According to Kabbalah, holidays are cosmic times when believers can tap into transformational energies. Every month presents a chance to connect with unique blessings. In "Days of Power, " luminary Kabbalist Rav Berg describes the spiritual ceremonies associated with holidays and explains their significance with depth, precision, and passion. Offering an awareness we can use to infuse our lives with positivity, Berg brings the holidays alive, from commemorations of historic events to dynamic opportunities for change and growth. From this perspective, observing holidays is not a religious obligation, but a choice we can make for the purpose of transforming ourselves and the world around us. In Part One, Berg explains preparation for, and provides deep insight into, the first four months of the year, beginning with Rosh Hashanah.

Filled with more than fifty prayers and blessings for almost every situation in our daily lives, The Book of Light is created for the Christian on the go. It's also great for new Christians looking to build an active prayer life or for those who simply need encouraging during challenging times. Prayers and blessings inspired by Scripture are a sure way to let the Word of God do the work in your life.

The formula 'for the life of' is often found in votive inscriptions, cast in Aramaic and other languages, which originate from the Syrian-Mesopotamian desert and adjacent areas and which roughly date from the first three centuries A.D. They belong to objects like statues and altars that usually were erected in temples and other structures with a ritual or sacred function. The inscriptions establish a relationship between the dedicator and one or more beneficiaries, those persons for whose life the dedication was made.
Since the social context evidently bears on both the meaning of the inscriptions as well as the status of the dedications, this volume deals with the nature of the relationships and the socio-religious function the dedications perform.

Describing a great variety of funeral ritual from major world religions and from local traditions, this book shows how cultures not only cope with corpses but also create an added value for living through the encouragement of afterlife beliefs. The explosion of interest in death in recent years reflects the key theme of this book - the rhetoric of death - the way cultures use the most potent weapon of words to bring new power to life. This new edition is one third longer than the original with new material on the death of Jesus, the most theorized death ever which offers a useful case study for students. There is also empirical material from contemporary/recent events such as the death of Diana and an expanded section on theories of grief which will make the book more attractive to death counsellors.

Bringing together prominent scholars in the sociology of religion, this collection of essays offers a framework for understanding the transition from the essentially penitential purposes of the medieval pilgrimage, to the rise of the varied spiritualities of contemporary religious tourism. Covering over 1,500 years of religious travel, these essays explore the forms of expression and experience which we must engage reflectively to better understand the idea of pilgrimage and religious tourism as an important aspect of religious affirmation. This unique volume sheds light on the transformation of the traditional religious pilgrimage into a tourist activity and examines the influence of modern culture, technology, and secularization on spiritually motivated travel.

The editors conclude that a sharp distinction between pilgrimage and religious tourism is historically unjustified. While the purposes of such travel have changed over time, they remain a part of a larger religio-cultural context, offering avenues for religious encounter, just as pilgrimage in earlier eras permitted the development of various secular dimensions. Covering such diverse topics as Pagan pilgrimage and Postmodern Traditionalism, medieval pilgrimage and disaster site visitation, the authors provide an interesting look at an often misunderstood phenomenon.

This monograph explores the ways in which canonical Francophone Algerian authors, writing in the late-colonial period (1945-1962), namely Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Mouloud Feraoun, Mouloud Mammeri and Assia Djebar, approached the representation of Algerian women through literature. The book initially argues that a masculine domination of public fields of representation in Algeria contributed to a postcolonial marginalization of women as public agents. However, it crucially also argues that the canonical writers of the period, who were mostly male, both textually acknowledged their inability to articulate the experiences and subjectivity of the feminine Other and deployed a remarkable variety of formal and conceptual innovations in producing evocations of Algerian femininity that subvert the structural imbalance of masculine symbolic hegemony. Though it does not shy from investigating those aspects of its corpus that produce ideologically conditioned masculinist representations, the book chiefly seeks to articulate a shared reluctance concerning representativity, a pessimism regarding the revolution's capacity to deliver change for women, and an omnipresent subversion of masculine subjectivity in its canonical texts.

Imagine opening a jewelry box. As you carefully raise the lid, the most beautiful music you have ever heard begins to play. Peering inside, you see precious gemstones surrounding a polished strand of pearls against a black velvet lining. This isn't just any jewelry box. It's your spiritual jewelry box. Pearls are the foundational piece placed in our spiritual jewelry box. When you don't know what to pray, don't know how to pray, and don't even want to pray, you can open your jewelry box and pull out Pearls.

In the same way an oyster covers an irritant in its shell with a substance called nacre, producing a pearl, we can coat the issues in our lives with the nacre of prayer and also produce pearls. Pearls outlines five essentials for a richer prayer life, focusing on how Jesus' words, "it is better to give than to receive," relate to prayer. These words are often related to our money, our time, or our service. Pearls takes a step further and shows how giving to God through prayer in five areas enriches your prayer life and draws you into a closer relationship with Him.

Pearls is about praying. It provides a fresh look at a subject that will never grow old.

Popular religion rarely expresses itself in the artifacts of "high" culture. In this book, Lippy approaches the study of popular religion by asking how ordinary people have gone about the process of being religious in America. Along the way, he examines popular religious periodicals, newspapers, novels, diaries, devotional materials, hymnals, promotional materials for revivals and camp meetings, religious tracts, as well as vernacular art and architecture, other artifacts, and, especially in the 20th century, radio, film, and television. He avoids the traditional focus on religious movements and institutions, choosing instead to illuminate the cultural impact of what people in America think and do when they are being religious by highlighting aspects of private life.

This volume provides a thorough introduction to the major classic and modern writings dealing with religious sacrifice. Collected here are twenty five influential selections, each with a brief introduction addressing the overall framework and assumptions of its author. As they present different theories and examples of sacrifice, these selections also discuss important concepts in religious studies such as the origin of religion, totemism, magic, symbolism, violence, structuralism and ritual performance. Students of comparative religion, ritual studies, the history of religions, the anthropology of religion and theories of religion will particularly value the historical organization and thematic analyses presented in this collection.

Although most historical and contemporary religions are governed by men, there are, scattered throughout the world, a handful of well-documented religions led by women. Most of these are marginal, subordinate, or secondary religions in the societies in which they are located. The one known exception to this rule is the indigenous religion of Okinawa, where women lead the official mainstream religion of the society. This book is the first in-depth look at this unique religious tradition, exploring the intersection between religion and gender. Based on fieldwork in an Okinawan village, Susan Sered argues that the absence of male dominance in the religious sphere is part of a broader absence of hiearchical ideologies and cultural patterns. In addition to providing important information on this remarkable and little-studied group, this book helps to overturn our mostly unexamined assumptions that male dominance of the religious sphere is universal, axiomatic, and necessary.

Dwight Lyman Moody defines a Prevailing Prayer as one which involves the entire being of the person praying: the entirety of the mind is focused not upon material or life circumstances, but the very being of God. Such an effort to pray so deeply is difficult: Moody, himself an experienced evangelist and preacher, had encountered many Christians who struggled to attain depth and connection with the Lord during their prayers. This book intends to help the true believer attain a material closeness to the divine through prayer which prevails. It is ideal for devotional reading before and after your daily prayers, that the insights within remain in mind. To help his fellow believers, Moody quotes numerous stories from the Biblical scriptures together with personal anecdotes from his long career as a man of God. We also hear of incidents in the life of Jesus Christ, and the many obstacles He surmounted to teach humanity of God.

This study presents a comprehensive treatment of a crucial aspect of Greek religion hitherto largely neglected in the English language. Simon Pulleyn makes a full examination of all the relevant literary and inscribed material available in order both to describe ancient Greek practices and to explain their significance.

This accessible study is the first critical investigation of the cult of saints among Muslims and Jews in medieval Syria and the Near East. Josef Meri's critical reading of a wide range of contemporary sources reveals a vibrant religious culture in which the veneration of saints and pilgrimage to tombs and shrines were fundamental.

When seeking guidance you need not look any further than the bible. Praying scripture is a simple way to pray when we are struggling with finding the right words. In this book you will find scripture verses for guidance along with a prayer for each verse. As you read each verse and say each prayer remember to keep the Lord on your mind, on your lips and in your heart.