John Chrysostom and Domestic Rituals in Fourth-Century Antioch
What did it mean for ordinary believers to live a Christian life in late antiquity? In Christians at Home, Blake Leyerle explores this question through the writings, teachings, and reception of John Chrysostom-a priest of Antioch who went on to become the bishop of Constantinople in 397 AD. Through elaborate spatial and ritual recommendations, ......
Contemplative author Christine Valters Paintner explores six unique fasts tied to spiritual practices--for Lent or a time of focus--to discover our truest hungers and our deepest spiritual reserves. Drawing on desert wisdom and contemplative practice, Paintner helps us enter into our own journey of spiritual growth, both for Lent and beyond.
Paul Ricoeur, Edith Stein, and the Heart of Meaning
This book probes the texts of Paul Ricoeur and Edith Stein to disclose the role of silence in the creation of meaning. To understand and live out of contemplative awareness as a way to think through transformative human experience is an ethical and spiritual task, one that warrants explanation and interpretation.
This edited volume explores the richness and diversity of Christian musical traditions in the Americas. The essays present a cross-section of current scholarship on Christian sacred music and the approaches to studying them in context.
Gathering with others constitutes the essential symbol of Christianity. Assembly is the biblical name for this local community. The book calls the church to think anew about gathering and to refresh its practice, articulating a spirituality that engages the assembly's gathering into the triune God and turns it toward the needs of our neighbors.
The Protestant Interpretation Problem and an Embodied Hermeneutic
This book delineates the individualist "interpretation problem" that has long beset Protestant biblical interpretation, and engages theological resources that could serve to move beyond it. Lauren Smelser White argues that readers of Scripture-specifically those who long to submit their lives to God's transforming Word, which they believe the ......
Language for God explores the ways language and images influence who we are and how we live. It declares the necessity of language and images for God that are expansive and inclusive of all genders. Lutheran perspectives are used as a compass to offer scriptural, theological, and historical insights to advance the reformation of Christian ......
American Quakerism changed dramatically in the antebellum era owing to both internal and external forces, including schism, industrialization, western migration, and reform activism. With the "Great Separation" of the 1820s and subsequent divisions during the 1840s and 1850s, new Quaker sects emerged. Some maintained the quietism of the previous ......
In 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing faint bloodstained imprints was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ's body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity's preeminent religious artifact. In an ......
This book shows how contemporary religious groups arrange very different sorts of rituals in order to achieve collective encounters with "the spirit." Mixed-methods analysis of rituals across a diverse range of religious traditions shows how Randall Collins' interaction ritual theory opens new pathways for the sociology of religion.
Paul Ricoeur, Edith Stein, and the Heart of Meaning
This book probes the texts of Paul Ricoeur and Edith Stein to disclose the role of silence in the creation of meaning. To understand and live out of contemplative awareness as a way to think through transformative human experience is an ethical and spiritual task, one that warrants explanation and interpretation.
Reading Religious Ritual with Ricoeur extends Ricoeur's philosophical treatment of religion beyond an analysis of mythic symbols and the biblical texts to religious ritual practices. It applies his broader hermeneutic lens to liturgical actions and practices in regard to religious truth, language, imagination, and identity.
Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition
Explores how, in the Americas, people of African birth or descent found spiritual and social empowerment in the orbit of the Church. Draws connections between Afro-Catholic festivals and their precedents in the early modern Christian kingdom of Kongo.
This thoughtful analysis offers a deeper understanding of Steiner's letters on the Archangel Michael and how he can help us to embrace a truly universal view of humanity.
This edited volume explores the richness and diversity of Christian musical traditions in the Americas. The essays present a cross-section of current scholarship on Christian sacred music and the approaches to studying them in context.