The Advent season is filled with rich themes that have fascinated poets. In Run, Shepherds, Run, Bill Countryman presents a poem a day for devotional reading during Advent and the twelve days of Christmas. Readers will find classic poets they know and love, including George Herbert, John Donne, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as well as contemporary poets, known and unknown. Run, Shepherds, Run includes helpful hints for reading poetry, for those who have less experience reading it than others, as well as useful annotations to help readers with older language that may not have easily apparent meanings for today's readers.

Based upon addresses given to Anglican audiences in North America and Australia, Bill Countryman directly confronts the challenges that face Anglicans and other Western Christians at a time of internal division and increasing indifference to religion on the part of educated elites. He regards these challenges as a work of the Holy Spirit, who is clearing the ground for a new era of building, and help readers start thinking about what kind of future the Spirit is leading us toward. The book begins by presenting the Spirit as a demolition expert, endeavoring to shake us out of our complacency. It then focuses on three central elements of Christian faith and life: the image of Jesus, the sacraments, and the scriptures, and notes some different ways in which we have seen and utilized them over the ages. It holds out the communion of saints as the key to understanding the ongoing value of the church today. It calls faithful people of all stripes to reject our tendency to turn God s gifts into idols and to rediscover a humility that will be open to the rebuilding that must now be done with the leadership of the Spirit. "

In the past two decades or so the issue of homosexuality has taken center stage at national and regional denominational meetings and in local church communities. The response of the majority of churches ranges from condemnation to toleration of the gay and lesbian community, neither of which offers much hope for homosexual Christians. In Gifted by Otherness L. William Countryman and M. R. Ritley conclude that being gay or lesbian is not actually a problem at all; rather it is a vocation, and, in fact, a gift to today's church.

As "outsiders" gay men and lesbians challenge the church to be inclusive of all God's children -- the central message of the gospel. "God has drawn us to this difficult place", they write, "in order to reveal God's grace to us and in us and through us". Basing their book on retreats they have presented to churches and seminaries, Countryman and Ritley explore what it means to affirm, not merely accept, being gay or lesbian, as well as Christian. Written primarily for the lesbigay community, and for their families and communities, they explore the ways in which the gay and lesbian community can appropriate and re-tell the biblical story, and find confidence in their unique spiritual journey and gifts. This pro-active and self-affirming book provides new hope for those who feel that it is impossible to be gay or lesbian, as well as Christian.

Written in accessible language and sensitive to those who have little or no experience in reading the Bible, each book in the Conversations with Scripture series focuses on exploring the historical and critical background of the biblical texts, while illustrating how these centuries-old writings still speak to us today. Countryman brings his considerable biblical studies erudition as well as his skills as a popular writer and published poet to bear on the Psalms. Though an accomplished scholar of the New Testament, Countryman illumines the Psalms with insight and creativity. Readers will experience this most beloved part of the scriptural canon in a fresh and exciting way.

"Only the strong can forgive. God, who is strongest, forgives best," writes Dr. L. William Countryman in this fresh look at forgiveness. Unlike most books on the subject, Forgiven and Forgiving is not about a step-by-step process. Rather, it is about conversion. Once we truly understand the depths of God's love for us and know deep-down that we are forgiven, we begin to see the world anew through God's eyes. Only when we are able to accept God's forgiveness for ourselves can we offer forgiveness to others. Biblically based with sound academic research, yet written in a conversational style, Forgiven and Forgiving offers valuable insights for clergy, laity, and church study groups. L. William Countryman is an Episcopal priest, professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California, and the author of The Good News of Jesus, Biblical Authority or Biblical Tyranny?, Language of Ordination, and The Mystical Way in the Fourth Gospel: Crossing Over into God (Trinity Press International), and Living on the Border of the Holy: Renewing the Priesthood of All.

"The first thing to say in our exploration of priesthood is this: priesthood is a fundamental and inescapable part of being human. All human beings, knowingly or not, minister as priests to one another. All of us, knowingly or not, receive priestly ministrations from one another. Unless we begin here, we are not likely to understand the confusions and uncertainties and opportunities we have been encountering in the life of the church itself in recent years. We shall be in danger, in fact, of creating makeshift solutions to half-understood problems, easy answers to misleading questions, temporary bandages for institutions that need to be healed from the ground up." - L. William Countryman There is a lot of tension in churches today about whose ministry is primary-that of the laity or of the clergy. L. William Countryman argues that we can only resolve that problem by seeing that we are all priests simply by virtue of being human and living, as we all do, on the mysterious and uncertain border with the Holy. Living on the Border of the Holy offers a way of understanding the priesthood of the whole people of God and the priesthood of the ordained in complementary ways by showing how both are rooted in the fundamental priestly nature of human life. After an exploration of the ministry of both laity and ordained, Countryman concludes by examining the implications of this view of priesthood for churches and for educating those studying for ordination.

In order to refocus their work so that it can open out into a three-way conversation between themselves, the scriptural text, and the communities interested in the text, Countryman argues that biblical scholars must abandon the over-dependence on analytical method that they favor. Scholars need to find new ways to bring the complexities of the text and its environment more directly into conversation with the complexities of human communities here and now. Countryman strikes out in new directions by stressing that the conversation with Scripture always calls the interpreter and the community of faith to address realities beyond the text. This book offers a challenge both to biblical scholars and to churches, calling them to work together in reforming and renewing their ways of dealing with Scripture. L. William Countryman is Sherman E. Johnson Professor in Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

This book focuses on reading the Greek text yet teaches enough syntax to enable students to effectively to deal with texts throughout the New Testament. The grammatical explanations are exceptionally clear and understandable, are based where possible on English usage, and are always related to what has been encountered in the reading. From the Publisher In American seminaries today, there is a very limited amount of time available to most students for language study. And yet, a working knowledge of the original language of the New Testament is imperative for informed exegesis of the biblical texts. Written with this difficult situation in mind, Read It in Greek offers a concise, one-semester introduction to the Greek language of the New Testament. Taking a unique, inductive approach to the study of Greek, this text focuses on reading the Greek-1 John is read through from beginning to end-yet also teaches enough syntax to enable students to interact with all of the New Testament.The book also integrates into the language course lessons in exegesis of the Greek text, resulting in immediate, usable skills that will allow students to look behind the facade of modern-language translations and to follow discussions in technical commentaries and other scholarly works. Students who go beyond the first semester to further study of the language will find it easy to refine the general concepts taught here. Those who do not will have begun reading the Greek New Testament and will have the resources necessary to continue doing so. Originally published as The New Testament Is in Greek: A Short Course for Exegetes, this volume continues to be one of the best resources available for quickly-yet effectively-introducing students to the reading of New Testament Greek. From The Critics

Proposes that scripture be understood as a word that prompts more questions than it answers and that in scripture God has not uttered the last word for us, but the first.

At the heart of Christianity stands the figure of Jesus and the message he embodied the gospel. This book seeks to make what is at the heart of the Christian religion available in a new way in our time. Many of those who read this book will already have some notion of what the Christian faith is about. Professor Countryman therefore writes: "I fear that the reader will bring to the reading of this book all kinds of assumptions that don't belong here; and I have tried to be explicit in rejecting some of these so that I can reintroduce something truer." Within the church and outside of it, people today are in a period of refocusing and rediscovery, asking what is really central to the Christian faith. Some claim that today's church has lost its heart, if not its soul. Countryman sounds a clarion call back to the gospel, the "good news." For in the end, he writes, "we must be prepared to choose the good news over everything else." Here, then, is a fundamental work that has grown out of and been tested in the parish, and that has served as a basic text for seminary courses in "Foundations of Christian Spirituality." L. William Countryman is Professor of New Testament at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, and author of The Language of Ordination: Ministry in an Ecumenical Context, also published by Trinity Press.

Countryman reintroduces the Good News to disciples and would-be disciples by going back to the basics of Christianity. He examines many of the assumptions we hold about the Christian faith concerning the Bible, the church, and doctrines, and offers the gospel in the language of forgiveness and grace.

This revised edition of Countryman's study of biblical authority is an excellent resource for adult forums or Bible study groups who are interested in a six-week course on exploring the authority and purpose of the Bible. Especially useful for those struggling with questions of fundamentalism. Countryman argues that the real authority of the Bible lies in its power to transform and convert.