to agree that "Comrade Stalin" had saved many more people than Jesus? This book tells the striking but also familiar tale of the promise and peril attending the collective pursuit of the extraordinary-how individuals within the True Jesus Church in China over the past century have sought to muster divine and human resources to transform their world.

This study helps young people learn how to understand one of the most important lessons of life: putting on the character of Christ. Includes easy-to-understand examples, discussion questions, and explanations of key words.

Leonard Ravenhill presents prayer as faith in action in this fast-paced presentation of this crucial subject. He called prayer the most essential ingredient in producing revival. Filled with exhortations and illustrations, it teaches the art of effective praying--which will result in revival. Moody Monthly said, "This is a plea for praying that will melt the preacher's heart, move the people, and magnify the Lord Jesus."

How did people think about listening in the ancient world, and what evidence do we have of it in practice? The Christian faith came to the illiterate majority in the early Church through their ears. This proved problematic: the senses and the body had long been held in suspicion as all too temporal, mutable and distracting. Carol Harrison argues that despite profound ambivalence on these matters, in practice, the senses, and in particular the sense of hearing, were ultimately regarded as necessary - indeed salvific -constraints for fallen human beings. By examining early catechesis, preaching and prayer, she demonstrates that what illiterate early Christians heard both formed their minds and souls and, above all, enabled them to become 'literate' listeners; able not only to grasp the rule of faith but also tacitly to follow the infinite variations on it which were played out in early Christian teaching, exegesis and worship. It becomes clear that listening to the faith was less a matter of rationally appropriating facts and more an art which needed to be constantly practiced: for what was heard could not be definitively fixed and pinned down, but was ultimately the Word of the unknowable, transcendent God. This word demanded of early Christian listeners a response - to attend to its echoes, recollect and represent it, stretch out towards it source, and in the process, be transformed by it.