Wonder Reborn
Wonder Reborn

Author: Thomas Troeger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-07-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0199889686

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This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship. The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day, the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God. The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of God. A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more faithfully in the world.

Wonder Reborn
Wonder Reborn

Author: Thomas Troeger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010-07-27

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0199774498

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This book explores an issue at the nerve of the long term health of all churches: how godly wonder can be reborn through renewed attention to the place of beauty in preaching and worship. The book opens with an exploration of the theological and cultural difficulties of defining beauty. It traces the church's historical ambivalence about beauty and art and describes how, in our own day, the concept of beauty has been commercialized and degraded. Troeger develops a theologically informed aesthetic that provides a counter-cultural vision of beauty flowing from the love of God. The book demonstrates how preachers can reclaim the place of beauty in preaching and worship. Chapter two employs the concept of midrash to mine the history of congregational song as a resource for sermons. Chapter three introduces methods from musicology for creating sermons on instrumental and choral works and for integrating word and music more effectively. Chapter four explores how the close relationship between poetry and prayer can stir the homiletical imagination. Each of these chapters includes a selection of the author's sermons illustrating how preachers can use these varied art forms to open a congregation to the beauty of God. A final chapter recounts the responses of congregation members to whom the sermons were delivered. It uses the insights gained from those experiences to affirm how the human heart hungers for a vision of wonder and beauty that empowers people to live more faithfully in the world.

Sermons That Sing
Sermons That Sing

Author: Noel A. Snyder

Publisher: InterVarsity Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 0830849343

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Preaching and music are both regular elements of Christian worship, yet they often don't interact or inform each other in meaningful ways. Theologian, pastor, and musician Noel A. Snyder considers how preaching that seeks to engage hearts and minds might be helpfully informed by musical theory—so that preachers might craft sermons that sing.

Wonder of Wonders
Wonder of Wonders

Author: Alisa Solomon

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2013-10-22

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 0805095292

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A sparkling and eye-opening history of the Broadway musical that changed the world In the half-century since its premiere, Fiddler on the Roof has had an astonishing global impact. Beloved by audiences the world over, performed from rural high schools to grand state theaters, Fiddler is a supremely potent cultural landmark. In a history as captivating as its subject, award-winning drama critic Alisa Solomon traces how and why the story of Tevye the milkman, the creation of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a cultural touchstone, not only for Jews and not only in America. It is a story of the theater, following Tevye from his humble appearance on the New York Yiddish stage, through his adoption by leftist dramatists as a symbol of oppression, to his Broadway debut in one of the last big book musicals, and his ultimate destination—a major Hollywood picture. Solomon reveals how the show spoke to the deepest conflicts and desires of its time: the fraying of tradition, generational tension, the loss of roots. Audiences everywhere found in Fiddler immediate resonance and a usable past, whether in Warsaw, where it unlocked the taboo subject of Jewish history, or in Tokyo, where the producer asked how Americans could understand a story that is "so Japanese." Rich, entertaining, and original, Wonder of Wonders reveals the surprising and enduring legacy of a show about tradition that itself became a tradition. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Reading for Wonder
Reading for Wonder

Author: Glenn Willmott

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-12-13

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 3319700405

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In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological intimacies and entanglements. Yet this deeply felt experience—at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical—has been dangerously neglected in our cultural education. In order to cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes, we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder. This book begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human capacity and as a fabricated experience. Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical power and political risks from early modern times to the present day. To save ourselves and the teeming life of our planet, indeed to flourish, we must liberate wonder from ideologies of enchantment and disenchantment, understand its workings and their ethical ambivalence, and give it a clear language and voice.

A Serious House
A Serious House

Author: Martin Camroux

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2024-04-30

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13:

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The church is in deep trouble, maybe in its death throes. Losing touch with the church has meant a break with the Western cultural past, its history, its music, its art, its literature, much of which cannot fully be understood without its religious heritage. But something more important than any of that is in danger of being lost. The church is a deeply imperfect and frustrating organization, but within it, community is experienced, values are nurtured, and God’s presence in the world is embodied in a people. The church carries the story of Jesus; it tells the story of who we are, it calls us to give away our lives to others and to find love as life’s central meaning. We have crossed a cultural divide. Before, if you did not hold traditional religious beliefs and belong to a church you felt obliged to explain yourself. Now the pressure is to explain why you do. This is my answer.

Wonder Women
Wonder Women

Author: Lillian S. Robinson

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780415966320

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First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Witch Magic
Witch Magic

Author: Kody Boye

Publisher: Kody Boye

Published: 2024-06-08

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13:

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With the vampire’s death, I have claimed my revenge. But what life is worth living without vengeance? I struggle to determine this in the aftermath of my victory. Lost for purpose, I turn to my mentor, Emily Bane, when I return to the Agency—not only seek to peace, but to discover what happened to my predecessor, whose untimely passing left a place for me to become a Hunter of the Agency. When I learn that a coven of witches was responsible for his trauma, I vow to seek justice for the man whose life was ended too soon. What I cannot anticipate is a ritualistic sacrifice occurring in the wilds near the Louisianan border. More people have died—and when it becomes apparent that the witches are involved, I must work to hunt them down, before the coven reveals themselves to the world. This book was previously released as Witch Haunt in 2017. It has been rewritten in first person with expanded details.