Inside, you’ve got heaven and earth, and all of creation. You’re a world – everything is hidden in you.” –Hildegard of Bingen She was a Benedictine abbess, artist, composer, dietician, naturalist, poet, travelling preacher, mystic, and political consultant. She was a self-doubter with acute certainty in a merciful and mysterious God; a gifted healer who suffered from illness her whole life. Meet the incomparable Hildegard of Bingen. Nourishing, challenging, and idea-bursting, her writings will stir and awaken your soul. This essential reader captures the vibrant spirit and intelligence of Hildegard with selections from her songs, theological texts, liturgical music, and letters. Combined with an introduction to Hildegard’s life and era, a map of Hildegard’s Germany, chronology, and a thorough bibliography/discography, Hildegard of Bingen provides the ideal introduction to the thought of this fascinating medieval mystic.

    For starters, you have to know who’s asking the question. People will ask it for a lot of different reasons. It’s pretty obvious that the question is a religious one. Questions about God naturally get filed in that folder. If you’ve spent a lot of your life in church, you might think you already know the answer. You might know parts of it, but I can guarantee you’ll see a lot that’s new here. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill “Christianity 101” book. Unfortunately, the thing that most often gets in the way of the wonder of the story is religion, and that isn’t what this book offers. And if you’ve never been in a church or heard much about the Bible, don’t worry. You’ve got nothing to unlearn or re-learn. It’s all fresh. That makes you an ideal reader. So what does God want? Best-selling author, Dr. Michael S. Heiser, shows readers that the answer is pretty simple. God wants YOU. That might surprise you. You may doubt it. That’s okay. But it’s the right answer. But it isn’t enough of an answer. You can’t get a sense of how amazing and profound the answer is by just that one sentence. There’s actually a long, remarkable story behind the answer—one that isn’t well known by most people interested in the question.

    These “pagans” were actually pious Greeks, Romans, Syrians, and Gauls who observed the traditions of their ancestors. To these devout polytheists, Christians who worshipped only one deity were immoral atheists who believed that a splash of water on the deathbed could erase a lifetime of sin.Religious scholar James J. O’Donnell takes us on a lively tour of the Ancient Roman world through the fourth century CE, when Romans of every nationality, social class, and religious preference found their world suddenly constrained by rulers who preferred a strange new god. Some joined this new cult, while others denied its power, erroneously believing it was little more than a passing fad.In Pagans, O’Donnell brings to life various pagan rites and essential features of Roman religion and life, offers fresh portraits of iconic historical figures, including Constantine, Julian, and Augustine, and explores important themes—Rome versus the east, civilization versus barbarism, plurality versus unity, rich versus poor, and tradition versus innovation—in this startling account.

    Boyd adds another counterintuitive and provocative thesis to his corpus. While conservative scholars and pastors have struggled for years to show that the Bible is without errors, Boyd considers this a fool's errand. Instead, he says, we should embrace the mistakes and contradictions in Scripture, for they show that God chose to use fallible humans to communicate timeless truths. Just as God ultimately came to save humanity in the form of a human, God chose to impart truth through the imperfect medium of human writing. Instead of the Bible's imperfections being a reason to attack its veracity, these "problems" actually support the trustworthiness of Christian Scripture. Inspired Imperfection is required reading for anyone who's questioned the Bible because of its contradictions.

    In the Gospels there are few people who understand love for Jesus as well as Mary Magdalene, which is the reason she is a prophetess of eucharistic love.This work is an extended meditation on the life of Saint Mary Magdalene, known as the "Apostle to the Apostles" because the Risen Christ appeared to her first and then sent her to announce the Resurrection to the apostles. Based on the biblical texts traditionally associated with Mary Magdalene, this book helps readers to learn from her inspiring example and to enter more deeply into adoration of Jesus Christ truly present in the Blessed Sacrament.In telling the story of Mary Magdalene's profound conversion after the Lord had to expel seven demons from her soul, this book shows how she is a shining witness to the transforming power of an encounter with Jesus Christ. Mary Magdalene is the perfect model for those who have experienced the redeeming love of Christ and who seek to deepen their devotion to him and to the Eucharist.

    Running a program to help the needy, Laura discovered a world of people she never knew: the lonely and unemployed, chronically poor families, and middle-class folks surprised to be struggling in a great recession. And to each, she offered a bag of groceries, a compassionate ear, and a heart of love. Taking a tiny food pantry and watching it grow to feed hundreds, Laura learned about her own hunger for God and began to discern her own spiritual directions, learning how her calling card a bag of groceries could be a gift to others and to herself of abundance and grace."

    Hays. These essays probe Paul's approach to scriptural interpretation, showing how Paul's reading of the Hebrew Scriptures reshaped the theological vision of his churches.Hays's analysis of intertextual echoes in Paul's letters has touched off exciting debate among Pauline scholars and made more recognizable the contours of Paul's thought. These studies contain some of the early work leading up to Hays's seminal Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul and also show how Hays has responded to critics and further developed his thought in the years since. Among the many subjects covered here are Paul's christological application of Psalms, Paul's revisionary interpretation of the Law, and the influence of the Old Testament on Paul's ethical teachings and ecclesiology.

    Religion need not be involved.” The Sabbath is not just the holy day of rest. It’s also a utopian idea about a less pressured, more sociable, purer world. Where did this notion come from? Is there value in withdrawing from the world one day in seven, despite its obvious inconvenience in an age of convenience? And what will be lost if the Sabbath goes away? In this erudite, elegantly written book, critic Judith Shulevitz weaves together histories of the Jewish and Christian sabbaths, speculations on the nature of time, and a rueful account of her personal struggle with the day. Shulevitz has found insights into the Sabbath in both cultural and contemporary sources—the Torah, the Gospels, the Talmud, and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, as well as in the poetry of William Wordsworth, the life of Sigmund Freud, and the science of neuropsychology. She tells stories of martyrdom by Jews who died en masse rather than fight on the Sabbath and describes the feverish Sabbatarianism of the American Puritans. And she counterposes the tyranny of religious law with the equally oppressive tyranny of the clock. Can we really flourish under the yoke of communal discipline, as preachers and rabbis like to tell us? What about being free to live as we please? Can we preserve what the Sabbath gives us—a time outside time—without following its rules?Whatever our faith or lack thereof, this rich and resonant meditation on the day of rest will remind us of the danger of letting time drive us heedlessly forward without ever stopping to reflect.

    As long-held beliefs on love, faith, and God are challenged by the aggregate of changes that have overhauled our world, many of us are left feeling confused and uncertain while old norms are challenged and redefined at breakneck speed.In Wrestling with God, Ronald Rolheiser offers a steady and inspiring voice to help us avow and understand our faith in a world where nothing seems solid or permanent. Drawing from his own life experience, as well as a storehouse of literary, psychological, and theological insights, the beloved author of Sacred Fire examines the fears and doubts that challenge us. It is in these struggles to find meaning, that Rolheiser lays out a path for faith in a world struggling to find faith, but perhaps more important, he helps us find our own rhythm within which to walk that path.

    Commenting on this startling discovery at the time, noted Talmud scholar Daniel Boyarin argued that “some Christians will find it shocking—a challenge to the uniqueness of their theology.”Guiding us through a rich tapestry of new discoveries and ancient scriptures, The Jewish Gospels makes the powerful case that our conventional understandings of Jesus and of the origins of Christianity are wrong. In Boyarin’s scrupulously illustrated account, the coming of the Messiah was fully imagined in the ancient Jewish texts. Jesus, moreover, was embraced by many Jews as this person, and his core teachings were not at all a break from Jewish beliefs and teachings. Jesus and his followers, Boyarin shows, were simply Jewish. What came to be known as Christianity came much later, as religious and political leaders sought to impose a new religious orthodoxy that was not present at the time of Jesus’s life.In the vein of Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels, here is a brilliant new work that will break open some of our culture’s most cherished assumptions.

    This book by Jamie Smith is a small field guide to Taylor's genealogy of the secular, making it accessible to a wide array of readers. Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is also, however, a philosophical guidebook for practitioners a kind of how-to manual that ultimately offers guidance on how to live in a secular age. It's an adventure in self-understanding and a way to get our bearings in postmodernity. Whether one is proclaiming faith to the secularized or is puzzled that there continue to be people of faith in this day and age, this is a philosophical story meant to help us locate where we are and what's at stake.

    An appendix includes a suggested plan for using each days meditation as part of a morning or evening prayer.Paperback

    Increasingly, the reliability of not just the New Testament but really any document of history is called into question. If everyone writes from a point of view and with an agenda, can we reasonably expect any historical account to be objective--to tell us the truth? In this newly revised edition of Is the New Testament Reliable? Paul Barnett defends the task of the historian and the concept of history. He then addresses questions about the New Testament of importance to people of faith and skeptics alike:How close in time are the New Testament documents to the life of Jesus? Why should we believe the writings of biased early Christians? Were any of the writers of the New Testament books eyewitnesses to the events it records? How can we know that what was originally written has not been altered through the centuries? It is no small thing to trust ancient claims, but Barnett shows that we can take confidence in the New Testament, for it tells us the truth.

    

    Written by three leaders belonging to different faiths, the book explores in accessible language the mythic quality and the teachings of reconciliation that are embedded in the Torah, the Qur'an, and the Bible.