Set in Pittsburgh in the 1980s, Christina's Gift begins with the death of Christina Martin Andrews, a minister serving an established congregation in the city. As her friends and family try to make sense of how her life ended, they realize that her friendship was an invitation to become friends with Jesus and, in doing so, to discover their true selves, their true purpose.
Christina is unfortunately used to dealing with monumental challenges. First, her father abandoned her at birth and then her mother died entirely too soon, leaving her with just a few months of rent money. Now the woman who took her in and provided her with a job has also passed away. As Christina hopelessly watches her world seemingly crumble and contemplates why God has placed her in these circumstances, she has no idea that something magical is about to happen that will change her life forever. A day after Mrs. Baker’s funeral, Christina opens the shop and is doing her best to muddle through the morning when her path crosses with Red, an older friend of Mrs. Baker who has opened a beautiful gallery of collectibles and antiques next to the shop. As Christina becomes more acquainted with Red, she begins noticing his special gift for finding the positive in all situations as she slowly learns how to handle and conquer life’s greatest adversities. Christina’s Gift is an exceptional story of faith, hope, and love as a young woman down on her luck finds help from a strange and mysterious source.
Tales of xenoglossia—the instantaneous ability to read, to write, to speak, or to understand a foreign language—have long captivated audiences. Perhaps most popular in Christian religious literature, these stories celebrate the erasing of all linguistic differences and the creation of wider spiritual communities. The accounts of miraculous language acquisition that appeared in the Bible inspired similar accounts in the Middle Ages. Though medieval xenoglossic miracles have their origins in those biblical stories, the medieval narratives have more complex implications. In The Gift of Tongues, Christine Cooper-Rompato examines a wide range of sources to show that claims of miraculous language are much more important to medieval religious culture than previously recognized and are crucial to understanding late medieval English writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Margery Kempe.
In this revised edition of his small group guidebook, Jeffrey Arnold discusses the basic components and dynamics of small groups and offers training and resources to help you get started in effective small group ministry.
On Christmas Day, Christina returns to her childhood home in the mountains of North Carolina for the annual family reunion, and soon finds herself in the midst of a crisis.
The period 800-1200 saw many changes in attitude towards death, sin and salvation. Visual sources can provide a valuable complement to written sources, often modifying or adding another dimension to what scholars and theologians expressed in words. Taking miniatures showing the Fall of Man and those with personifications of death, this study looks at the ideas they express and the relationship between them. It examines both the general tendencies and specific manuscripts, relating them to their contexts and to the writings of the time. This book shows the shifts in ideas as to what constitutes sin, the merging of eschatological death with sin and a new emphasis on physical death, thereby giving new insights into medieval thought and culture.
Essays on a variety of medieval women, which will grant readers a more complete view of medieval women’s lives broadly speaking. These essays largely take a new perspective on their subjects, pushing readers to reconsider preconceived notions about medieval women, authority, and geography. This book will expand the knowledge base of our readers by introducing them to non-canonical and non-European subjects.
Bringing to bear a variety of perspectives on the poetry, prose, and letters of a writer whose work is just now beginning to emerge from critical neglect, this collection edited by David A. Kent should play an important role in the re-evaluation of Christina Rossetti. It consists of fifteen essays by gifted Victorian scholars who represent a wide range of methodologies and critical concerns, and it offers alternatives to the autobiographical approach that has limited appreciation of Rossetti the writer.
