Receive Your Miracle from GodGeorge Mller was the worst of sinners--a thief and a liar. But after turning to Christ, he provided for over 10,000 orphans--without ever asking anyone but God to supply his needs! He testified that he knew of at least 50,000 specific answers to his prayers. Here are his reports of a few of the most spectacular ones.From his amazing personal experiences, you will find the secret to receiving miraculous answers to your prayers.

This book looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material drawn from her personal experience in working with individuals and groups to show how the construction of ritual is a practice which uses storymaking and embodied action to empower women. She argues that ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. She includes stories of women who have created or participated in their own rituals to mark significant changes and transition in their lives, and reflects on these in the light of ritual theory. The book interweaves narrative and interview material drawn from case studies with insights drawn from feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies to show that the making of ritual for women is a transformative process which empowers them in constructing identity and agency. The writer shows how women are drawing from both Christian feminist theology and broader understandings of spirituality to construct their own understanding of God/Goddess through the rituals they enact.

Extraordinary wisdom to help you understand yourself, lead your life, and deal with other people.

As human beings, we have instincts for both good and evil, conscious and unconscious. To rectify ourselvesto live spiritually and properlyinvolves getting a handle on these impulses. "from the Introduction

In this special book of practical wisdom, Dr. Abraham J. Twerski draws from his extensive professional experience as a psychiatrist and spiritual counselor, a life-long student of Jewish wisdom texts, and his personal experience as a son of a wise Chassidic rabbi to give us practical lessons for life that we can put to day-to-day use in dealing with ourselves and others.

In a presentation as warm and witty as it is profound, Dr. Twerski combines lively anecdotes, personal musings, and insights and wisdom from sources ranging from Freud to the great Talmudic and Torah scholars throughout the ages. And with deep compassion and refreshing candor, he shows how these wisdom teachings can guide us in all moments of our lives, whatever our faith tradition.

Celebrate the Mystery, Compassion Wonder and Beauty of Animals

Take a spiritual journey through this beautiful collection of blessings, prayers and meditations about the creatures, wild and tame, that inhabit our world. These moving contributions about all types of animals playful dogs and beloved cats, giant whales and powerful elephants, tiny insects and delicate birds are drawn from many faith traditions, including Native American, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist.

A special section also provides animal blessing ceremonies you can use to memorialize the loss of a companion animal, offer prayers for an animal suffering illness or injury or simply recognize the spiritual connection we create when we fully appreciate another member of God's creation.

Contributors include: Basho Elizabeth Barrett Browning Feng Chih James Dickey Meister Eckhart St. Francis of Assisi Joy Harjo Stanley Hauerwas Jane Hirshfield Galway Kinnell D. H. Lawrence John Muir Rumi Albert Schweitzer Rabindranath Tagore Evelyn Underhill Walt Whitman and many more"

The author applies the fields of gender studies, psychoanalysis, and literature to Talmudic texts. In opposition to the perception of Judaism as a legal system, he argues that the Talmud demands inner spiritual effort, to which the trait of humility and the refinement of the ego are central. This leads to the question of the attitude to the Other, in general, and especially to women. The author shows that the Talmud places the woman (who represents humility and good-heartedness in the Talmudic narratives) above the character of the male depicted in these narratives as a scholar with an inflated sense of self-importance. In the last chapter (that in terms of its scope and content could be a freestanding monograph) the author employs the insights that emerged from the preceding chapters to present a new reading of the Creation narrative in the Bible and the Rabbinic commentaries. The divine act of creation is presented as a primal sexual act, a sort of dialogic model of the consummate sanctity that takes its place in man's spiritual life when the option of opening one's heart to the other in a male-female dialogue is realized.

The twentieth century has been called a "century of horror". Proof of that, designation can be found in the vast and ever-increasing volume of scholarly work on violence, trauma, memory, and history across diverse academic disciplines. This book demonstrates not only the ways in which the wars of the twentieth century have altered theological engagement and religious practice, but also the degree to which religious ways of thinking have shaped the way we construct historical narratives. Drawing on diverse sources - from the Hebrew Bible to Commonwealth war graves, from Greek tragedy to post-Holocaust theology - Alana M. Vincent probes the intersections between past and present, memory and identity, religion and nationality. The result is a book that defies categorization and offers no easy answers, but instead pursues an agenda of theological realism, holding out continued hope for the restoration of the world.

A critical and challenging look at reinventing the synagogue, as the centerpiece of a refashioned Jewish community.

America is undergoing a spiritual revolution: only the fourth religious awakening in its history. I plead, therefore, for an equally spiritual synagogue, knowing that any North American Jewish community that hopes to be around in a hundred years must have religion at its center, with the synagogue, the religious institution that best fits North American culture, at its very core. from Chapter 1

Synagogues are under attack, and for good reasons. But they remain the religious backbone of Jewish continuity, especially in America, the sole Western industrial or post-industrial nation where religion and spirituality continue to grow in importance. To fulfill their mandate for the American future, synagogues need to replace old and tired conversation with a new way of talking about their goals, their challenges and their vision for the future.

In this provocative clarion call for synagogue transformation, Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman summarizes a decade of research with Synagogue 2000 a pioneering experiment that reconceptualized synagogue life providing fresh ways for synagogues to think as they undertake the exciting task of global change.

The material symbol has become central to understanding religion in late modernity. Overtly theological approaches use words to express the values and faith of a religion, but leave out the 'incarnation' of religion in the behavioural, performative, or audio-visual form. This book explores the lived expression of religion through its material expression, demonstrating how religion and spirituality are given form, and are thus far from being detached or ethereal. Cutting across cultures, senses, disciplines and faiths, the contributors register the variety in which religions and religious groups express the sacred and numinous. Including chapters on music, architecture, festivals, ritual, artefacts, dance, dress and magic, this book offers an invaluable resource to students of sociology and anthropology of religion, art, culture, history, liturgy, theories of late modern culture, and religious studies.

This volume is concerned with the origins, development and character of ritual in Islam. The focus is upon the rituals associated with the five 'pillars of Islam': the credal formula, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage. Since the 19th century academic scholarship has sought to investigate Muslim rituals from the point of view of history, the study of religion, and the social sciences, and a set of the most important and influential contributions to this debate, some of them translated into English for the first time, is brought together here. Participation in the ritual life of Islam is for most Muslims the predominant expression of their adherence to the faith and of their religious identity. The Development of Islamic Ritual shows some of the ways in which this important aspect of Islam developed to maturity in the first centuries of Islamic history.

The events surrounding the holidays molded the foundation of the Jews as a nation and are related to their continuity and survival as Jews throughout history. In The Jewish Holidays: A Journey through History, author Larry Domnitch contends that there is a cyclical nature to the events of Jewish history. He writes, "The events that make up the themes of the Jewish holidays did not occur in a vacuum but have recurred throughout history. The actual Israelite exodus from Egypt, or the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai as celebrated on Shavuot, may have occurred once, but in a sense the themes conveyed by those momentous events have been repeated over the centuries. This book attempts to give the reader an appreciation of the cyclical nature of Jewish history and a greater appreciation of the holidays and their relevance throughout Jewish history."

Ascensions on high took many forms in Jewish mysticism and they permeated most of its history from its inception until Hasidism. The book surveys the various categories, with an emphasis on the architectural images of the ascent, like the resort to images of pillars, lines, and ladders. After surveying the variety of scholarly approaches to religion, the author also offers what he proposes as an eclectic approach, and a perspectivist one. The latter recommends to examine religious phenomena from a variety of perspectives. The author investigates the specific issue of the pillar in Jewish mysticism by comparing it to the archaic resort to pillars recurring in rural societies. Given the fact that the ascent of the soul and pillars constituted the concerns of two main Romanian scholars of religion, Ioan P. Culianu and Mircea Eliade, Idel resorts to their views, and in the Concluding Remarks analyzes the emergence of Eliade's vision of Judaism on the basis of neglected sources.

Sacrifice dominated the religious landscape of the ancient Mediterranean world for millennia, but its role and meaning changed dramatically in the fourth and fifth centuries with the rise of Christianity. Daniel Ullucci offers a new explanation of this remarkable transformation, in the process demonstrating the complexity of the concept of sacrifice in Roman, Greek, and Jewish religion.
The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice challenges the predominant scholarly model, which posits a connection between so-called critiques of sacrifice in non-Christian Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts and the Christian rejection of animal sacrifice. According to this model, pre-Christian authors attacked the propriety of animal sacrifice as a religious practice, and Christians responded by replacing animal sacrifice with a pure, ''spiritual'' 'worship. This historical construction influences prevailing views of animal sacrifice even today, casting it as barbaric, backward, and primitive despite the fact that it is still practiced in such contemporary religions as Islam and Santeria.
Rather than interpret the entire history of animal sacrifice through the lens of the Christian master narrative, Ullucci shows that the ancient texts must be seen not simply as critiques but as part of an ongoing competition between elite cultural producers to define the meaning and purpose of sacrifice. He reveals that Christian authors were not merely purveyors of pure spiritual religion, but a cultural elite vying for legitimacy and influence in societies that long predated them. The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice is a crucial reinterpretation of the history of one of humanity's oldest and most fascinating rituals.

..".a successfully ambitious effort, richly informative and insightful in its coverage of the site's religious life and most sophisticated in its use and advancing of theoretical perspectives...Profound insights...abound in this complex and rewarding piece of scholarship..a must read for scholars of south Asian religions." -The Australian Journal of Anthropology

The Sri Lankan ethnic conflict that has occurred largely between Sinhala Buddhists and Tamil Hindus is marked by a degree of religious tolerance that sees both communities worshiping together. This study describes one important site of such worship, the ancient Hindu temple complex of Munnesvaram. Standing adjacent to one of Sri Lanka's historical western ports, the fortunes of the Munnesvaram temples have waxed and waned through the years of turbulence, violence and social change that have been the country's lot since the advent of European colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Bastin recounts the story of these temples and analyses how the Hindu temple is reproduced as a center of worship amidst conflict and competition.

Rohan Bastin is Head of the School of Anthropology, Archaeology & Sociology at James Cook University.

This volume explores the ways in which interreligious encounters happen ritually. Drawing upon theology, philosophy, political sciences, anthropology, sociology, and liturgical studies, the contributors examine different concrete cases of interrituality. After an introductory chapter explaining the phenomenon of interrituality, readers learn about government-sponsored public events in Spain, the ritual life of mixed families in China and the UK. We meet Buddhist and Christian monks in Kentucky and are introduced to rituals of protest in Jerusalem. Other chapters take us to shared pilgrimage sites in the Mediterranean and explore the ritual challenges of Israeli tour guides of Christian pilgrims. The authors challenges readers to consider scriptural reasoning as a liturgical practice and to inquire into the (in)felicitous nature of rituals of reconciliation. This volume demonstrates the importance of understanding the many contexts in which interrituality happens and shows how ritual boundaries are perpetually under negotiation.