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"The Eastern Church venerates among its saints several Early Christian women whose teaching and wisdom contribute to the depth of our theological heritage. Their inspired voices can be heard at work witnessing: in the New Testament, in the early centuries of the Church Fathers and throughout the Byzantine era. Readers will find this volume bringing female leaders from the Early Church to life from the traditional ancient sources and sharing their experience of the presence of God. Their remembered advice to followers still illuminates issues of faith and justice which bind us together as Christians today"--
The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous provides a spiritual program dramatically distinct from religion. Twelve Step spirituality is based on experience, not doctrine; it is pragmatic, focusing on what works and not on theory; it is centered in a community that is inclusive, welcoming all who desire to stop drinking; it seeks rigorous honesty even when that honesty involves painful questioning; and it centers upon service to the still suffering alcoholic. The power found in working the Steps is transformational, moving participants from despair to hope, from self-focused resentment to concern for others, and from angry efforts to control to gratitude for gifts received. It works for atheists and agnostics, secularists and free thinkers, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other faiths. At a time when more and more people identify themselves as spiritual but not religious and the traditional religious institutions are in decline in Western culture, Twelve Step spirituality provides insights that can assist in the renewal and reinvigoration of our churches, synagogues, and mosques. In our time of dramatic social polarization, it can provide a foundation for bridging differences. Largely unknown outside the recovery community, this book examines how this transformative program can be relevant to today.
The first biography of its kind about Desmond Tutu, this book introduces readers to Tutu's spiritual life and examines how it shaped his commitment to restorative justice and reconciliation. Desmond Tutu was a pivotal leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and remains a beloved and important emblem of peace and justice around the world. Even those who do not know the major events of Tutu’s life—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, serving as the first black archbishop of Cape Town and primate of Southern Africa from 1986–1996, and chairing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1995–1998—recognize him as a charismatic political and religious leader who helped facilitate the liberation of oppressed peoples from the ravages of colonialism. But the inner landscape of Tutu’s spirituality, the mystical grounding that spurred his outward accomplishments, often goes unseen. Rather than recount his entire life story, this book explores Tutu’s spiritual life and contemplative practices—particularly Tutu’s understanding of Ubuntu theology, which emphasizes finding one’s identity in community—and traces the powerful role they played in subverting the theological and spiritual underpinnings of apartheid. Michael Battle’s personal relationship with Tutu grants readers an inside view of how Tutu’s spiritual agency cast a vision that both upheld the demands of justice and created space to synthesize the stark differences of a diverse society. Battle also suggests that North Americans have much to learn from Tutu’s leadership model as they confront religious and political polarization in their own context.
Set in the context of the Church Year, The Close is an enthralling account of one young woman's spiritual journey. It is both a personal meditation on faith, in the spirit of Kathleen Norris's Cloister Walk, and a fascinating behind-the-scenes story of a graduate student's first year, in the mode of Scott Turow's One L. Raised in a liberal, interfaith home, Breyer, responding to an inner call to a spiritual vocation, began her training at New York's General Theological Seminary in 1997. She describes her intense immersion in daily prayer, the rigors and rewards of the academic program, and the challenging tension between secular and spiritual that marks her training, including working as a chaplain at Bellevue Hospital. She probes the day-to-day meanings of such profound issues as exaltation, enlightenment, and redemption, illuminating the unique experience of a young person of faith preparing to live and hoping to thrive in a secular modern world.
In the days when New York City's most populous area was below Fourteenth Street, what is today the oldest theological seminary of the Episcopal Church enrolled its first students at St. Paul's Chapel. Founded in 1817, before a decade had passed the Seminary moved to the woods and fields of Clement Clarke Moore's country estate just north of the town in Chelsea. There its stone buildings soon became a familiar landmark. The General Seminary still occupies that site, now Chelsea Square, on the lower west side. For a hundred and fifty years its life has been intimately interwoven, not only with that of the Episcopal Church, but also with the changing scene of New York City. Dr. Dawley's history of the Seminary begins with the circumstances leading to its establishment by the General Convention, and describes the experimental years of the new institution, when there were few precedents to guide the pioneering venture. Much of the subsequent story is told in biographical vignettes, giving the reader vivid glimpses of a continuing community of men, teachers and students, priests and candidates for the ministry, who strove to fulfill in their successive generations the vocation to which they were called. Chapters deal with the ministry and theological education in the early nineteenth century, old New York and its churches, the growth of the Seminary, its years of crisis and controversy, the development of the theological curriculum, and the story of the institution during the recent years of change. The theological community in Chelsea today is a landmark, not only of the long history of the Seminary, but also of the Church's determination to remain close to the inner-city that has become an urgent frontier of Christianity in the contemporary world. At a time when reform in theological education is believed to be essential to any effective program for the renewal of the Church, the experience of the past, recaptured in these pages, may be both enlightening for the present and instructive for the future.