This timeless treasure from Charles Spurgeon reminds readers to place their hope in the finished work of Jesus Christ as they navigate trials on this earth. Part of the Crossway Short Classics series.

The last 150 years of biblical scholarship have revolutionised the understanding of the four Gospels. The revolution remains, however, largely unknown to the general public. Paul Laffan's The Fabricated Christ argues for the wider dissemination of this knowledge and tasks those engaged in biblical criticism with greater honesty and frankness about the results of their research.

he Faith of Friends series is part of Breakwater's religious education series for children in grades 4-6. This educational series introduces children to the underlying beliefs of the world's major religions, and it teaches young students the value of being understanding and other perspectives and showing tolerance for those who have beliefs that vary from their own. This series employs a unique approach to religious education in that it seeks to inform students about a broad range of religious faiths without using the perspective of one specific religion, and without promoting any one religion.

The Faith of Friends series is part of Breakwater's religious education series for children in grades 4-6. This educational series introduces children to the underlying beliefs of the world's major religions, and it teaches young students the value of being understanding and other perspectives and showing tolerance for those who have beliefs that vary from their own. This series employs a unique approach to religious education in that it seeks to inform students about a broad range of religious faiths without using the perspective of one specific religion, and without promoting any one religion. The texts in this series comprise a religious education experience that can provide consistent, enriching experience for children over a three-year period. One of the most notable features of the series is that it uses learning strategies that accommodate "multiple intelligences" (i.e. the learning activities and exercises used are specially designed so that the series can accommodate children with different aptitudes and learning styles). This series was created to accommodate the vision of the Newfoundland and Labrador Religious Education Curriculum: "to enable and encourage students to grow religiously, spiritually, and morally into informed, caring and contributing members of society, who appreciate their own beliefs and values of others, and who understand the contribution that Christianity and other religions make to human life." Breakwater Books is proud to have created an educational series that upholds this admirable vision.

As liberal democracies include increasingly diverse and multifaceted populations, the longstanding debate about the role of the state in religious education and the place of religion in public life seems imperative now more than ever. The maintenance of religious schools and the planning of religious education curricula raise a profound challenge. Too much state supervision can be conceived as interference in religious freedom and as a confinement of the right to cultural liberty. Too little supervision can be seen as neglecting the development of the liberal values required to live and work in a democratic society and as abandoning those who within their communities wish to attain a more rigorous education for citizenship and democracy. This book draws together leading educationalists, philosophers, theologians, and social scientists to explore issues, problems, and tensions concerning religious education in a variety of international settings. The contributors explore the possibilities and limitations of religious education in preparing citizens in multicultural and multi-religious democratic societies.

Lutheran colleges and universities occupy a distinctive space in American higher education. In an age where the dividing line between sacred and secular has become blurred, Brian Beckstrom argues that their "rooted and open" approach, combined with adaptive theological leadership, could be the best hope for faith based higher education. To do so, he provides an overview of Lutheran higher education, its history, and identity, and combines surveys of students, faculty, and staff at Lutheran institutions with leadership theory and theological reflection. Leaders at Lutheran colleges and universities will find it to be helpful in understanding their mission, identity, and vocation in a secular age, and navigating the changing cultural environment that challenges the church and higher education alike.

Seit Grundung der Bundesrepublik ist die religiose Zusammensetzung der Gesellschaft heterogener und konfliktreicher geworden: Zugenommen hat die Gruppe der Religionslosen, von denen einige aktiv fur einen weltanschaulichen Sakularismus eintreten, und die der Muslime unterschiedlichen Bekenntnisses.
Dem Islam selbst und seiner komplexen Beziehung zum Verfassungsstaat sind zwei Beitrage gewidmet, ein weiterer sakularistischen (bzw. laizistischen) Positionen. Mehrere Kapitel gehen der Frage nach, wie das staatliche Religionsrecht auf die Herausforderungen Islam und Sakularismus reagieren sollte und ob es einer Neujustierung bedarf. Abschliessend werden zwei kontrare Urteile des Europaischen Gerichtshofs fur Menschenrechte (EGMR) zu einem italienischen Schulkreuz-Fall analysiert."

Charlotte Mason was a late nineteenth-century British educator whose ideas were far ahead of her time. She believed that children are born persons worthy of respect, rather than blank slates, and that it was better to feed their growing minds with living literature and vital ideas and knowledge, rather than dry facts and knowledge filtered and pre-digested by the teacher. Her method of education, still used by some private schools and many homeschooling families, is gentle and flexible, especially with younger children, and includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, conveying wonder and arousing curiosity, and through reflection upon great art, music, and poetry; nature observation as the primary means of early science teaching; use of manipulatives and real-life application to understand mathematical concepts and learning to reason, rather than rote memorization and working endless sums; and an emphasis on character and on cultivating and maintaining good personal habits. Schooling is teacher-directed, not child-led, but school time should be short enough to allow students free time to play and to pursue their own worthy interests such as handicrafts. Traditional Charlotte Mason schooling is firmly based on Christianity, although the method is also used successfully by secular families and families of other religions. Here in one affordable volume is her complete Homeschooling Series: Home Education: Six lectures by Charlotte Mason about the raising and educating of young children (up to the age of nine), for parents and teachers. She details how lessons in various school subjects can be done using her approach. She concludes with remarks about the Will, the Conscience, and the Divine Life in the Child. Parents and Children: A collection of 26 articles from the original Parent's Review magazines to encourage and instruct parents. School Education: Thoughts about the teaching and curriculum of children aged 9-12, either at school or at home. Ourselves: A character curriculum book written directly to children. Book I, Self-Knowledge, is for elementary school students; Book II, Self-Direction, is for older students. Formation of Character: Includes case studies of children (and adults) who cured themselves of bad habits; reflections on subjects including both schooling and vacations (or "stay-cations" as we now call them); various aspects of home schooling, with a special section detailing the things that Charlotte Mason thought were important to teach to girls in particular; and examples of how education affected outcome of character in famous writers of her day. Towards a Philosophy of Education: Charlotte Mason's final book, written after years of seeing her approach in action. This volume gives the best overview of her philosophy, and includes the final version of her 20 Principles. This book is particularly directed to parents of older children, about ages 12 and up, but is a valuable overview for parents of younger children as well, covering both theory and practice.

By its very nature, the ideals of religion entail sin and failure. Judaism has its own language and framework for sin that expresses themselves both legally and philosophically. Both legal questions - circumstances where sin is permissible or mandated, the role of intention and action - as well as philosophical questions - why sin occurs and how does Judaism react to religious crisis - are considered within this volume. This book will present the concepts of sin and failure in Jewish thought, weaving together biblical and rabbinic studies to reveal a holistic portrait of the notion of sin and failure within Jewish thought.

Preaching has been central to Muslim communities throughout the centuries. The liturgical Friday sermon is a prime example, although other genres that are less commonly known also serve important functions. This book addresses the ways in which Muslims relate various forms of religious oratory to authoritative tradition in 21st-century Islamic practice, while striving to adapt to local contexts and the changing circumstances of politics, media and society. This is the first book of its kind to look at homiletics beyond a specific country focus. Taking into consideration the historical developments of Muslim preaching, it offers a collection of thoroughly contextualised case studies of oratory in Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, Sweden and the USA. The analyses presented here show shared emphasis on struggles for legitimacy, efforts to speak authoritatively, as well as discursive opportunities and constraints.

This indispensable guide for teachers, students, and all those interested in the history and politics of pedagogy charts the course of religious education in England and Wales from 1944 to the present. The fully revised and updated second edition includes a major new chapter covering the years since the book's original publication in 1995, and places recent changes in the religious education system in context through judicious use of documentary sources and interviews with key policy makers and curriculum practitioners. As Terence Copley engagingly explores the interaction between religious thinkers, educators, and politicians, "Teaching Religion" suggests that our approach to the teaching of religion within the national education system offers insight into the type of society we aspire to be.

The fascinating story briefly told, plus the famous "miraculous" prayers and devotions along with the Litany to the Infant Jesus. (5-1.00 ea.; 10-.80 ea.; 25-.70 ea.; 50-.60 ea.; 100-.50 ea.).

The distinction between "insiders" and "outsiders" in religious studies has become an area of fruitful discussion in recent years. This anthology aims to extend that discussion by gathering newly commissioned essays from a diverse range of scholars, spanning a variety of disciplines and approaches, including ethnography, anthropology, theology and education. The result is a book that is at once accessible and readable, while remaining scholarly. The Insider/Outsider Debate has implications for numerous methodological issues in the study of religion, such as the emic/etic distinction, the distinction between religion and spirituality, the notions of "believing without belonging", the claim to be "spiritual but not religious" and the existence of multiple, complicated, contesting religious identities. A particular focus of the volume is providing critiques of these methodological issues within the most recent academic approaches to religion - particularly models of lived and vernacular religion.

As recent domestic and geopolitical events have become increasingly dominated by intolerant forms of religious thought and action, the critical study of religion continues to find itself largely ignored in the public square. Caught between those who assert that its principal purpose is to reflect the perspectives of those who believe and those who assert that its only proper place is to expose these same worldviews as deceptive social and economic mechanisms of power, the discipline has generally failed to find a truly audible voice. Rejecting both of these conservative and liberal modes of knowing as insufficient to the radical subject that is religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal offers in this book another possibility, that of the serpent's gift. Such a gift hisses a form of "gnosis," that is, a deeply critical approach to religion that is at the same time profoundly engaged with the altered states of consciousness and energy that are naively literalized by the proponents of faith and too quickly dismissed by the proponents of pure reason. Kripal does not simply describe such a gnosis. He performs and transmits it through four meditations on the sexualities of Jesus, the mystical humanism of Ludwig Feuerbach, the gnostic potentials of the comparative method, and the American mythologies of the comic book. From the erotics of the gospels to the mutant powers of the superhero, "The Serpent's Gift" promises its readers both an intellectual exile from our present religious and sexual ignorance and a transfigured hope in the spiritual potentials of the human species.

While courses in Bible and theology typically require research papers, particularly at the graduate level, very few include training in research. Professors have two options: use valuable class time to teach students as much as they can, or lower their standards with the understanding that students cannot be expected to complete tasks for which they have never been prepared. From Topic to Thesis: A Guide to Theological Research offers a third option. This affordable and accessible tool walks students through the process, focusing on five steps: finding direction, gathering sources, understanding issues, entering discussion and establishing a position. Its goal is to take students directly from a research assignment to a research argument-in other words, from topic to thesis.

This groundbreaking collection explores the important ways Jesuits have employed rhetoric, the ancient art of persuasion and the current art of communications, from the sixteenth century to the present. Much of the history of how Jesuit traditions contributed to the development of rhetorical theory and pedagogy has been lost, effaced, or dispersed. As a result, those interested in Jesuit education and higher education in the United States, as well as scholars and teachers of rhetoric, are often unaware of this living 450-year-old tradition. Written by highly regarded scholars of rhetoric, composition, education, philosophy, and history, many based at Jesuit colleges and universities, the essays in this volume explore the tradition of Jesuit rhetorical education-that is, constructing "a more usable past" and a viable future for eloquentia perfecta, the Jesuits' chief aim for the liberal arts. Intended to foster eloquence across the curriculum and into the world beyond, Jesuit rhetoric integrates intellectual rigor, broad knowledge, civic action, and spiritual discernment as the chief goals of the educational experience. Consummate scholars and rhetors, the early Jesuits employed all the intellectual and language arts as "contemplatives in action," preaching and undertaking missionary, educational, and charitable works in the world. The study, pedagogy, and practice of classical grammar and rhetoric, adapted to Christian humanism, naturally provided a central focus of this powerful educational system as part of the Jesuit commitment to the Ministries of the Word. This book traces the development of Jesuit rhetoric in Renaissance Europe, follows its expansion to the United States, and documents its reemergence on campuses and in scholarly discussions across America in the twenty-first century. Traditions of Eloquence provides a wellspring of insight into the past, present, and future of Jesuit rhetorical traditions. In a period of ongoing reformulations and applications of Jesuit educational mission and identity, this collection of compelling essays helps provide historical context, a sense of continuity in current practice, and a platform for creating future curricula and pedagogy. Moreover it is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding a core aspect of the Jesuit educational heritage.

New England pastor Jonathan Edwards encourages Christians struggling through the imperfections of life here on earth to experience the perfect love of God in communion with the Holy Spirit.

One of the most basic questions for any legal system is that of methodology: how one interprets, analyzes, weighs, and applies a mass of often competing legal rules, precedents, practices, customs, and traditions to reach final determinations and practical guidance about the correct legal-prescribed course of action in any given situation. Questions of legal methodology raise not only practical concerns, but theoretical and philosophical ones as well. We expect law to be more than the arbitrary result of a given decision maker's personal preferences, and so we demand that legal methodologies be principled as well as practical. These issues are especially acute in religious legal systems, where the stakes are raised by concerns for respecting not just human, but divine law. Despite this, the major scholars and codifiers of halakhah, or Jewish law, have only rarely explicated their own methods for reaching principled legal decisions. This book explains the major jurisprudential factors driving the halakhic jurisprudence of Rabbi Yehiel Mikhel Epstein, twentieth-century author of the Arukh Hashulchan-the most comprehensive, seminal, and original modern restatement of Jewish law since Maimonides. Reasoning inductively from a broad review of hundreds of rulings from the Orach Chaim section of the Arukh Hashulchan, the book teases out and explicates ten core halakhic principles that animate Rabbi Epstein's halakhic decision-making. Along the way, it compares the Arukh Hashulchan methodology to that of the Mishna Berura. This book will help any reader understand important methodological issues in both Jewish and general jurisprudence.