Senses of Devotion
Senses of Devotion

Author: William Dyrness

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2013-03-29

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 162032136X

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This ethnographic study focuses on the religious imagery and practices of a sample of Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques in the greater Los Angeles area. As a way of expanding interfaith dialogue, it is framed as a conversation between the largely Christian researchers and the seventy-five respondents, who were asked about the images, space, and practices of their religious experience. From the respondents in their various religious settings, it seeks to distill the specific religious imaginations and aesthetic profiles that might be said to characterize their experience--to discover what might be considered the living images of these faiths. Set in the context of contemporary discussions of the nature of religion and visual culture, this richly textured study of visual and sensory practices in religion raises fundamental questions about the place of belief and ritual practice and the role these play in our increasingly pluralistic religious culture.

Sacred Pathways
Sacred Pathways

Author: Gary Thomas

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0310361184

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Sacred Pathways reveals nine distinct spiritual temperaments--and their strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies--to help you improve your spiritual life and deepen your personal walk with God. It's time to strip away the frustration of a one-size-fits-all spirituality and discover a path of worship that frees you to be you. Experienced spiritual directors, pastors, and church leaders recognize that all of us engage with God differently, and it's about time we do too. In this updated and expanded edition of Sacred Pathways, Gary Thomas details nine spiritual temperaments and--like the Enneagram and other tools do with personality--encourages you to investigate the ways you most naturally express yourself in your relationship with God. He encourages you to dig into the traits, strengths, and pitfalls in your devotional approach so you can eliminate the barriers that keep you locked into rigid methods of worship and praise. Plus, as you begin to identify and understand your own temperament, you'll soon learn about the temperaments that aren't necessarily "you" but that may help you understand the spiritual tendencies of friends, family, and others around you. Whatever temperament or blend of temperaments best describes you, rest assured it's not by accident. It's by the design of a Creator who knew what he was doing when he made you according to his own unique intentions. If your spiritual walk is not what you'd like it to be, you can change that, starting here. Sacred Pathways will show you the route you were made to travel, marked by growth and filled with the riches of a close walk with God. A Sacred Pathways video Bible study is also available for group or individual use, sold separately.

Exploring the Senses
Exploring the Senses

Author: Axel Michaels

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-19

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1317342100

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This fascinating volume offers a transdisciplinary and transcultural approach to understanding the senses by exploring themes in anthropologies of sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, and movement as expressed through aesthetic, perceptual, religious, and spiritual experiences. In drawing upon comparative perspectives from Indian and Western theories, the essays demonstrate the integral relation of senses with each other as well as with allied notions of the body, emotion and cultural memory. Stressing the continued relevance of senses as they manifest in a globalized world under the influence of new media, this work will interest scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, ritual studies, psychology, religion, philosophy, and history.

The Sacred Overlap
The Sacred Overlap

Author: J.R. Briggs

Publisher: Zondervan

Published: 2020-09-08

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 0310102146

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The widening of political, racial, generational, and religious differences leads too often to an "us vs. them" mentality. The Sacred Overlap communicates a refreshing vision that embraces tension and shows us how to live in radical love and faithfulness between the extremes that isolate and divide people. The gospels display how Jesus was committed to crossing the either/or waters of the cultural and societal wars of his day. His miracles and parables often broke or ignored religious and political lines that seemed all important. He comforted the disturbed and disturbed the comfortable. Using Jesus' example, J. R. Briggs offers a fresh and relevant understanding of evangelism and discipleship in our present time of extreme polarization. Without sacrificing biblical integrity, The Sacred Overlap is a joyful exploration of the complexity of life in the peace of Christ. With careful discernment, Briggs: Shares creative ways to engage with God's mission of ministering to those who are intrigued by Jesus but turned off by church. Explores what it means to be joyful in the midst of heart-wrenching pain and earthly suffering. Models what it means to maintain a posture of convicted civility which emphasizes both grace and truth. The Sacred Overlap helps readers see how Christians are called to live with their feet firmly planted in two different worlds—in both heaven and earth—living naturally with both the sacred and the ordinary. Only then can a Christian be a faithful witness and disciple of Jesus.

Curiosities and (Un)common Sense from the Bible
Curiosities and (Un)common Sense from the Bible

Author: Anthony Russo

Publisher: Ellie Claire Gifts

Published: 2021-11-09

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1546000844

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The Bible. You've heard of it, yes? Maybe something about David and Goliath or Noah’s ark, or a baby in a manger? What if I told you there was tons of stuff in the Bible that you’ve never heard about? Things like talking donkeys, self-conscious magicians, and kings who think they’re cows. The Bible is a curious book full of deeply flawed people and a God who refuses to give up on them. Don’t believe me? Look for yourself. In these 60 devotions, we examine these unique stories, the circumstances and biblical truth around them, and what they reveal about the heart of God.

Savoring God
Savoring God

Author: Kathleen Finley

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1610977114

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Usually when we pray we try to shut out the outside world and focus on the interior, the spiritual, in order to be able to be with God. Instead, this book invites us to be with God through the very tangible, specific objects of our everyday life. We're invited to take another look--as well as another listen, taste, touch, and smell--at what is right before us and see God there. A rock, a shoe, a pen--all offer an opportunity for entering into prayer and experiencing God's presence.

Reformation of the Senses
Reformation of the Senses

Author: Jacob M. Baum

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780252083990

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We see the Protestant Reformation as the dawn of an austere, intellectual Christianity that uprooted a ritualized religion steeped in stimulating the senses--and by extension the faith--of its flock. Historians continue to use the idea as a potent framing device in presenting not just the history of Christianity but the origins of European modernity. Jacob M. Baum plumbs a wealth of primary source material from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to offer the first systematic study of the senses within the religious landscape of the German Reformation. Concentrating on urban Protestants, Baum details the engagement of Lutheran and Calvinist thought with traditional ritual practices. His surprising discovery: Reformation-era Germans echoed and even amplified medieval sensory practices. Yet Protestant intellectuals simultaneously cultivated the idea that the senses had no place in true religion. Exploring this paradox, Baum illuminates the sensory experience of religion and daily life at a crucial historical crossroads. Provocative and rich in new research, Reformation of the Senses reevaluates one of modern Christianity's most enduring myths.

The sensual icon
The sensual icon

Author: Bissera V

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published:

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0271035846

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"Explores the Byzantine aesthetic of fugitive appearances by placing and filming art objects in spaces of changing light, and by uncovering the shifting appearances expressed in poetry, descriptions of art, and liturgical performance"--Provided by publisher.

Devotion
Devotion

Author: Patti Smith

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 0300218621

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"In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, [a] ... fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This ... fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action"--Booklist, 08/01/2017.

Transgressive Devotion
Transgressive Devotion

Author: Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

Publisher: SCM Press

Published: 2021-02-28

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 033405947X

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Academic theology is in need of a new genre. In "Transgressive Devotion" Natalie Wigg-Stevenson articulates a theological vision of that genre as performance art. She argues that theology done as performance art stops trying to describe who God is, and starts trying to make God appear. Recognising that the act of studying theology or practicing ministry is always a performance, where the boundaries between what we see, feel, experience and learn are not just blurred but potentially invisible, Wigg-Stevenson brings together ethnographic theological fieldwork, historical and contemporary Christian theological traditions, and performance artworks themselves. A daring vision of theology which will energise anybody feeling ‘boxed in’ by the discipline, Transgressive Devotion blurs borders between orthodoxy, heterodoxy and heresy to reveal how the very act of doing theology makes God and humanity vulnerable to each other. This is theology which is a liturgy of Divine incantation. In other words: this is theology which is also prayer.