* Reflections follow the practices of The Way of Love-Turn, Learn, Pray, Worship, Bless, Go, Rest * Each devotion includes a passage of scripture, a story, and reflection questions * Perfect during Lent or any time of year "Living the Way of Love" offers forty brief reflections about the seven Jesus-centered practices identified by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry in "The Way of Love" initiative. Sullivan tells stories from her own and others' experiences as a starting point for discussion about how to seek and find a deeper connection to God. Rotating through each practice so that each is covered once a week, going deeper into the practice throughout the forty days, each reflection ends with questions designed to spur further discussion and assist readers in making the practices their own. Perfect for using as a Lenten devotional or at any time of the year, the book includes a guide for creating a personal rule of life, and a downloadable Facilitator's Guide.

God thinks the world is worth saving and invites us to believe this too. For anyone who thinks Lent is a seemingly endless time of self-sacrifice and introspection, this 6-week study offers a breath of fresh air. Author George Donigian challenges readers to connect their inner spiritual life with outward actions of compassion in the world. He inspires readers to pray about daily news events and respond to the needs around them by serving others, feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, offering healing, and extending friendship. Give up apathy for Lent this year

Existing books on Christian ritual and the sacraments tend to presuppose a good acquaintance with Roman Catholic thought and practice. Today, however, even at Catholic institutions students tend to lack even a basic knowledge of Christian ritual. Moreover, for many modern people the word "ritual" carries negative connotations of rigidity and boredom. In this accessibly-written book two noted authors offer an engaging introduction to this important topic. Their goal is first to demonstrate that celebration, ritual and symbol are already central to the readers' lives, even though most do not see their actions as symbolic or ritualistic. Once this point has been made, the book connects central Christian symbols to the symbols and rituals already present in the readers' lives. The Christian theology of symbol, ritual, and sacrament is thus placed in the context of everyday life. The authors go on to discuss such questions as how rituals establish and maintain power relationships, how "official" rituals are different from other "popular" Christian rituals and devotions, and how Christian rituals function in the process of human "salvation." Their lively yet solidly grounded work will appeal to intelligent lay readers and discussion groups, as well as being useful for courses in ritual and the sacraments at the undergraduate and seminary level.

One of the great achievements of twentieth-century theology, Joseph Jungmann's work is a comprehensive study of the origins, evolution, and theology of the Mass from its earliest forms to the dawn of Vatican II. With a revised chapter previously unavailable in the two-volume edition.

Bryan Spinks is one of the world's leading scholars in the field of liturgy and to have a comprehensive work by him on the Eucharist is a major catch for SCM. Like the author's previous work on Baptism, this will become a standard work about the Eucharist and Eucharistic theology worldwide. The book, a study of the history and theology of the Eucharist, is the fifth volume in the SCM Studies in Worship and Liturgy series and will help to establish the series as a place for landmark books of liturgical scholarship. This book will be aimed at undergraduate and graduate theology students, clergy and theologically literate laity. It will assume some technical knowledge (i. e. it is not an introduction to liturgy or introduction to sacraments), but will attempt to outline what the evidence is, and what current scholars think. On occasions it will advance or argue for why one interpretation is preferable to another.

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."

Anne Fedele offers a comprehensive ethnography of alternative pilgrimages to French Catholic shrines dedicated to Saint Mary Magdalene. Drawing on more than three years of extensive fieldwork, she describes how pilgrims from Italy, Spain, Britain, and the United States interpret Catholic figures, symbols, and sites according to spiritual theories and practices derived from the transnational Neopagan movement. Fedele pays particular attention to the life stories of the pilgrims, the crafted rituals they perform, and the spiritual-esoteric literature they draw upon. She examines how they devise their rituals; why this kind of spirituality is increasingly prevalent in the West; and the influence of anthropological literature on the pilgrims. Among these pilgrims, spirituality is lived and negotiated in interaction with each other and with textual sources: Jungian psychology, Goddess mythology, and ''indigenous'' traditions merge into a corpus of theories and practices centered upon the worship of divinities such as the Goddess, Mother Earth, and the sacralization of the reproductive cycle. The pilgrims' rituals present a critique of the Roman Catholic Church and the medical establishment and have critical implications for contemporary discourses on gender. Looking for Mary Magdalene is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in ritual and pilgrimage.

"A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey" gives you the opportunity to walk around the Abbey church and cloisters with suggestions for reflection and prayer. If you have not visited the Abbey it is an excellent tool with which to help visualise the sites of Iona. Included are some stories about the Abbey and life in the community from the perspective of Iona Community members. At each point of your pilgrimage around the Abbey and the Abbey grounds you will find: some background information; a reflection; and a simple prayer. 'Iona is a place where people come looking for answers - to get in touch with their spiritual needs and find a new vision of themselves and their lives, and of our lives together.' From "A Pilgrim's Guide to Iona Abbey": Candles in the Abbey Some candles flickered in a downdraft; some stood still, lighting, in orange flame, the precious dark. Their silence created silence; their dimness in so vast a space soothed the restless soul. Their light was a quiet presence that spoke of the light, the real presence, come to meet us at the appointed place. He was there, though human eyes are not given to see him. Hearts, open to receive him, rested awhile in a circle of peace. David Levison is a member of the Iona Community.

Kirstie Blair explores Victorian poetry in relation to Victorian religion, with particular emphasis on the bitter contemporary debates over the use of forms in worship. She argues that poetry made significant contributions to these debates, not least through its formal structures. By assessing the discourses of church architecture and liturgy in the first half of the book, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion demonstrates that Victorian poets both reflected on and affected ecclesiastical practices. The second half of the book focuses on particular poets and poems, including Browning's Christmas-Eve and Tennyson's In Memoriam, to show how High Anglican debates over formal worship were dealt with by Dissenting, Broad Church and Roman Catholic poets and other writers. This book features major Victorian poets - Tennyson, the Brownings, Rossetti, Hopkins, Hardy - from different Christian denominations, but also argues that their work was influenced by a host of minor and less studied writers, particularly the Tractarian or Oxford Movement poets whose writings are studied in detail here. Form and Faith presents a new take on Victorian poetry by showing how important now-forgotten religious controversies were to the content and form of some of the best-known poems of the period. In methodology and content, it also relates strongly to current critical interest in poetic form and formalism, while recovering a historical context in which 'form' carried a particular weight of significance.