Религия: прочее
Различные книги в жанре Религия: прочееDreaming in Church
Humans are created as dreaming creatures and have been interested in the meaning of their dreams for thousands of years. This book offers tools and guidelines to help you work with your dreams as a practice of your Christian faith. Drawing on biblical and historical references as well as modern research, the book outlines ways to better understand your own dreams and gives practical advice for beginning and leading a dream group. The book also discusses how other contemporary spiritual practices, such as lectio divina, journaling, and meditation, can inform your dream work and vice versa. Dreams are not a secret code and will not necessarily improve your life forever, but they can serve as a valuable source of insights and inspiration in your life. This book will help you reach a deeper understanding of yourself and your faith through working with your dreams.
Making Good the Claim
The Church of God Reformation Movement (founded in 1881) has the distinction of having been founded on the two core principles of holiness and visible unity. Standard histories of the group proudly argue that the founder and pioneers exhibited a zeal for interracial unity that began to wane only in the early years of the twentieth century. This book rejects that claim and argues instead that little to no extant hard evidence supports that view. Moreover, Making Good the Claim argues that while blacks eagerly joined the group, they did so not because whites expended much energy evangelizing among them but because they heard something deeper in the message of holiness and visible unity than God's expectation that members achieve spiritual and church unity. Unlike most whites, blacks interpreted the message to call for unity along racial lines as well. This book challenges members of the Church of God to begin forthwith to make good their historic claim about holiness and visible unity, particularly as it applies to interracial unity.
The Book of Womanhood
Christian womanhood. What does it mean? When does it happen–at a certain age, status, or maturity? How do we know we're no longer girls? And when we've figured that out, how will others know to call us «woman» rather than «girl»? Christian women don't usually get a rite of passage in which they are named «woman.» Seeing this need, Amy Davis Abdallah created such a rite, and this book accompanies it.
No need to be in her rite of passage, however, to name yourself «woman.» Read this book and then sit down with some friends to talk about it over tea, coffee, and/or chocolate. Let The Book of Womanhood create a path through the confusion by its flexible framework of finding identity through developing relationship with God, self, others, and creation.
Amy writes simply as one perhaps further along in her journey of womanhood, and she doesn't write alone. She includes the stories of biblical women, of friends young and old, and even more. The diverse voices come together as a cloud of witnesses–encouraging us in our individual journeys.
Read for empowerment. Read for transformation. Read. And become the woman of God you were created to be.
The Resounding Soul
It is surely not coincidental that the term «soul» should mean not only the center of a creature's life and consciousness, but also a thing or action characterized by intense vivacity («that bike's got soul!»). It also seems far from coincidental that the same contemporary academic discussions that have largely cast aside the language of «soul» in their quest to define the character of human mental life should themselves be so–how to say it?–bloodless, so lacking in soul. This volume arises from the opposite premise, namely that the task of understanding human nature is bound up with and in important respects dependent upon the more critical task of learning to be fully human, of learning to have soul. The papers collected here are derived from a conference in Oxford sponsored by the Centre of Theology and Philosophy and together explore the often surprising landscape that emerges when human consciousness is approached from this angle. Drawing upon literary, philosophical, theological, historical, and musical modes of analysis, the essays of this volume vividly remind the reader of the power of the ancient language of soul over against contemporary impulses to reduce, fragment, and overly determine human selfhood.
Beware the Evil Eye Volume 1
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth makes reference to one of the oldest beliefs in the ancient world–the malignity of an Evil Eye. The Holy Scriptures in their original languages contain no less than twenty-four references to the Evil Eye, although this is obscured by most modern Bible translations. John H. Elliott's Beware the Evil Eye describes this belief and associated practices, its history, its voluminous appearances in ancient cultures, and the extensive research devoted to it over the centuries in order to unravel this enigma for readers who have never heard of the Evil Eye and its presence in the Bible.
Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy
It's obvious that Jesus fulfilled prophecies about the promised Messiah–or so the gospels make it seem. But the real story is more complex, and more compelling. In hindsight we can see that Jesus had help fulfilling prophecy. The gospel writers skillfully manipulated prophecies–carefully lifting them out of context, creatively reinterpreting them, even rewriting them–to match what Jesus would do in fulfilling them. The evangelists also used the prophecies themselves to shape the very stories that show their fulfillment.
This book describes in detail how Christian authors «helped» Jesus fulfill prophecy. Studies of Greek oracles, the Dead Sea Scrolls, translations of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek and Aramaic, and the writings of Josephus explore the interpretive techniques that paved the way for the New Testament's manipulation of prophecy.
This book analyzes how the belief that Jesus fulfilled prophecy became an argument to justify a new notion: the view that Christians had replaced Jews as God's chosen people. An aggressive anti-Judaism is analyzed in chapters on patristic theologians such as Justin Martyr and Augustine, who embedded it into the argument from prophecy.
The book concludes with an ethical argument for why Christians should retire the argument from prophecy.
Introducing Christian Theologies, Volume Two
Should Christianity's theological face remain largely European and North American in the twenty-first century in the wake of the expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America? The question about the «theological face» of Christianity cannot be ignored. For too long African, Asian, and Latin American theologians have been left out of mainstream theological discussions. Few standard textbooks on Christian theology acknowledge the unique contributions theologians from these continents have made to global Christianity. Introducing Christian Theologies: Voices from Global Christian Communities is a two-volume textbook that alters the predominantly European and North American «theological face» of Christianity by interacting with voices of Christian communities from across the globe. Introducing Christian Theologies explores the works of key theologians from around the world, highlighting their unique contributions to Christian theology and doctrine.
The Sculptor and His Stone
This book argues, from a distinctly Eastern Orthodox perspective, for the inseparability of classical Hellenism from the Greek patristic tradition, postulating a common striving for truth in both domains and laying emphasis on the contributions of the ancients and Greek paideia to Christian learning and culture. The essays contained in the volume provide a fruitful strategy, in the spirit of the late Werner Jaeger, for looking anew at the Greek classical world and Christianity through the eyes of the Greek fathers, the direct inheritors of the ancient Greek worldview. Collectively, the author and contributors forcefully demonstrate that, conflated with the visionary insights of the Jewish prophets and of Jewish messianism, the wisdom of the ancients served to pave the way for the unfolding of the fullness of Christian teaching and its spiritually enlightening revelation.
Retrieving Apologetics
Given the popes' recent statements of their desires to implement the New Evangelization, it is imperative that Catholic theologians and other intellectually engaged laypersons retrieve the vital discipline of apologetics. For, the New Evangelization places particular emphasis on «reproposing the Gospel to those who have experienced a crisis of faith . . . due to secularization.» One salient method of Catholic apologetics used to be characterized by three demonstrations, each of which assumes the conclusions established in the previous step(s). Some might think that this classical method of apologetics has been abandoned in the postconciliar Church, but Siniscalchi's book updates it. Unlike the classical apologetics of the preconciliar era, Siniscalchi engages contemporary scholarship in a variety of academic disciplines, such as philosophy, history, biblical studies, sociology, and theology, to develop the steps that are necessary for showing the reasonableness of faith.
Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity
The need to train Christian missionaries was an afterthought of the Protestant missionary movement in the early nineteenth century. The Basel Missionary Training Institute (BMTI) was the first school designed solely for the purpose of preparing European missionaries for ministry in non-European lands. Pitfalls of Trained Incapacity explores the various sociological and historical factors that influenced the BMTI «community of practice» and how the outcomes affected the work of the Basel Mission in Ghana in its initial phase. It shows that the integral training of the BMTI resulted in missionary practices that lacked flexibility to adjust attitudes and behavior to the vastly different circumstances in Africa, impeded the realization of mission objectives, and hindered the emergence of an African appropriation of Christianity.
By exploring educational and sociological perspectives in a precolonial context, this study reaches beyond its historical significance to raise questions of unintended effects of integral ministry training in other times and places. The natural cultural bias of groups with shared theological assumptions and social ideals–like the Basel Mission–suggests a strong propensity for trained incapacity, that is, for training processes that establish inflexible mental frameworks that are potentially detrimental to intercultural engagement.