Christ in a Choppie Box

Christ in a Choppie Box
Author: Michael Sadgrove
Publisher: Sacristy Press
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2015-10-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1910519103

An edited collection of sermons preached by Michael Sadgrove during his time as Dean of Durham (2003–2015). Thought-provoking and inspiring. Foreword by Justin Welby.

Northern Lights

Northern Lights
Author: Jason Byassee
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2020-11-04
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1725264471

You may have heard that churches in Europe are vanishing. Yet church growth in London has been steady for decades, fueled by such innovations as Alpha and Fresh Expressions. What about outside the capital? Some, both inside and outside the church, say churches "cannot grow." But here they are--growing churches--in the north of England of all places. This is not only a story about England. It is about growing churches wherever you've heard they "can't" grow. God is always up to something precisely where (we think) God shouldn't be.

The 2024 Canterbury Preacher's Companion

The 2024 Canterbury Preacher's Companion
Author: Catherine Williams
Publisher: Canterbury Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2023-06-16
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1786225085

This longstanding annual favourite brings a wide variety of preaching voices together to offer a resource for preaching at the principal and the second service (for which preaching resources are scarce) every Sunday of the coming year, plus on principal feast days and seasonal services. Ideal for preachers wherever the 3-year lectionary is used, it also includes sermons for holy days, major saints’ days and special occasions such as Mothering Sunday, harvest, rogation and Christmas services. Hymn suggestions are provided throughout. It also includes an introductory essay to help build preachers’ skills and confidence, this year by Mark Oakley . If preparation time is short, the sermons are complete and can be used as they are, but they will also act as a springboard or framework for creating your own sermon texts. A boon for hard-pressed clergy, readers and local preachers everywhere.

Poems, Piety, and Psyche

Poems, Piety, and Psyche
Author: David John Keighley
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2020-10-23
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 172528071X

Confronting the crisis facing Christianity, this anthology of post-modern, progressive Christian poems, with a rebellious tone, demythologizes Christian theology. Poems, Piety and Psyche is a brave departure from literal Christian dogma and challenges the outdated ideas of doctrine and Scripture to disclose hidden truths still valid today. This volume is an attempt to revitalize the church and reshape its future for current congregations and the missing generation of young people, scientifically literate, who are exiled from the church through its inability to absorb contemporary teaching of biblical criticism, the reality of evolution, the false idea of a God “up there,” and an institutional insistence on an unconvincing supernatural theology. Christianity must be adapted to incorporate these and change, or it will die. David Keighley reclaims the original gospel message and takes us on a turbulent and challenging journey to the heart of what it is to be truly Christian. There is in these poems an emphasis on the teaching of the historical Jesus while rejecting nature miracles, the virgin birth, and bodily resurrection. Jesus’s divinity is that we can see God in him in the same way as we see God in the lives of each other, if we look closely enough.

Wrestling with the Word

Wrestling with the Word
Author: Jamie Harrison
Publisher: SPCK
Total Pages: 185
Release: 2016-11-17
Genre: Bibles
ISBN: 0281076499

Many biblical texts seem almost impossible to preach. They may be violent or terrifying or strange or abrasive. They may deal with matters simply beyond human experience. The preacher could well be tempted to choose an easier text on offer! But leaving taxing passages untouched means the Bible is effectively silenced. In Wrestling with the Word, well-known and accomplished preachers grapple with a range of notoriously difficult biblical Old and New Testament texts. As well as providing sample sermons – in an exhilarating variety of structural styles and voices – they offer ideas to help in the planning process of interpreting and applying such passages. 'A well-constructed and delivered sermon has the potential to inspire people as few other experiences can.' The Rt Revd John Pritchard, from the Foreword

Steeple Chasing

Steeple Chasing
Author: Peter Ross
Publisher: Headline
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2023-05-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1472281934

The Sunday Times paperback bestseller and Waterstones Non-Fiction Book of the Month *Featuring a brand new chapter!* 'Never have the joys of exploring the churches and cathedrals of this country been so vividly conveyed as they are in this engaging and elegiac book.' - New Statesman **BOOK OF THE YEAR pick 2023** 'A delicious treat' - Financial Times **TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR pick 2023** 'A charming odyssey' - The Times 'A wonderful book; thoughtful and challenging' - Daily Telegraph ***** 'A beautiful book' - Gabriel Byrne 'Beautiful and brilliant. I loved it' - Fergus Butler-Gallie From the author of A Tomb With a View - Scottish Non-Fiction book of the Year Churches are all around us. Their steeples remain landmarks in our towns, villages and cities, even as their influence and authority has waned. They contain art and architectural wonders - one huge gallery scattered, like a handful of jewels, across these isles. Award-winning writer Peter Ross sets out to tell their stories, and through them a story of Britain. Join him as he visits the unassuming Norfolk church which contains a disturbing secret, and London's mighty cathedrals with their histories of fire and love. Meet cats and bats, monks and druids, angels of oak and steel. Steeple Chasing, though it sometimes strikes an elegiac note, is a song of praise. It celebrates churches for their beauty and meaning, and for the tales they tell. It is about people as much as place, flesh and bone not just flint and stone. From the painted hells of Surrey to the holy wells of Wales, consider this a travel book . . . with bells on. Praise for Peter Ross 'Ross is a wonderfully evocative writer, deftly capturing a sense of place and history, while bringing a deep humanity to his subject. He has written a delightful book.' - The Guardian 'Fascinating . . . Ross makes a likeably idiosyncratic guide and one finishes the book feeling strangely optimistic about the inevitable.' - The Observer 'The author's humanity has acted as a beacon of light in the darkness.' - The Sunday Times

The Public Work of Christmas

The Public Work of Christmas
Author: Pamela E. Klassen
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2019-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0773557962

Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Christianity, and the nationalizing and racializing of religion. The essays gathered here examine how cathedrals, banquets, and carols serve as infrastructures of memory that hold up Christmas as a civic, yet unavoidably Christian holiday. At the same time, the authors show how the public work of Christmas depends on cultural forms that mark, mask, and resist the ongoing power of Christianity in the lives of Christians and non-Christians alike. Legislated into paid holidays and commodified into marketplaces, Christmas has arguably become more cultural than religious, making ever wider both its audience and the pool of workers who make it happen every year. The Public Work of Christmas articulates a fresh reading of Christmas – as fantasy, ethos, consumable product, site of memory, and terrain for the revival of exclusionary visions of nation and whiteness – at a time of renewed attention to the fragility of belonging in diverse societies. Contributors include Herman Bausinger (Tübingen), Marion Bowman (Open), Juliane Brauer (MPI Berlin), Simon Coleman (Toronto), Yaniv Feller (Wesleyan), Christian Marchetti (Tübingen), Helen Mo (Toronto), Katja Rakow (Utrecht), Sophie Reimers (Berlin), Tiina Sepp (Tartu), and Isaac Weiner (Ohio State).