Kategoria BISAC: Religion >> Christian Rituals & Practice - General

Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and...

Wives of the Leopard explores power and culture in a pre-colonial West African state whose army of women and practice of human sacrifice earned it notoriety in the racist imagination of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. Tracing two hundred years of the history of Dahomey up to the French colonial conquest in 1894, the book follows change in two central institutions. One was the monarchy, the coalitions of men and women who seized and wielded power in the name of the king. The second was the palace, a household of several thousand wives of the king who supported and...

Father Brown reflects here not only on those annunciations of Jesus' forthcoming birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but also on the beautiful canticles, the Magnificat and the Benedictus, and on the origins of Jesus as given in the first words of the New Testament.

As the Church continues to try to clarify the meaning of baptism, well-known liturgical scholar Kenneth Stevenson provides important insights into the historical issues with which we still wrestle. Is baptism a private or a public act? Is the symbolism of the rite still appropriate? Does the language of the baptismal service remain meaningful in a secular age?

In order to answer these and other pressing questions, we must understand the thinking of those who have come before us. Stevenson does just that by looking at the writings of the 17th century Anglican divines such as Lancelot...

This concise, conversational, and engaging book is for those who find it difficult or even impossible to slow down and be quiet. But if we can't learn how to be still in the midst of a noisy world, we will have a hard time listening for God's voice and guidance in our lives.

McPherson explores the positive effects that practicing silence has on body,...

In the summer of 1995 Mary Earle returned from a vacation feeling refreshed and restored from her time away. A few days later, all that changed, when she was rushed to the emergency room with a case of acute and life-threatening pancreatitis. Being ill, she discovered, forces you to learn to live in whole new ways, ones often marked by limitation and fragility.

As a priest and spiritual director, Earle began to explore ways in which her own prayer life might help her build a different relationship with her illness. Using the Benedictine practice of lectio divina, or sacred reading,...

"We have been drifting into a muddle and a mess, putting together bits and pieces of traditions, ideas and practices in the hope that they will make sense. They don't. There may be times when a typical Anglican fudge is a pleasant, chewy sort of thing, but this isn't one of them. It's time to think and speak clearly and act decisively."

With these robust words Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham, throws down a challenge to current liturgy and practice surrounding All Saints' and All Souls' Days, and sets out to clarify our thinking about what happens to people after they die. Heaven,...