Религия: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Религия: прочееThe Social Contexts of Disability Ministry
This book provides pastors, seminarians, and interested laity with the background necessary to understand the need for disability ministry and the contexts out of which the church's ministry among people with disabilities must emerge. This is true not only for descriptions of ministries over the past sixty years, but also the challenges disability poses for biblical studies, church history, Christian theology, and ethics. Insights are gained not only from mainstream secular and religious sources but from evangelical and other conservative materials. The blending of items from different religious resources reveals just how ubiquitous disability is and the need for disability ministry–now and for many years into the future. The book's format is such that either it can serve as a text for courses on disability ministry, or individual chapters can be employed in various courses on selected topics in biblical studies, history, theology, and ethics. Pastors and lay leaders will enjoy the depth of coverage for each topic. This is a book about a serious subject, for serious readers. Its materials are designed to inform, stimulate, and promote disability ministry as a topic worthy of serious study.
Reformation Observances: 1517–2017
The year 2017 marks the five-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, if that event is dated from the posting of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. Admittedly, 2017 is an arbitrary and somewhat artificial milestone. Nevertheless, anniversaries can be special occasions that allow for an appreciation and evaluation of memorable persons and events. As a number of Reformation anniversaries approach, the historical significance of the Reformation merits increased attention. Employing a variety of historiographical methods from intellectual history to postcolonial theory, this volume demonstrates how four major traditions observed the Reformation: Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed, and Roman Catholic. The foreword and preface place the essays into the contemporary and broader historical contexts in the history of reform. Commemorations of the Reformation varied in different periods, often influenced by immediate historical contexts. How are those sixteenth-century events, which caused both renewal and conflict in church and society as well as divisions between those expressions, to be viewed in the twenty-first century in a setting broader than Europe?
The Sacred Now
The Sacred Now presents a contemporary Jewish spiritual philosophy that is founded in both the Jewish tradition and a commitment to contemporary culture. It synthesizes the sensibilities of Kabbalah, philosophy, and secular spirituality. While the great timeless questions that humanity has asked itself remain unchanged, humanity's responses to these questions evolve over time. As society changes and our knowledge of the universe changes, our spiritual and religious life naturally must also evolve if we intend to remain engaged in the world around us.
The Sacred Now examines the state of Jewish spirituality today, proposing orientations and practices geared toward cultivating consciousness of the Divine. It discusses the relationship of spirituality and religion, examines the functions of both structure and freedom in developing a lifestyle with a strong spiritual focus, while remaining cognizant that it is the practice more than the theory that ultimately matters.
Still Moving
Speaking about love, Jesus said we should be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. Was Jesus joking? Was he setting us up for failure? Or was Jesus offering us a greater experience of God's love than we are currently settling for? Still Moving is about the journey of love's perfection. God wants to make us perfect in love in this life. And God wants us to strive after God's perfect and perfecting love.
Still Moving is for individuals and groups seeking to give shape to their formation, to clarify the goal of their faith, and to live in deeper intimacy with God. Areas include:
–Learning and living God's will for your life and for the world –Joining your life story to God's story and cultivating the mind of Christ –Simplifying your bodily life and experiencing God's power in your body –Living intentionally from the deepest part of your being in union with God –Tearing down personal and societal walls of prejudice, class, violence, and ideology
Still Moving includes sections for group discussion or further personal exploration and action. So let's go! The journey of love's perfection begins with the first step.
The Priesthood of All Believers and the Missio Dei
The priesthood of all believers is a pillar undergirding Protestant ecclesiology. Yet the doctrine has often been used to serve diverse agendas. This book examines the doctrine's canonical, catholic, and contextual dimensions. It first identifies the priesthood of all believers as a canonical doctrine based upon the royal priesthood of Christ and closely related to the believer's eschatological temple-service and offering of spiritual sacrifices (chapters 1-3). It secondly describes its catholic development by examining three paradigmatic shifts, shifts especially associated with Christendom (chapters 4-6) and a suppression of the doctrine's missional component. Finally, the book argues that a Christian doctrine of the priesthood of all believers should be developed with a Christocentric-Trinitarian understanding of the missio Dei. This suggests there are especially appropriate ways for the royal priesthood to relate to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. A canonically and catholically informed priesthood of all believers leads contextually to particular ecclesial practices. These seven practices are 1) Baptism as public ordination to the royal priesthood; 2) Prayer; 3) Lectio Divina; 4) Ministry; 5) Church Discipline; 6) Proclamation; and 7) the Lord's Supper as the renewal of the royal priesthood.
Pathways to the Waters of Grace
What if the church took with utmost seriousness that baptism is the gift of a new identity taking a lifetime to grow into? And, what if that identity includes God's call to a way of life made visible in how Jesus lived his? This book is a response to these questions in relationship to the church's practice of baptizing children. This book's underlying premise is that how the church helps parents prepare for baptism is vital to how the whole family lives its baptismal identity throughout life, as well as to the renewal of churches themselves. In the last several decades, institutionalized Christianity has found itself renegotiating its relationship with a culture that often has churches on the defensive for practices that are little changed from an era now past and insufficient as a witness to life as Christ's disciple. This book urges a reconsideration of what churches offer parents seeking baptism for a child, offering a transformed vision of such a ministry as well as a practical guide for putting it in place in the life of churches. Pastors, educators, and leaders will find a pathway to follow that promises to be life changing for all involved.
Recreating the Cosmos
This book is a meditation on Paul's letter to the church in Galatia with the purpose of reclaiming Paul for those of faith who have grown tired of thinking that Christians are the people who draw lines, make distinctions, and police religious borders. This book is an attempt to reclaim the vision of Paul that is beyond Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female: the new creation. Ultimately, the vision of Paul was not Paul's vision, but God's vision of the cosmos. As readers reclaim this vision of a new creation, they begin to reclaim God's new creation experienced in our lives and within the world around us. God, as the grand creator of the cosmos, is attempting to inject the same creative process into the cosmos through humans. Rather than simply seeing humans as the destroyers of the cosmos, Barrier invites us to consider this beautiful thought: «The earth could be renewed daily by . . . humanity.»
Intimate Partner Violence in the Black Church
Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) or Domestic Violence (DV) continues to be a perennial issue in the Black church and Christendom as a whole. Women in the church continue to experience violence at increased rates, but leadership has been delayed in providing a meaningful response to IPV as families experience the turmoil of abuse. Further, more and more children suffer from the trauma of family violence that perpetuates as males, who witness IPV, have a greater susceptibility of becoming abusers and females, who witness abuse, are put in risk of choosing abusers in relationships.
The church must now become the leading change agent in the struggle to reduce and end family violence by addressing the heart of the issue, the pulpit, namely male leaders in the church who abuse their wives and hide behind the scripture text. The church must expose the biblical truth regarding marriage and relationships and embed policy within the by-laws of the church that provide victims and survivors with opportunities for confidential reporting, resources when they are ready to leave, and on-going support for women who desire to transition from abuse to survivorship.
The Drama of Preaching
Preaching is dramatic. Through it, we hear the voice of the living God as he speaks to us both through the reading and the preaching of the word of God. But where do the hearers of sermons fit into the drama? This book suggests ways in which the drama metaphor may help to address age old questions about the centrality of the gospel and the place of the hearer in preaching. As God in Christ is the central character in the biblical drama of redemption, he also calls hearers to understand their role in creatively, yet faithfully living according to the biblical script. Thus, no sermon is complete until God's redemptive work is powerfully proclaimed, and his people are instructed in how they too are participating in the Missio Dei. In this work, Hebrews 11 is employed as a means of showing how God not only reveals his redemptive work to his people, but also through them. As postmodernism sets the stage of contemporary preaching, The Drama of Preaching interacts with some of the particular challenges preachers face in engaging postmodern listeners, that they might not only be hearers, but doers of the preached word.
The Ghost of Perfection
Who am I? Who are we? Simple yet profound questions. What does it mean to be human? Why does society sometimes make us feel inadequate and diminished as humans? Where does the church and religion slot into this sense of dehumanization? What are we doing to ourselves and to others to impede our journey as humans living to the fullest? Why does it feel as if violence and fear is the dominant narrative in this modern world?
Who is Jesus? Again, a simple yet profound question. A question that can open the door to knowing what it truly means to be human, living a life of love and not fear and violence.
With the help of ancient and modern thinkers, pioneer, church planter, and chaplain Joe Haward explores these questions in this provocative book and seeks to help us reconnect with our beautiful humanity.