Your wedding day is undoubtedly one of the most magical experiences in your lifetime. Whether you have been dreaming of it since you were a little girl or your wedding thoughts have just now begun, planning with purpose will help to make your wedding experience unregrettable and unforgettable. What God-given purposes do you have that shape your decision-making process? What lurking, sinful purposes need to be confessed and addressed in order to avoid stress and hurt? The Purposed Bride guides you in determining your wedding goals and the motivations behind them. Once your wedding purposes are identified, The Purposed Bride will lead you closer to finding God's will for your wedding by providing Bible-based insight on aspects of wedding planning and by encouraging you to pray through each decision. The Purposed Bride is a perfect companion to your favorite practical wedding-planning guide. From managing your wedding-season relationships and planning the event's particulars to preparing a life with your fiance, The Purposed Bride offers a Scriptural principle, a Bible-based discussion, a practical activity, and a relevant prayer for each wedding topic. Using personal anecdotes both from recent brides, The Purposed Bride provides "snapshots" from real weddings to inspire you in what to do (Perfect Pictures) and in what not to do (Problem Pictures). With the help of The Purposed Bride, your wedding will be well on its way to being an intentional, fruitful experience of worship designed in God's image and in your unique personality.

Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of "religion" and "body" through the religious lens of practical theology, with an emphasis on sensation as the embodied means in which human beings know themselves, others, and the divine in the world. The manuscript argues that all human interaction and practice, including religious praxis, engages "body" through at least one of the human senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste, sight, kinestics/proprioception). Unfortunately, body-and, more specifically and ironically, sensation-is eclipsed in contemporary academic scholarship that is inherently bent toward the realm of theory and ideas. This is unfortunate because it neglects bodies, physical or communal, as the repository and generator of culturally conditioned ideas and theory. It is ironic because all knowledge transmission minimally requires several senses including sight, touch, and hearing. Sensing Sacred is organized into two parts. The first section devotes a chapter to each human sense as an avenue of accessing religious experience; while the second section explores religious practices as they specifically focus on one or more senses. The overarching aim of the volume is to explicitly highlight each sense and utilize the theoretical lenses of practical theology to bring to vivid life the connections between essential sensation and religious thinking and practice.

Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of "religion" and "body" through the religious lens of practical theology, with an emphasis on sensation as the embodied means in which human beings know themselves, others, and the divine in the world. The manuscript argues that all human interaction and practice, including religious praxis, engages "body" through at least one of the human senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste, sight, kinestics/proprioception). Unfortunately, body-and, more specifically and ironically, sensation-is eclipsed in contemporary academic scholarship that is inherently bent toward the realm of theory and ideas. This is unfortunate because it neglects bodies, physical or communal, as the repository and generator of culturally conditioned ideas and theory. It is ironic because all knowledge transmission minimally requires several senses including sight, touch, and hearing. Sensing Sacred is organized into two parts. The first section devotes a chapter to each human sense as an avenue of accessing religious experience; while the second section explores religious practices as they specifically focus on one or more senses. The overarching aim of the volume is to explicitly highlight each sense and utilize the theoretical lenses of practical theology to bring to vivid life the connections between essential sensation and religious thinking and practice.