Contents:
1. Introduction
2. American Women at Home: The Woman's Board of Missions of the Interior and American Women Missionaries to Japan
3. Missionary Work Launched: Kobe Home, 1873-1877, the Founding Years
4. A Transition to Education as a Profession: Kobe Home to Kobe Girls' School, 1877-1882
5. Missionary Aspirations for Higher Education: Kobe Girls' School to Kobe College, 1883-1909
Epilogue: The Dissolution of Women's Authority: Kobe College, 1910-1927
Appendix
Tables
Bibliography

Contents:
Preface and acknowledgements Introduction: Religion in an age of environmental crisis Introduction to the second edition: Good news/bad news Part I: The moment of seeing: Selections from nature writers linking nature and spirit Part II: How have traditional religions viewed nature? Part III: Ecotheology in an age of environmental crisis: Transforming tradition Part IV: Ecotheology in an age of environmental crisis: Ecofeminist spirituality Part V: Ecotheology in an age of environmental crisis: Spiritual deep ecology Part VI: Religious practice for a sacred earth Part VII: Ecology, religion and society Suggestions for further reading Websites on religion and the environment Environmental organisations About the contributors

Pastors say goodbye to congregations. Sometimes their goodbyes are timely and sweet; sometimes they are jarring and painful. But as they leave, they face a unique journey of grief, one shaped by their role. They face both the outward grief of leaving people behind and the inward grief of leaving an identity behind. In The Graceful Exit, Lutheran pastor Mary Lindberg shares insights from her experience of ending her service to a congregation, as well as wisdom from other pastors who have changed their life work. Lindberg invites readers to pull apart the strands of self and role, individual and community; confront regrets, confusion, and dislocation; and figure out where and who God is at this juncture in their lives. She offers the book she wishes someone had handed her about finding a new church home, about getting a life, about relating to the colleagues who stayed. She reflects on how to be a pastor in a non-pastoral role, how to find community, and how to be graceful in the midst of the awkward unknown. Lindberg acknowledges that as pastors leave congregations, they have to discern how to wrap up their ministry and get out the door without regrets. She recognizes that most pastors will struggle with the spiritual themes of fulfillment, surrender, community, legacy, and separation. But she also believes pastors can face these challenges together. The Graceful Exit invites them into a community of healing and shows them that God walks with them to a new place, even as God keeps on loving the place they have left.

Congregations that seek growth are often frustrated at hitting a plateau-caught in a transition zone between sizes. The Alban Institute has long been recognized as a leader in size transition research and learning, and this anthology offers an in-depth collection of resources, through new articles developed for the book as well as previously published and highly regarded pieces that inform and provoke.

Shamanism has been practised amongst communities all over the world for millennia, and continues to survive today in both modern and ancient forms. During its long evolution it has migrated from Siberia, Aboriginal Australia, Northern Europe and South America to become a core part of Western New Age and rave culture, as well as popular mythology. It's place within modernity is at once familiar and alien, exemplary and uneasy. So how does the fantastical image of the shaman influence debates on identity, experience, nature, rationality, the cosmos, transformation and change? This book unites perspectives from disciplines including anthropology, psychology, musicology and botany to provide an overview of modern writing on shamanism. From grassroots political writing to classical ethnographies, and imaginative narratives to detailed case studies, the 25 articles and short extracts presented here cover topics including gender, initiation, hallucinogenic consciousness and political protest. Juxtaposing the traditional practices of indigenous peoples with their new and often radically urban reinterpretations, experts including Michael Harner. Majorie M. Balzer and Piers Vitebsky raise qu

Citizenship is high on the agenda of education systems in many of the world's democracies. As yet, however, discussions of citizenship education have neglected issues of religious diversity and how the study of religions can contribute to our understanding of citizenship. International Perspectives on Citizenship, Education and Religious Diversity brings together an international range of contributions from religious studies scholars and educators specialising in the study of religions. Together, these illustrate and explore the key questions for educational theory and pedagogy raised by drawing issues of religious diversity into citizenship education.
The chapters address and extend debates over the nature of citizenship in late modernity, highlighting local and global dimensions of citizenship in relation to issues of national, religious, ethnic and cultural identity. As well as emphasising the role religious education has to play in citizenship education, this book also covers wider issues such as state-supported faith schools and cultural diversity in relation to common citizenship. The authors argue that critical, yet reflective, approaches to religious education have a distinctive and valuable contribution to make to citizenship education. Issues addressed within the study of religions are related to new forms of global and cultural citizenship, as well as citizenship within the nation state. Ultimately, this stimulating and original collection highlights the challenges and possibilities for teaching and learning about religion, religions and religious diversity within an inclusive educational practice.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203218795

Acclaimed church leader, blogger, founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan unpacks the lifecycle of a typical church, identifies characteristics of each phase, and provides practical next steps a church can take to move towards sustained health. Think about your church for a moment. Is it growing? Is it diminishing? Is it somewhere in between? Acclaimed church leader, blogger, and founder and chief strategic officer of The Unstuck Group, Tony Morgan has identified the seven stages of a church's lifecycle that range from the hopeful and optimistic days of launch, to the stagnating last stages of life support. Regardless of the stage in which you find your church, it carries with it the world's greatest mission-to "go and make disciples of all the nations . . ." With eternity at stake the Church should be doing most everything within its power to see lives changed forever. The Church should strive for the pinnacle of the lifecycle, where they are continually making new disciples and experiencing what Morgan refers to as "sustained health." In The Unstuck Church, Morgan unpacks each phase of the church lifecycle, and offers specific and strategic next steps the church leader can take to find it's way to sustained health . . . and finally become unstuck. The Unstuck Church is a call for honest an assessment of where your church sits on the lifecycle, and a challenge to move beyond it.

The common goal of the contributors is to illuminate sexuality as a crucial site of conflict and dissent both within and between religious traditions. Thus, we have a collection of ten essays on themes emerging from the social scientific study of religion and sexuality in an array of cultural contexts. Together the essays examine four themes: 1) fecundism as an ideology of reproduction, 2) sexual identity and the life cycle, 3) binary sexual categories, and 4) relations of power and domination.

This book takes as its point of departure the historical fact that it was Orthodox pioneers of German origin, in contrast to their Eastern European counterparts, who successfully developed religious kibbutz life. Employing sociological concepts and methods, the author goes on to examine the correlations between two evolutionary phases in kibbutz development and two modes of Judaism: the rational Halkhic and the emotive Hassidic modes. In doing this, he exlores the relationship between two diverse dispositions towards divinity - the transcendent and the immanent - and two diverse modes of the self and their related communities.
This innovative and insightful work will be of essential interest to scholars of the sociology of religion, Jewish studies, modern Jewish history and Israel's national history, and will also interest those more broadly engaged with theology and religious studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203217373

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians and those in ecological politics.

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: western modernity's free market capitalism. Philip Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno, Horkheimer and Marx, to suggest that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety in which capitalism becomes a global religion, in practice, if not always in belief. This book presents a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians and those in ecological politics.

In this ground-breaking book, Gerald Grace addresses the dilemmas facing Catholic education in an increasingly secular and consumer-driven culture. The book combines an original theoretical framework with research drawn from interviews with sixty Catholic secondary head teachers from deprived urban areas. Issues discussed include:
*Catholic meanings of academic success
*tensions between market values and Catholic values
*threats to the mission integrity of Catholic schools
*the spiritual, moral and social justice commitments of contemporary Catholic schools
This book will be equally useful to leaders of Catholic and other schools and to all those interested in values and leadership in schooling.

The history of Judaising movements has been largely ignored by historians of religion. This volume analyses the interplay between colonialism, a Judaism not traditionally viewed as proselytising' but which at certain points was struggling to heed the Prophets and become a light unto the Gentiles' and the attraction for many different peoples of the rooted historicity of Judaism and by the symbolic appropriation of Jewish suffering.
This book will look at the role of colonialism in the development of Judaising movements throughout the world, including New Zealand, Japan, India, Burma and Africa. Particular attention will be paid to the Lemba tribe of Southern Africa. A remarkable parallel movement in 1930s Southern Italy will also be dealt with. The history of the converts of San Nicandro is seen in the context of currents of Jewish universalism, messianism and Zionism. Gender issues are also discussed here as the converted women assumed powers they had not hitherto enjoyed.

This book examines the method of meditative reading encouraged by John Cassian (c. 360-435) in his ascetic writings, the bulk of which are fictive dialogues that purportedly record the instruction he had received from Egyptian Christian monks. This instruction was at its core an interactive experience, deepening upon both the discernment of the master and diligent application of instruction by the student. Driver examines Cassian's understanding of the act of reading and suggests the implications of this for Cassian's monastic teaching and it interprets Cassian's method of reading in light of contemporary discussions of reading and the self.

This study is a comprehensive history of the papacy, the oldest elective office in the world, and how it has managed over the centuries the most complex voluntary association of faith. The book argues that in fact through most of its existence, the papacy has adapted managerial models of the secular world and applied them to the Catholic Church. Since its emergence from the Jewish synagogues to a persecuted minority in the Roman Empire to becoming the established religion of the West, the Church and the papacy engaged the world on its own terms. It is only after the Council of Trent did the Church become somewhat more divorced and estranged from the environment around it. This book focused on those changes and on the great popes across the centuries who reformed and altered Catholicism. Special attention is directed to Gregory I, Innocent I, Innocent III, Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXVII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. The conclusion is that the persistence of the Catholic Church for so many centuries was due to its ability to preserve the faith, but re-establish its forms and managerial class.

In 1799 four missionaries - two English and two Dutch - arrived at the Cape, having been sent out by the London missionary society. This is their story.Although mission work by the Moravians had begun some time before, this meant the commencement of large-scale mission work in South Africa, and initiated what might be called the 'golden age' of missionary activity in South Africa. The Early Mission, 1799 1819 consists of 17 essays, some of them in Afrikaans, in which the noted writer and historian Karel Schoeman describes the life and work of a number of missionaries, mission assistants and artisans, 'native agents', catechists and lay helpers, including three women, who where involved in the establishment of the mission during the pioneer period. His subjects are mainly Dutch and indigenous mission workers in the service of the LMS and their work among the slave population of the Cape Colony and the inhabitants of the Orange River area beyond the northern frontier of the Colony."

'This is a deep and intense book, written with empathy for everything involved, and is of vital global, social significance.' - Revd Mary Sellers, Church Times

'Gosling's work is clearly and passionately written, betraying careful scholarship in science and religious studies. It should help to clarify the role of religious traditions in increasing ecological awareness, and, it is to be hoped, in promoting some resolution of the social and environmental problems our world faces' - THES

'The book is a must in any serious library dealing with ecology in India and Southeast Asia' - G. Gispert-Sauch, VJTR

'... a book which should allow Hinduism and Buddhism, and activists from India and Thailand, to challenge those of us from "religions of the book".' - Andrew Wingate, Theology

What happens when a nineteen-year-old boy leaves home and heads into the jungles to evangelize a murderous tribe of South American Indians? For Bruce Olson, it meant capture, disease, terror, loneliness, and torture. But what he discovered by trial and error has revolutionized then world of missions.

Bruchko, which has sold more than 300,000 copies worldwide, has been called "more fantastic and harrowing than anything Hollywood could concoct." Living with the Motilone Indians since 1961, Olson has won the friendship of four presidents of Colombia and has made appearances before the United Nations because of his efforts. Bruchko includes the story of his 1988 kidnapping by communist guerrillas and the nine months of captivity that followed. This revised version of Olson's story will amaze you and remind you that simple faith in Christ can make anything possible. " Bruchko is] an all-time missionary classic. Bruce Olson is a modern missionary hero who has modeled for us in our time the reaching of the unreached tribes." --Loren Cunningham Co-founder, Youth With A Mission

There is no published account of the history of religious women in England before the Norman Conquest. Yet, female saints and abbesses, such as Hild of Whitby or Edith of Wilton, are among the most celebrated women recorded in Anglo-Saxon sources and their stories are of popular interest. This book offers the first general and critical assessment of female religious communities in early medieval England. It transforms our understanding of the different modes of religious vocation and institutional provision and thereby gives early medieval women's history a new foundation.

The essays collected here, prepared by a think tank of the Elijah Interfaith Academy, address the subject of religious leadership. The subject is of broad relevance in the training of religious leaders and in the practice of religious leadership. It is also germane to religious thought as such, where reflections on religious leadership occupy an important place. What does it mean to be a religious leader in today's world? To what degree are the challenges that confront religious leadership the perennial challenges that have arrested the attention of the faithful and their leaders for generations, and to what degree do we encounter today challenges that are unique to our day and age? One dimension is surely unique and that is the very ability to explore these issues from an interreligious perspective and to consider challenges, opportunities and strategies across religious traditions. Some challenges confront leaders of all traditions, and therefore unite them. Studying the theme across six faith traditions-Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, and Buddhism-we recognize the common challenges to present day religious leadership. Chapters examine the nature of religious leadership in each tradition in relation to the goals of the tradition. They then present a typology of leadership in each of the traditions. These provide the background to a review of both systemic and contemporary challenges to religious leadership, and allow us to consider points of connection and intersection between the different faith traditions. This leads us to a reflection on religious leadership for the future, including the role of interfaith engagement in the profile of the ideal future religious leader.

The foundation of discipleship is sound, scriptural doctrine. The value of sound doctrine is often misunderstood by the modern church. While it can be dry and dull, when it flows from the story of Scripture, it can be full of life and love. This kind of doctrine, steeped in Scripture, is critical for disciple-making. And it's often overlooked by modern pastors. In Hearers and Doers, Kevin Vanhoozer makes the case that pastors, as pastor-theologians, ought to interpret Scripture theologically to articulate doctrine and help cultivate disciples. scriptural doctrine is vital to the life of the church, and local pastor-theologians should be the ones delivering it to their communities. With arresting prose and striking metaphors, Vanhoozer addresses the most pressing problems in the modern church with one answer: teach sound, scriptural doctrine to make disciples.

Since its inception, the Alban Institute has earned a reputation as a leader in addressing congregational conflict management issues through its research, consulting services, educational events, and particularly its publications. Drawing on this rich heritage, the first title in our new "Harvesting the Learnings" anthology series gathers 20 classic Alban works on congregational conflict into a single, indispensable volume. Conflict Management in Congregations harvests the collected wisdom of many of the key thinkers on this topic, including such past and present Alban consultants as Speed Leas, George Parsons, Margaret Bruehl, Gil Rendle, Alice Mann, and Roy Pneumann. Much of the material found here has long been unavailable but is still much in demand. Divided into three sections that explore the dynamics of conflict, conflict management techniques, and dealing with conflict in specific contexts, this book serves as a comprehensive primer that no pastor or congregational leader will want to be without.

CHRISTIANS SHOULD BE REVOLUTIONARIES! WE SHOULD BE BRINGING A REVOLUTION TO OUR WORLD. Today's world needs a revolution. But not a violent one. We've had plenty of those. We need a revolution that changes hearts and minds. Jesus didn't come to earth just to change your Sunday morning routine. He came to change your life every day and in every way. The Right and Left are growing farther apart each week. Liberal politicians and conservatives are in a moral and political take-no-prisoners civil war. And the expanding divide is evident, not just in politics, but also in the arts, education, business, journalism, science, technology, social services, the military, and even in the faith community. Today's emerging generation is fed up with an unengaged, judgmental Christianity that is afraid to get its hands dirty with real change but is more than willing to shout at the decaying world from a distance. We simply must take a different stance in this world if we want to make a difference . . . and now is the time. But what is that stance? And how do we revolutionize our world as Christians? As author Neil Cole dramatically points out, it's all about One Thing. It's a revolution of love! Grounded in the love found in the new covenant, this book passionately calls the church back to its true spiritual roots and provides tangible examples of how that was done in the past and how we can do it today. One Thing offers an alternative that is biblical, effective, subversive, and loving all at the same time. It's time for us to trade in our busy religion with so many rules for a one-thing spirituality. That one thing is the love generated by being with Jesus, focused upon Jesus, and letting Jesus leak out in our lives. Jesus was all about transformation and change. He was a revolutionary of the heart, and as his followers, we must bring that radical revolution to our world. !VIVA LA REVOLUTION!

Among young people, symptoms of social change emerge in a multiple manner. This observation by Karl Mannheim inspired the concept of the survey of social and religious attitudes conducted by the integrated research team of employees of the Department of Sociology of Religion in the Institute of Sociology at Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw and Institute for Catholic Church Statistics SAC. The title of the book is an intentional reference to the concept of social constructionism. This idea manifests itself in the subjective function of participants of an interaction who reconstruct social contexts in the course of the interaction on the basis of symbolic meanings. The conducted survey is a diachronic measurement with statistical time series of the years 1988 - 1998 - 2005 - 2017. The survey uses the research tool in which dimensions were primarily established by Charles Glock and Rodney Stark and a community component by Ohio Fukuyama. The term 'global profession of faith' was introduced by French sociologists Louis Dingemans and Jean Remy to describe motivation and dynamics of changes of one's individual religiousness and identification of individuals with religious group of reference. In this survey of social and religious attitudes of young university students, religiousness dimensions adopted by forms of activity on the Internet were added to the research tool.