* Thoughtful exploration of midlife spirituality through the prism of nature walks * Study questions for each section Roger Owens, facing a "dark night of the soul" as he turned forty and entered midlife, was en-couraged by his spiritual director to think of it instead as a "threshold of discovery." Rather than go on a grand adventure like walking the Appalachian Trail or the Camino de Santiago, he decid-ed to mark his fortieth year by taking forty walks in a nearby nature preserve. With patience and attention, he explored the concerns rising with him: the inevitability of death, his boredom with life, and the reality of his changing faith, changing images of God, and changing sense of self. The result is forty short chapters that weave together insightful stories of his walks with accessi-ble history and practices of Christian spirituality and the lives of saints. This field guide to the spirituality of midlife facilitates readers' personal journeys through ques-tions of faith, purpose, and relationships. It is not solely a memoir, but a work of wisdom litera-ture that uses engaging first-person narratives to explore universal themes and spiritual inquiry. Wise and imaginative, and with study questions for each section, Threshold of Discovery is the companion guide for a thoughtful Christian journey.

About the Contributor(s): Jason Byassee is senior pastor at Boone United Methodist Church in North Carolina and a Fellow in Theology and Leadership at Duke Divinity School. L. Roger Owens is associate professor of leadership and ministry at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

"I challenge you to get through a chapter of this book without a desire for God being struck in your soul." - read more ...

Description: The Shape of Participation is a work of constructive theology addressed to theologians, seminarians, and thoughtful pastors. Owens engages and deepens recent popular discussions of church practices by approaching practices from the church Fathers' understanding of the church's participation in God. Through a wide-ranging engagement with theologians, both ancient and contemporary--including Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Herbert McCabe--Owens argues that the embodied practices of the church are the church's participation in the life of God, making the church Jesus' own continued, peaceable embodiment in and for the world. This book is for theologians, pastors, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of how the visible presence of God's church is extraordinarily good news in a violent world. Endorsements: ""I'm grateful for this account of the church's relationship to the life of God for refusing the hopelessness of so much contemporary ecclesiology. All of us who persist in preaching or hearing the Word and receiving God's good gifts at the table will be strengthened and encouraged by Owens's theocentric understanding of what the church is up to in the world."" --Beth Felker Jones Wheaton College ""A wonderful book--Owens takes the significant interest in 'practices' that has emerged over the last decade, engages it theologically in rich ways with attention to specific ecclesial examples, and deepens it through insightful analyses of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Herbert McCabe, and Maximus the Confessor. Pastors and scholars alike will benefit from careful study of Owens's significant argument."" --L. Gregory Jones Duke University ""By reframing the church's practices as a participation in Christ and, indeed, as Christ's own practicing in and for the world, Owens has brought to the study of Christian practice new theological depth, shape, and creativity. Moreover, by doing this in dialogue with ancient as well as contemporary theological and philosophical sources and in a way that takes seriously the concrete, embodied church rather than remaining on the level of idealized and abstract ecclesiology, he has provided us a helpful new model for thinking about what it means to be the church."" --Bryan Stone Boston University School of Theology About the Contributor(s): L. Roger Owens is co-pastor with his wife Ginger Thomas of Duke Memorial United Methodist Church, Durham, North Carolina. His next book is So I Send You: An Introduction to the Missional Church (forthcoming in the Cascade Companion series of Cascade Books).

Farmer, poet, essayist, and environmental writer Wendell Berry is acclaimed for his ideas regarding the values inherent in an agricultural society. Place, community, good work, and simple pleasures are but a few of the values that form the bedrock of Berry's thought. While the notion of reverence is central to Berry, he is not widely known as a religious writer. However, the moral underpinnings of his work are rooted in Christian tradition, articulating the tenet that faith and stewardship of the land are not mutually exclusive. In Wendell Berry and Religion, editors Joel J. Shuman and L. Roger Owens probe the moral and spiritual implications of Berry's work. Chief among them are the notions that the earth is God's provisional gift to mankind and that studying how we engage material creation reflects important truths. This collection reveals deep, thoughtful, and provocative conversations within Berry's writings, illuminating the theological inspirations inherent in his work.