Primordial Grace
Primordial Grace

Author: Robert and Rachel Olds

Publisher:

Published: 2014-03-06

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 9780983194552

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Primordial grace, the great perfection woven throughout the fabric of being, offers always a way home, in and through the natural radiance of the origin itself. The practices of opening to this sacred wholeness arose out of direct experience in the wilderness long before humans turned from the Earth and created structures of separation. Particularly now in these times of great upheaval brought on by human insistence on remaining apart from the natural world, we need to make a different choice by embracing the teachings that are all around us manifesting naturally as the vision that is this life, letting go of separation, reconnecting with the Earth, and acknowledging the radiant intent at the heart of all being. A guide for reuniting with this primordial path as a prayer for all life, Primordial Grace joins a greatly revised version of their previous work, Luminous Heart of the Earth, with the visionary path of radiance, providing a guide to the natural wholeness of the complete path. Primordial Grace is offered as a seed of hope. Within a seed is the energy to live and grow in the rubble of this age and reestablish human connection with the primordial grace of Earth, original heart, and radiance.

Paul's Language of Grace in its Graeco-Roman Context
Paul's Language of Grace in its Graeco-Roman Context

Author: James R. Harrison

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2017-01-03

Total Pages: 475

ISBN-13: 1532613466

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Paul’s Language of Grace in Its Graeco-Roman Context was originally published by Mohr Siebeck in 2003 and is now reprinted by Wipf and Stock with a new introduction by its author, James R. Harrison. The book was the first major investigation of charis (‘grace’, ‘favor’) in its social, political, and religious context since G. P. Wetter’s pioneering 1913 monograph on the topic. Focusing on the evidence of the inscriptions, papyri, philosophers, and Greek Jewish literature, Harrison examined the operations of the eastern Mediterranean benefaction system, probing the dynamic of reciprocity between the beneficiary and benefactor, whether human or divine. Before Paul’s converts were first exposed to the gospel, they would have held a variety of beliefs regarding the beneficence of the gods. The apostle, therefore, needed to tailor his language of grace as much to the theological and social concerns of the Mediterranean city-states in his missionary outreach as to the variegated traditions of first-century Judaism. In terms of human grace, although Paul endorses the reciprocity system, he redefines its rationale in light of the gospel of grace and transforms its social expression in his house churches. The explosion of ‘grace’ language that occurs in 2 Corinthians 8–9 regarding the Jerusalem collection is unusual in its frequency in comparison to the honorific inscriptions, underscoring the apostle’s distinctive approach to giving. Regarding divine beneficence, Paul accommodates his gospel to contemporary benefaction idiom. But he retains a distinctiveness of viewpoint regarding divine charis: it is non-cultic; it is mediated through a dishonored and impoverished Benefactor; it overturns the do ut des expectation (‘I give so that you may give’) regarding divine blessing in antiquity. Harrison’s book still remains the authoritative coverage of the Graeco-Roman context of charis.

Adventures of the Spirit
Adventures of the Spirit

Author: Clark M. Williamson

Publisher: University Press of America

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 9780761808169

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This book offers an introduction to worship from the standpoint of process theology. It helps worship planners develop services of worship that are characterized by an intense vision of community with God, where depth of feeling surmounts verbal language and touch the believer in the most life-shaping ways. Process conceptuality allows the church to move toward genuinely contemporary worship while drawing from the past, explaining how worship is understood in this Christian tradition and moving to practical approaches such as conceiving the service, preparing the prayers, the liturgy, and the sermon; the sacraments, the wedding and the funeral, and the arts' role in worship. The ultimate goal is not only to show how process theology can inform each aspect of the service of worship, but to help the Christian community deepen its apprehension of God through services of worship.

The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology
The Option for the Poor in Christian Theology

Author: Daniel G. Groody

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2007-04-01

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 026808081X

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Since the publication of Gustavo Gutiérrez's 1973 groundbreaking work, A Theology of Liberation, much has been written on liberation theology and its central premise of the preferential option for the poor. Arguably, this has been one of the most important yet controversial theological themes of the twentieth century. As globalization creates greater gaps between the rich and the poor, and as the situation for many of the world’s poor worsens, there is an ever greater need to understand the gift and challenge of Christian faith from the context of the poor and marginalized of our society. This volume draws on the thought of leading international scholars and explores how the Christian tradition can help us understand the theological foundations for the option for the poor. The central focus of the book revolves around the question, How can one live a Christian life in a world of destitution? The contributors are concerned not only with a social, economic, or political understanding of poverty but above all with the option for the poor as a theological concept. While these essays are rooted in a solid grounding of our present “reality,” they look to the past to understand some of the central truths of Christian faith and to the future as a source of Christian hope. Following Gustavo Gutiérrez's essay on the multidimensionality of poverty, Elsa Tamez, Hugh Page, Jr., Brian Daley, and Jon Sobrino identify a central theological premise: poverty is contrary to the will of God. Drawing on scripture, the writings of the early fathers, the witness of Christian martyrs, and contemporary theological reflection, they argue that poverty represents the greatest challenge to Christian faith and discipleship. David Tracy and J. Matthew Ashley carry their reflection forward by examining the option for the poor in light of apocalyptic thought. Virgilio Elizondo, Patrick Kalilombe, María Pilar Aquino, M. Shawn Copeland, and Mary Catherine Hilkert examine the challenges of poverty with respect to culture, Africa, race, and gender. Casiano Floristán and Luis Maldonado explore the relationship between poverty, sacramentality, and popular religiosity. The final two essays by Aloysius Pieris and Michael Signer consider the option for the poor in relationship to other major world religions, particularly an Asian theology of religions and the meaning of care for the poor within Judaism.

Sacred Fictions
Sacred Fictions

Author: Lynda L. Coon

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2010-11-24

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0812201671

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Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.

The Difference Nothing Makes
The Difference Nothing Makes

Author: Brian D. Robinette

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess

Published: 2023-02-15

Total Pages: 423

ISBN-13: 0268205736

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This book explores the doctrinal, social, and spiritual significance of a central yet insufficiently understood tenet in Christian theology: creation “from nothing.” In this original study, Brian D. Robinette offers an extended meditation on the idea of creation out of nothing as it applies not only to the problem of God but also to questions of Christology, soteriology, and ecology. His basic argument is that creatio ex nihilo is not a speculative doctrine referring to cosmic origins but rather a foundational insight into the very nature of the God-world relation, one whose implications extend throughout the full spectrum of Christian imagination and practice. In this sense it serves a grammatical role: it gives orientation and scope to all Christian speech about the God-world relation. In part 1, Robinette takes up several objections to creatio ex nihilo and defends the doctrine as providing crucial insights into the gifted character of creation. Chapter two underscores the contemplative dimensions of a theological inquiry that proceeds by way of “unknowing.” Part 2 draws from the field of mimetic theory in order to explore the creative and destructive potential of human desire. Part 3 draws upon the Christian contemplative tradition to show how the “dark night of faith” is a spiritually patient and discerning way to engage the sense of divine absence that many experience in our post-religious, post-secular age. The final chapter highlights creatio ex nihilo as an expression of divine love—God’s love for finitude, for manifestation, for relationship. Throughout, Robinette engages with biblical, patristic, and contemporary theological and philosophical sources, including, among others, René Girard, Karl Rahner, and Sergius Bulgakov.

Who Do You Say I Am?
Who Do You Say I Am?

Author: George Kalantzis

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2020-03-06

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 1725262924

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Human existence is a bodily existence. A first principle of historic Christianity has been that Jesus assumed our humanity and everything essential to it in order that God may redeem all of our existence. Christ is the revelation of God and the revelation of true humanity. As we seek to understand our embodied experiences of the world and one another we do so in light of the embodied life of Jesus Christ. Jesus’s humanity shows us what it means to live an embodied human life rightly and how we, as embodied human beings, can relate to the world around us. In this book we invite readers to explore with us why the humanity of Jesus is central to the Christian understanding of community, society, salvation, and life with God. Over the span of these ten chapters this book draws from biblical, historic, and cultural discussions as it enters into the breadth of the significance of the humanity of Jesus and explores how the reality of the Incarnation challenges and redeems our broken social structures, racial and ethnic divisions, economic systems, and sexuality.

A Genealogy of Manners
A Genealogy of Manners

Author: Jorge Arditi

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1998-12

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780226025834

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Remarkable for its scope and erudition, Jorge Arditi's new study offers a fascinating history of mores from the High Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Drawing on the pioneering ideas of Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu, Arditi examines the relationship between power and social practices and traces how power changes over time. Analyzing courtesy manuals and etiquette books from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, Arditi shows how the dominant classes of a society were able to create a system of social relations and put it into operation. The result was an infrastructure in which these classes could successfully exert power. He explores how the ecclesiastical authorities of the Middle Ages, the monarchies from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, and the aristocracies during the early stages of modernity all forged their own codes of manners within the confines of another, dominant order. Arditi goes on to describe how each of these different groups, through the sustained deployment of their own forms of relating with one another, gradually moved into a position of dominance.

The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx Volume 1
The Collected Works of Edward Schillebeeckx Volume 1

Author: Edward Schillebeeckx

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2014-09-25

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 1472558332

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This is a new edition of the 1963 classic which gave Christological thought a new direction. As far back as his first major book Schillebeeckx propounded an anthropological approach to the sacraments. In Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God , he draws on theologically fruitful work by phenomenological anthropologists like Merleau-Ponty, Buytendijk and Binswanger. That makes Schillebeeckx's distinctive idiom and modern approach appealing even today. He rediscovers, as it were from within, the notions forged by scholastic theology, and thus restores to us a theology of the sacraments rooted in the biblical and patristic soil from which they first sprang. Schillebeeckx's speculative synthesis of this quest still has a fresh ring to it. He describes Christ as the primordial sacrament in a reflection on his public ministry, death and resurrection inspired by the universal human search for such a 'sacrament'. He concludes that the church's sacraments have to be an earthly extension of the liberation brought by Christ's story. Schillebeeckx ends by describing sacraments as grace made visible that gives crowning moments in Christian life a mystical quality. Edward Schillebeeckx Collected Works bring together the most important and influential works of the Dutch Dominican and theologian Edward Schillebeeckx (1914-2009) in a reliable edition. All translations have been carefully checked or revised, some texts are presented in English for the first time. The page numbers of earlier editions are included. Each volume carries a foreword by an internationally renowned Schillebeeckx expert. This edition makes Schillebeeckx available for a new generation of scholars and students.

The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa
The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa

Author: Lucas Francisco Mateo Seco

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 840

ISBN-13: 9004169652

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The Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa is the fruit of wide-ranging collaboration between experts in Philology, Philosophy, History and Theology. These scholars shared the desire to develop a comprehensive reference work that would help attract more people to the tudy of the 'Father of Fathers' and assist them in their work. Gregory of Nyssa's thought is at once quintessentially classic and modern, as it speaks directly to the contemporary reader. As interest in Gregory has increased along with the number of works devoted to him, the need for a comprehensive introduction and bibliographical reference work has arisen. In order to meet this need, more than forty scholars from various disciplines and perspectives have contributed to this work. In two hundred articles, the Brill Dictionary of Gregory of Nyssa provides a symphonic vision of the studies on Gregory of Nyssa and his thought.