Spiritual Friendship

Spiritual Friendship
Author: Wesley Hill
Publisher: Brazos Press
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1441227512

Christianity Today Book Award Winner Friendship is a relationship like no other. Unlike the relationships we are born into, we choose our friends. It is also tenuous--we can end a friendship at any time. But should friendship be so free and unconstrained? Although our culture tends to pay more attention to romantic love, marriage, family, and other forms of community, friendship is a genuine love in its own right. This eloquent book reminds us that Scripture and tradition have a high view of friendship. Single Christians, particularly those who are gay and celibate, may find it is a form of love to which they are especially called. Writing with deep empathy and with fidelity to historic Christian teaching, Wesley Hill retrieves a rich understanding of friendship as a spiritual vocation and explains how the church can foster friendship as a basic component of Christian discipleship. He helps us reimagine friendship as a robust form of love that is worthy of honor and attention in communities of faith. This book sets forth a positive calling for celibate gay Christians and suggests practical ways for all Christians to cultivate stronger friendships.

Spiritual Friends

Spiritual Friends
Author: Robert W. Kelleman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2007
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780884692560

Spiritual Friends provides a biblically relevant training manual and relationally practical workbook for relating God's truth to human relationships. Spiritual Friends is for the layperson, pastor, or professional Christian counselor. It will equip the reader to master the personal ministry of the Word and spiritual friendships with thousands of illustrative interactions and hundreds of skill-building exercises.

Becoming Gertrude

Becoming Gertrude
Author: Janice Peterson
Publisher: NavPress
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2018-11-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1631468456

"A NavPress resource published in alliance with Tyndale House Publishers, Inc."

Friends on the Path

Friends on the Path
Author: Thich Nhat Hanh
Publisher: Parallax Press
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2010-05-10
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1935209566

Friends on the Path presents some of Thich Nhat Hanh's most precious offerings on the necessity of practicing with a Sangha (spiritual community) in order to receive support and encouragement along the way. This anthology also includes contributions from Dharma teachers and Sangha leaders from around the world based on many years of experience and gives sage advice from these teachers on how to build and sustain a Sangha.

Spiritual Friends

Spiritual Friends
Author: Thubten Dondrub
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2017-06-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0861717686

A collection of the favorite guided meditations of senior monks and nuns of the International Mahayana Institute of the FPMT. A collection of the favorite guided meditations of senior monks and nuns of the International Mahayana Institute of the FPMT. These meditations center on different Buddhist themes and provide a good resource for the practicing meditator. The book also includes brief spiritual autobiographies that allow the reader to trace each contributors' entry into and study of Tibetan Buddhism. Our true spiritual friends are the positive potentials in our minds, which will never never disappoint us and never desert us. Similarly, the generous and personal meditations offered in this book help us develop these potentials and thus are true friends to whom we can always turn. Likewise, the Sangha, as the ordained followers of the Buddha upon whom the continuity of the Buddha's teachings depend, are spiritual friends who encourage us and inspire us to transform our minds. This unique book—the first from the International Mahayana Institute—contains meditations written by eighteen nuns and monks of the IMI Sangha as well as an autobiographical essay from each in which these nuns and monks share how they came to the ordained life.

Finding a Spiritual Friend

Finding a Spiritual Friend
Author: Timothy K. Jones
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1998
Genre: Friendship
ISBN: 9780835808576

The book is a mixture of practical suggestions and deep spiritual wisdom about trust and openness to God's Spirit, which best characterizes spiritual friendship. Jones helps the reader to envision the life-giving possibilities found in relationships that are centered on God.

Walking Together

Walking Together
Author: Mary DeTurris Poust
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1594713340

In Walking Together: Discovering the Catholic Tradition of Spiritual Friendship, author, journalist, and speaker Mary DeTurris Poust examines rich and nurturing examples of spiritual friendship from well-known saints, writers, and spiritual Catholic leaders who serve as exemplars for cultivating meaningful Catholic friendship in a world of Twitter and Facebook. Addressing a growing modern hunger for deep soul friendships, popular Catholic New York columnist and Our Sunday Visitor blogger Mary DeTurris Poust looks honestly but hopefully at today's culture, where people feel increasingly isolated despite the advent of myriad gadgets designed to keep them “connected.” In ten practical chapters, Poust explores issues such as commitment and acceptance, the virtues that make for a lasting friendship, the importance of listening, open communication, and praying together. Readers will find here the guidance and encouragement to take the next step in developing spiritual friendships in their lives, one of the basic necessities of spiritual life. Poust profiles inspiring spiritual friendships from the past such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare, and St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane de Chantal. She also examines famous contemporary friendships, like those between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien or Thomas Merton and famous Zen master D. T. Suzuki. Each chapter concludes with “Food for Thought” reflection questions and a prayerful meditation.

The Book of Joy

The Book of Joy
Author: Dalai Lama
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2016-09-20
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 0399185062

An instant New York Times bestseller. Over 1 million copies sold! Two spiritual giants. Five days. One timeless question. Nobel Peace Prize Laureates His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu have survived more than fifty years of exile and the soul-crushing violence of oppression. Despite their hardships—or, as they would say, because of them—they are two of the most joyful people on the planet. In April 2015, Archbishop Tutu traveled to the Dalai Lama's home in Dharamsala, India, to celebrate His Holiness's eightieth birthday and to create what they hoped would be a gift for others. They looked back on their long lives to answer a single burning question: How do we find joy in the face of life's inevitable suffering? They traded intimate stories, teased each other continually, and shared their spiritual practices. By the end of a week filled with laughter and punctuated with tears, these two global heroes had stared into the abyss and despair of our time and revealed how to live a life brimming with joy. This book offers us a rare opportunity to experience their astonishing and unprecedented week together, from the first embrace to the final good-bye. We get to listen as they explore the Nature of True Joy and confront each of the Obstacles of Joy—from fear, stress, and anger to grief, illness, and death. They then offer us the Eight Pillars of Joy, which provide the foundation for lasting happiness. Throughout, they include stories, wisdom, and science. Finally, they share their daily Joy Practices that anchor their own emotional and spiritual lives. The Archbishop has never claimed sainthood, and the Dalai Lama considers himself a simple monk. In this unique collaboration, they offer us the reflection of real lives filled with pain and turmoil in the midst of which they have been able to discover a level of peace, of courage, and of joy to which we can all aspire in our own lives.

Gay and Catholic

Gay and Catholic
Author: Eve Tushnet
Publisher: Ave Maria Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-10-20
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1594715432

Winner of a 2015 Catholic Press Award: Gender Issues Category (First Place). In this first book from an openly lesbian and celibate Catholic, widely published writer and blogger Eve Tushnet recounts her spiritual and intellectual journey from liberal atheism to faithful Catholicism and shows how gay Catholics can love and be loved while adhering to Church teaching. Eve Tushnet was among the unlikeliest of converts. The only child of two atheist academics, Tushnet was a typical Yale undergraduate until the day she went out to poke fun at a gathering of philosophical debaters, who happened also to be Catholic. Instead of enjoying mocking what she termed the “zoo animals,” she found herself engaged in intellectual conversation with them and, in a move that surprised even her, she soon converted to Catholicism. Already self-identifying as a lesbian, Tushnet searched for a third way in the seeming two-option system available to gay Catholics: reject Church teaching on homosexuality or reject the truth of your sexuality. Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality, Finding Community, Living My Faith is the fruit of Tushnet’s searching: what she learned in studying Christian history and theology and her articulation of how gay Catholics can pour their love and need for connection into friendships, community, service, and artistic creation.

Creation and Covenant

Creation and Covenant
Author: Christopher Roberts
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2008-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567269671

Does sexual difference matter for marriage? Are there good theological reasons why the two main characters in a marriage should be a male and a female, or is marriage a more flexible covenant, which any two people can keep? Creation and Covenant analyzes latent but under-examined beliefs about sexual difference in the theology about marriage which has been dominant for centuries in the Christian west. The book opens by studying patristic theologies of marriage, which rested on mostly implicit and often incompatible beliefs about sexual difference. However, Roberts argues that Augustine developed a coherent theology of sexual difference, according it a shifting significance from creation to eschaton. Roberts traces how Augustine's theology influenced and was developed by subsequent theologians, such as Bernard of Clairvaux, Luther, Barth, and John Paul II. Finally, Roberts engages today's debates about gay marriage. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Roberts was a journalist. On behalf of PBS television, he covered both the Lambeth Conference in England and the World Council of Churches in Zimbabwe. During those years, he was disappointed by both the liberal and conservative arguments on homosexuality. Left-wingers seemed more interested in privacy, autonomy, and experience than in theology, and right-wingers seemed to have lots of prohibitions but little good news. In the final chapters, this book tries to do better, inviting liberals to improve the standard of their arguments, and explaining what is beautiful and persuasive about the traditional case.