Set in the final days of Roman Britain, this sweeping historical novel follows a family’s struggle to preserve their land, identity, and way of life as the empire collapses around them. For four generations, the Rusticelii have farmed their estate, weathering political shifts, invasions, and the slow erosion of Roman rule in the British countryside. Now, as the legions withdraw and raiders from across the sea descend upon the land, they must make impossible choices—clinging to the past or ...

"The world is our parish and all her creatures our congregation." Based on talks given to ordinands in Wales, this book presents the ministry as responding to God's call to be priestly stewards of creation and to participate in the blossoming of the new creation. Clavier engages with Scripture and people such as Augustine, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, Lancelot Andrewes, George Herbert, C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, and Rowan Williams to portray the whole minis...

Rescuing the Church... examines how people are initiated into a consumer culture during childhood and thus drawn into pursuing a vocation as consumers by means of various quasi-sacramental rites and practices.The upshot of this is that the church today is composed primarily of men and women whose lives are situated more within a consumer culture than within a distinctively Christian one.In order for the church to free itself, the author believes it must rec...

Winner of the 2022 Nautilus Book Award in Religion / Spirituality of Western Thought (#24B)Mark Clavier examines a series of paradoxes that lie at the heart of Christian faith: eternity and time, silence and words, and wonder and the commonplace. In an intellectual reflection on an overnight trek on Cadair Idris in Wales and other wilderness walks, he explores the oft-hidden connections between faith, society, and nature.Each reflection ranges widely throug...

The Reading Augustine series presents short, engaging books offering personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo's contributions to western philosophical, literary, and religious life.Mark Clavier's On Consumer Culture, Identity, The Church and the Rhetorics of Delight draws on Augustine of Hippo to provide a theological explanation for the success of marketing and consumer culture. Augustine's thought, rooted in rhetorical theory, presents a brilliant understanding of the...

Envisioning a future in which the Christian church plays a viable and transformative role in shaping society, Gretta Vosper argues that if the church is to survive at all, the heart of faith must undergo a radical change. Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and a minister in Toronto, believes that what will save the church is an emphasis on just and compassionate living -- a new and wholly humanistic approach to religion. Without this reform, the church as w...

Whatever else one might say about Emergence Christianity, says Phyllis Tickle, one must agree it is shifting and re-configuring itself in such a prodigious way as to defy any final assessments or absolute pronouncements. Yet the insightful and well-read Tickle offers us a dispatch from the field to keep us informed of where Emergence Christianity now stands, where it may be going, and how it is aligning itself with other parts of God's church. Through her careful study and culture-watching...

Christianity Today Award of MeritReaders' Choice Awards Honorable MentionBest Books About the Church from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds Bookstore"When . . . faith communities begin connecting together, in and for the neighborhood, they learn to depend on God for strength to love, forgive and show grace like never before. . . . The gospel becomes so much more tangible and compelling when the local church is...

The architects of the sexual revolution won over the popular imagination because they knew the power of story. They drew together radical new ideologies, often complex and hard to grasp, and melded them into the simpler structure of narrative. Crucially, they cast narratives that appealed to the moral instincts of ordinary, decent people.This moral vision overwhelmed the church and silenced its faltering apologists.The author argues that if Christians still...

Globalisation and consumerism affect every area of our lives. But it's not just about shopping; these powerful forces shape our personal lives, how we relate to one another, how we view the world - and they are having a seriously detrimental impact both on the lives of the global poor, and on the health of the planet itself.Every Christian in every generation down through the history of the church has had to work out what it means to be a follower of Jesus in their particular cultu...

Our seduction into beliefs in competition, scarcity, and acquisition are producing too many casualties. We need to depart a kingdom that creates isolation, polarized debate, an exhausted planet, and violence that comes with the will to empire. The abbreviation of this empire is called a consumer culture.We think the free market ideology that surrounds us is true and inevitable and represents progress. We are called to better adapt, be more agile, more lean, more schooled, more, mor...

Byzantium, 1096. When a mysterious assassin looses his arrow at the Emperor, he has more than a man in his sights; the keystone of a crumbling empire, the Emperor is the solitary figure holding its enemies in check. If he falls, then the mightiest power in Christendom will be torn apart. Aware of the stakes, the Emperor hires Demetrios Askiates, the unveiler of mysteries, to catch the would-be-killer. But Demetrios is entering an unknown and mysterious world, a bubbling cauldron of princes...