"These essays advance the understanding of Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices from a religious studies perspective."— Reading ReligionHow do people experience spirituality through what they see, hear, touch, and smell? In this book, Sonja Luehrmann and an international group of scholars assess how sensory experience shapes prayer and ritual practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians.Prayer, even when performed privately, is considered as a shared ...

This book comes complete with a Touch-or-Click Table of Contents, divided by each section. This edition has a linked Table of Contents and has been wonderfully formatted (searchable and interlinked) to work on your e-book reader. Enjoy a collection of Advent Homilies written by Saint Thomas Aquinas! Saint Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angeli...

An e-prayerbook following the Tradition of the Russian Orthodox Church. This book is ideal for daily personal use, especially when "on the go." Included are Morning and Evening Prayers; Prayers at Meals: Akathists to our Sweetest Jesus Christ and our Most Holy Lady the Mother of God; Canon of Preparation for Holy Communion; Thanksgiving after Holy Communion; and The Order for Reading Canons and Akathists When Alone.

A special edition of The Way of a Pilgrim and its sequel, two spiritual classics that demonstrate the profound power of the Jesus prayerThis classic of world spiritual literature is the firsthand account of a pilgrim's journey as he endeavors to live out Saint Paul's instruction to “pray without ceasing.” The narrator, an unnamed nineteenth-century peasant, sets out on his pilgrimage with nothing but a Bible, a rosary, and some dried bread. As he walks, he...

This package includes the complete three-volume set of the Christ in the Feasts series: Christ in the Passover, Christ in the Feast of Pentecost, and Christ in the Feast of Tabernacles.In Christ in the Passover, Ceil and Moishe Rosen explore the meaning behind the different elements of the feast such as the bitter herbs, salty water, a sweet apple mixture, and the shankbone of a lamb. This book invites you to enter the celebration of Passover, ri...

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet in many ways equally legitimate interpretations ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book Catherine Bell offers a...

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints renounced the practice of plural marriage in 1890. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, however--the heyday of Mormon polygamy--as many as three out of every ten Mormon women became polygamous wives. Paula Kelly Harline delves deep into the diaries and autobiographies of twenty-nine such women, providing a rare window into the lives they led and revealing their views and experiences of polygamy, including their well-founded belief that the...

This book describes the role of the medieval Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (c.600-c.1453). As an integral part of its policy it was (as in western Christianity) closely linked with many aspects of everyday life both official and otherwise. It was a formative period for Orthodoxy. It had to face doctrinal problems and heresies; at the same time it experienced the continuity and deepening of its liturgical life. While holding fast to the traditions ofthe fathers and the councils it...

The present work examines the controversies inherent to the issues on shamanic practices, by comparing the different outlooks of the scholars and their methodological approaches, Then, applying to the case of Japan, it will give a theoretical systematization of trance and possession going through the figures of the ascetic and that of the medium to demonstrate that none of them can be associated to the Eliade's Siberian type of shaman, with the former experiencing a different kind of “sta...

When changes happen to the Catholic Mass, opinions are strong and diverse. Everyone feels in some way that the Mass is theirs. It is. Or is it? Whose Mass is it? And what should people do to claim it?Whether or not adult Catholics attend Mass regularly, they strongly bond with it. Within a single generation, English-speaking Catholics experienced the Second Vatican Council’s authorization for the first overhaul of the liturgy in four hundred years, and then, in 2011, they ...

Prayers, worship resources and reflections to help individuals and groups effect a change in mindset in relation to the environment so that we act from a more rooted place.

In A Philosophy of the Unsayable, William Franke argues that the encounter with what exceeds speech has become the crucial philosophical issue of our time. He proposes an original philosophy pivoting on analysis of the limits of language. The book also offers readings of literary texts as poetically performing the philosophical principles it expounds. Franke engages with philosophical theologies and philosophies of religion in the debate over negative theology and shows how apopha...