This new volume in the Feasting on the Word series provides an alternative to strict lectionary use for Advent, with six thematically-designed services for the four Sunday in Advent, as well as, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Four midweek services provide a supplemental study of John the Baptist to enhance the congregation's Advent experience. The resources in this companion are a combination of material from existing Feasting on the Word volumes as well as newly written material. In keeping with other Feasting on the Word resources, the Advent Companion offers pastors focused resources for sermon preparation along with ready-to-use liturgies for a complete order of worship. All new material including hymn suggestions, Service of Hope and Healing, and children's sermon make this an invaluable resource for the Advent season.

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day.

For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion.

The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day.

For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion.

The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

Gospel medicine' is Barbara Brown Taylor's metaphor for the power of God's word to heal and mend a broken world. In this searingly beautiful collection, she practises the oldfashioned art of gospel home remedies, drawing strength and piercing insight from biblical stories that can help us confront our weaknesses, revive our spirits and restore us to lasting wholeness.

Year B, Volume 1: Advent through Transfiguration. With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox Press offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints Day. For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. They might focus on the Gospel text, for instance, by reading all four essays provided for that text, or they might explore connections between the Hebrew Bible, Psalm, Gospel, and Epistle texts by reading the theological essays for each one. Each lectionary year will consist of four volumes, one for the Advent and Christmas season, one for Lent and Easter, and one for each half of Ordinary Time. While the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents.

With the twelve-volume series Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press offers one of the most extensive and well-respected resources for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes will cover all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions.The page layout is truly unique. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essaysA--one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume will also contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents. The printed volumes for Ordinary Time include the complementary stream during Year A, the complementary stream during the first half of Year B, the semicontinuous stream during the second half of Year B, and the semicontinuous stream during Year C. Beginning with the season after Pentecost in Year C, the alternate lections for Ordinary Time not in the print volumes will be available online at feastingontheword.net.

In this selection of new sermons, Barbara Brown Taylor walks us through the church year, from the expectancy of Advent to the fires of Pentecost and beyond.

New York Times Bestseller The renowned and beloved New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World and Learning to Walk in the Dark recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching the world's religions to undergraduates in rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations. Barbara Brown Taylor continues her spiritual journey begun in Leaving Church of finding out what the world looks like after taking off her clergy collar. In Holy Envy, she contemplates the myriad ways other people and traditions encounter the Transcendent, both by digging deeper into those traditions herself and by seeing them through her students' eyes as she sets off with them on field trips to monasteries, temples, and mosques. Troubled and inspired by what she learns, Taylor returns to her own tradition for guidance, finding new meaning in old teachings that have too often been used to exclude religious strangers instead of embracing the divine challenges they present. Re-imagining some central stories from the religion she knows best, she takes heart in how often God chooses outsiders to teach insiders how out-of-bounds God really is. Throughout Holy Envy, Taylor weaves together stories from the classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been complicated and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions--even those whose truths are quite different from hers. The one constant in her odyssey is the sense that God is the one calling her to disown her version of God--a change that ultimately enriches her faith in other human beings and in God.

By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.

Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Some-times I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me -- that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human -- seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that.

After nine years serving on the staff of a big urban church in Atlanta, Barbara Brown Taylor arrives in rural Clarkesville, Georgia (population 1,500), following her dream to become the pastor of her own small congregation. The adjustment from city life to country dweller is something of a shock -- Taylor is one of the only professional women in the community -- but small-town life offers many of its own unique joys. Taylor has five successful years that see significant growth in the church she serves, but ultimately she finds herself experiencing "compassion fatigue" and wonders what exactly God has called her to do. She realizes that in order to keep her faith she may have to leave.

Taylor describes a rich spiritual journey in which God has given her more questions than answers. As she becomes part of the flock instead of the shepherd, she describes her poignant and sincere struggle to regain her footing in the world without her defining collar. Taylor's realization that this may in fact be God's surprising path for her leads her to a refreshing search to find Him in new places. Leaving Church will remind even the most skeptical among us that life is about both disappointment and hope -- and ultimately, renewal.

With the twelve-volume series Feasting on the Word, Westminster John Knox Press offers one of the most extensive and well-respected resources for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes will cover all of the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with moveable occasions.The page layout is truly unique. For each lectionary text, preachers will find brief essaysA--one each on the exegetical, theological, pastoral, and homiletical challenges of the text. Each volume will also contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers may make use of its contents. The printed volumes for Ordinary Time include the complementary stream during Year A, the complementary stream during the first half of Year B, the semicontinuous stream during the second half of Year B, and the semicontinuous stream during Year C. Beginning with the season after Pentecost in Year C, the alternate lections for Ordinary Time not in the print volumes will be available online at feastingontheword.net.

Gospel medicine is Barbara Taylor's metaphor for the healing power of God seen in the active and ongoing restoration of this broken world. In this new collection of sermons she practices the old-fashioned art of gospel home remedies like a true evangelist, summoning with piercing clarity and wit the Old and New Testament stories that have the power to mend our spirits, strengthen our weaknesses, and restore us to wholeness. Scripture comes to life in the contemporary people and places of which Taylor speaks. Georgia apple-growers become God's sharecroppers of the gospel parable; through Mary's embracing of her role as God-bearer we are dared to take risks in our own discipleship; in Jonah's angry stand-off with God we see reflections of our own struggles with a God who is more forgiving than we want him to be; with tender awe after years of waiting Sarah wipes her hands on her apron and goes to tell Abraham she is to bear a child. Through the stories of Scripture, Taylor addresses with moving simplicity the contemporary wounds of anger, abandonment, fear of judgment, and a longing for home, healing, and mercy.

In her critically acclaimed Leaving Church ("a beautiful, absorbing memoir"--The Dallas Morning News), Barbara Brown Taylor wrote about her experience leaving full-time ministryto become a professor, a decision that stretched the boundaries of her faith. Now, in her stunning follow-up, An Altar in the World, she shares how she learned to encounter God far beyond the walls of the church.

Taylor reveals meaningful ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see, from simple practices such as walking, working, and prayer. Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of meditation if we pay attention to what we're doing and take time to notice the sights, smells, and sounds around us. Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries. As we incorporate these practices into our daily lives, we begin to discover altars everywhere we go, in nearly everything we do. Through Taylor's expert guidance and delicate, thought-provoking prose, we learn to live with purpose, pay attention, slow down, and revere the world we live in.

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day. For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion. The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

With her customary grace, intelligence and wit, Barbara Brown Taylor wonders why science and faith have become polarized in the popular imagination. She explores what quantum physics, the new biology and chaos theory can teach people of faith and why scientists sound like poets and why physicists use the language of imagination, ambiguity, and mystery that is also found in scripture. In explaining why the church should care about the new insights of science, Taylor suggests ways we might close the gap between spirit and matter, between the sacred and the secular, and celebrate our shared life in the "web of creation" where nothing is without consequence, where all things coexist, where faith and science together seek to discover the same truths about the universe.

Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

The renowned Christian preacher and New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching world religions to undergraduates in Baptist-saturated rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations. Christians are taught that God is everywhere--a tenet that is central to Barbara Brown Taylor's life and faith. In Holy Envy, she continues her spiritual journey, contemplating the myriad ways she encountered God while exploring other faiths with her students in the classroom, and on field trips to diverse places of worship. Both she and her students ponder how the knowledge and insights they have gained raise important questions about belief, and explore how different practices relate to their own faith. Inspired by this intellectual and spiritual quest, Barbara turns once again to the Bible for guidance, to see what secrets lay buried there. Throughout Holy Envy, Barbara weaves together stories from her classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been challenged and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions--and by meeting God in them. At the heart of her odyssey is her trust that it is God who pushes her beyond her comfortable boundaries and calls us to "disown" our privatised versions of the divine--a change that ultimately deepens her relationship with both the world and with God, and ours.

In these essays on the dialogue between science and Christian faith, Barbara Brown Taylor describes her journey as a preacher learning what the insights of quantum physics, the new biology, and chaos theory can teach a person of faith. She seeks to discover why scientists sound like poets and why physicists use the language of imagination, ambiguity, and mystery also found in scripture. In explaining why the church should care about the new insights of science, Taylor suggests ways we might close the gap between spirit and matter, between the sacred and the secular. We live in the midst of a "web of creation" where nothing is without consequence and where all things coexist, even in such a way that each of us changes the world, whether we know it or not. In this luminous web faith and science join on a single path, seeking to learn the same truths about life in the universe. "For a moment," Taylor writes, "we see through a glass darkly. We live in the illusion that we are all separate 'I ams.' When the fog finally clears, we shall know there is only One."

This collection of more than fifty of Fred Craddock's sermons provides a glimpse of a master preacher at work. Amazingly, only one of the sermons was preached from a manuscript written in advance, as Craddock considered a sermon to be an event in the world of sound. As a result, the selections here wonderfully reflect and preserve Craddock's "voice" and engage readers with all the immediacy of the spoken word.

With this new lectionary commentary series, Westminster John Knox offers the most extensive resource for preaching on the market today. When complete, the twelve volumes of the series will cover all the Sundays in the three-year lectionary cycle, along with movable occasions, such as Christmas Day, Epiphany, Holy Week, and All Saints' Day. For each lectionary text, preachers will find four brief essays--one each on the theological, pastoral, exegetical, and homiletical challenges of the text. This gives preachers sixteen different approaches to the proclaimation of the Word on any given occasion. The editors and contributors to this series are world-class scholars, pastors, and writers representing a variety of denominations and traditions. And while the twelve volumes of the series will follow the pattern of the Revised Common Lectionary, each volume will contain an index of biblical passages so that nonlectionary preachers, as well as teachers and students, may make use of its contents.

In this new edition of her earliest collection of sermons Barbara Brown Taylor brings her down-to-earth wisdom and keen perspective to the Bible readings of the lectionary cycle. Originally preached for the congregation of All Saints Episcopal Church in downtown Atlanta, the topics of these sermons range from conversations with Abraham and Moses in the texts of the Hebrew scriptures to our awareness of the communion of saints and how to recognize a miracle when one comes our way."

In her bestselling preaching autobiography Barbara Brown Taylor writes of how she came to be a preacher of the gospel as a priest in the Episcopal Church. In this warm and poignant collection, Barbara Brown Taylor's humor and wisdom delve into the meaning of Christian symbols and history-both her own, growing up in the Mid-West and Georgia, and the Church's, from its earliest beginnings in the Near East. Seamlessly, Taylor weaves together reflections on her vocation with the long-standing struggles of the Church to hear, respond, and remain faithful to its mission of holy love. She moves effortlessly from reflection to homily, concluding the volume with thirteen sermons illustrative of the answered call. This rich meeting of memoir, theology, and sermon stands at the center of Taylor's work, bringing into one book the origins and the vision of her remarkable preaching life. But her voice is not sentimental. Instead, Taylor explores Christian meanings and histories in order to hear and speak, in the present, for God. "God has given us good news in human form and has given us the grace to proclaim it," she writes, "but part of our terrible freedom is the freedom to lose our voices, to forget where we were going and why. While that knowledge does not yet strike me as prophetic, it does keep me from taking both my ministry and the ministry of the whole church for granted." This book on the calling to preach is itself a call to reawaken to the activating presence of God. "Because I am a preacher, it is through a preacher's eyes that I see. . . , but because I am a baptized Christian too, it is from that perspective I write. Either way, my job remains the same: to proclaim the good news of God in Christ and to celebrate the sacraments of God's presence in the world. Those two jobs are described as clearly in the baptismal vows as they are in the ordination vows, which give all Christians a common vocation." -from Chapter One