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Eyes of the Heart; photography as Christian contemplative practice
Creativity, Spiritual ExercisesEyes of the Heart by Christine Valters Paintner explores photography as a spiritual practice from a Christian perspective. Christine builds on the process of contemplative creativity in her book The Artist’s Rule (also available from the community bookshop) by adapting the monastic practice of lectio divina (sacred reading) into a form of visio divina (sacred seeing). A spiritual director and Benedictine oblate, she guides readers through a new way of spiritual observation – through the lens of a camera – and in receiving images, not simply taking them. She writes that, ‘My hope is that, in exploring the language of photography, you [develop] new portals into the your own experience and awareness of God. Shadow and light, framing, colour, reflections, and mirrors all offer us metaphors for ways of understanding how we might move towards seeing ourselves and God with the eyes of the heart.’ She invites us to use our cameras to help us to release our expectations of what we think we ought to see and learn to discover what is actually there. And then helps us to bring this kind of interaction into our everyday lives.£12.99 -
Rehearsing Scripture: discovering God’s word in community
Leadership, Resources for the Christian Year, Scripture & PrayerPopular preacher Anna Carter Florence explores how to read, encounter and interpret Scripture as it was originally intended - by doing so collectively with others. Drawing on practices from drama and the theatre, she shows how to bring familiar texts to life, uncovering meaning and better apprehending biblical truth for daily life. Her methods are illuminating, easy to grasp, and easily adaptable to a variety of contexts - ideal for study group leaders and pastors seeking to bring the Bible and the real lives of congregations into conversation. Full of helps for preachers especially, Rehearsing Scripture invites groups and churches to gather around a shared text and encounter God anew together.£17.99 -
The Tenderness of God
Scripture & Prayer, The Inner JourneyThe tenderness of God is not a theme that can be approached just to satisfy our intellectual curiosity, but is an unfathomable mystery that leads us deep into the heart of God. A deep thirst for tenderness means that many, both young and old, are prepared to do almost anything if only this thirst can be quenched. Many of us go far astray without knowing or even suspecting that the most extraordinary tenderness is that of God, and that indeed he is the source of all tenderness. This volume is the fruit of many years of prayer and thought. Throughout these meditations on lesser-known biblical texts, the reader will engage with the compassionate, merciful God, a God with all the tenderness of both mother and father. In this way, the reader will be opened up to new vistas onto the mystery of God's humble, delicate tenderness. Today the world suffers such a deep wound that only one remedy will suffice: the balm of God's tenderness. Daniel Bourguet, in the spirit of the Great Physician, applies the salve of three achingly beautiful OT texts--good news of God's infinite mercy and compassion--with a tone befitting the deep need of the hour.£17.00 -
Tell it Together: 50 tell-together Bible stories to share
CreativityStories are so important. Everything we are and everything we do revolves around the big story of God's love for us and how we respond to it. Storytelling is a vital skill for everyone in ministry of any kind. In Tell it Together well-known author and storyteller Renita Boyle combines stories that have been written to read well aloud with tools for groups to share them effectively. The stories can be used on their own, to enhance a theme or Bible passage, or alongside other activities as the basis for clubs or creative worship gatherings and festivals. They don't just retell the story, they draw us in. There are no listeners here: all are participants!£8.99 -
Holy Envy. Finding God in the Faith of Others.
Spiritual GrowthIn this hardback book, Barbara Brown Taylor tackles the questions, worries and concerns that arise when we encounter "difference" and "others" and explores what is opened and what is revealed when we accept the invitations to investigate all the wonder before us. Here we learn not only that God's preferred language is driven by curiosity and specialises in questions, but we also discover the spiritual riches God can teach us from the faith of others.£16.99 -
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Godzone: a guide to the travels of the soul
Re-imagining Church, Seasons of Life, Spiritual Growth, The Inner JourneyGodzone is a book of mystery and illumination, a guide-book to the travels of the heart. With humour, story-telling and captivating originality, it entices the reader to join its hitchhiking author on the most important journey of all.£8.99 -
At Home in Exile: the journey towards a new paradigm
Re-imagining ChurchThe numbers of people attending church are declining. Churches are closing and the influence the church once had in society is waning. The natural response is to immediately look for solutions to the problems. However, finding appropriate solutions depends on a correct understanding of the problem. In 'At Home in Exile', Peter McDowell shows how the experience of exiles in the Old Testament can provide a way for the church to understand its current experience of marginalisation. The feelings associated with the three stages of the exile experience resonate with our current experience. The first stage is entering exile, and has associated feelings of shock and denial. The second stage, being in exile, has feelings of anger and depression. The third stage, departing from exile, is associated with acceptance and integration.£5.00 -
Paradox in the Gospel
Culture & Mission, Scripture & PrayerLife and the gospel contain a good deal of paradox, but a survey has showed that evangelists often ignore it. Here Jim Currin wants to stir a discussion to make evangelism more effective, in the belief that acknowledging paradox makes the gospel more exciting, relevant, and attractive to today's spiritual seeker.£4.00 -
Drysalter
CreativityWinner of the 2013 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection; Winner of the 2013 Costa Poetry Award; Shortlisted for the 2013 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize; Shortlisted for the 2015 Portico Prize; Michael Symmons Roberts' sixth - and most ambitious collection to date - takes its name from the ancient trade in powders, chemicals, salts and dyes, paints and cures. These poems offer a similarly potent and sensory multiplicity, unified through the formal constraint of 150 poems of 15 lines. Like the medieval psalters echoed in its title, this collection contains both the sacred and profane. Here are hymns of praise and lamentation, songs of wonder and despair, journeying effortlessly through physical and metaphysical landscapes, from financial markets and urban sprawl to deserts and dark nights of the soul. This collection is a compelling, powerful search for meaning, truth and falsehood. But, as ever in Roberts' work, this search is rooted in the tangible world, leavened by wit, contradiction, tenderness and sensuality. This is Roberts' most expansive writing yet: mystical, philosophical, earthy and elegiac. Drysalter sings of the world's unceasing ability to surprise, and the shock and dislocation of catching your own life unawares.£12.00 -
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Waiting on the Word: A poem a day for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany
Advent & Christmas, Resources for the Christian YearAdvent is a season of waiting and anticipation in which the waiting itself is strangely rich and fulfilling. Its focus is on the coming of Christ – in humility in the manger at Bethlehem, in majesty as the fulfilment and finality of all things, and in the countless moments of encounter and transformation in the time between these two great comings in which we live. The other sense we have of the word 'advent' is in the word 'adventure'. 'Let us take the adventure that God sends us,' say the knights in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, recognising that the God in whom we live and move and have our being may come and meet us when and where he pleases. Poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of Advent's many paradoxes: past and future, dark and light, waiting and consolation, emptiness and fulfilment, ancient and ever new. In the spirit of the season, this anthology includes the familiar and adventures upon the new. Malcolm Guite selects and reflects on a poem for each day. The selection ranges from spiritual classics such as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert and Christina Rossetti, to new and contemporary voices such as Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns. His own acclaimed sequence of sonnets for great Advent antiphons is also included. This anthology moves through Advent into its fulfilment in Christmas, and on to Epiphany where the choice of poetry is influenced by the stargazing pagan wise men. Here are works by non-Christian poets who seem, nevertheless, to see in the heavens such signs as declare the glory of the Lord.Original price was: £12.99.£9.00Current price is: £9.00. -
Accidental Saints. Finding God in All the Wrong People
Culture & Mission, The Inner JourneyWhat if the annoying person you try to avoid is actually seconds away from becoming an accidental saint in your life? What if, even in our persistent failings, holy moments are waiting to happen? In Accidental Saints, New York Times bestselling author Nadia Bolz-Weber invites readers into a surprising encounter with what she calls 'a religious but not-so-spiritual life.' Tattooed, angry, and profane, this unlikely priest stubbornly, sometimes hilariously, resists the God she feels called to serve. But God keeps showing up in the least likely of people―a church-loving agnostic, a drag queen, and a gun-toting member of the NRA. As she lives and worships alongside these 'accidental saints,' Nadia is swept into first-hand encounters with grace―a gift that often feels less like being wrapped in a warm blanket and more like being hit by a blunt instrument. But by this grace, people are transformed in ways they couldn't have been on their own. In a time when many have become disillusioned with Christianity, Accidental Saints demonstrates what happens when ordinary people share bread and wine, struggle with scripture together, and tell each other the truth about their real lives. This unforgettable account of their faltering steps toward wholeness will ring true for believer and sceptic alike. Told in Nadia’s trademark confessional style, Accidental Saints is the stunning next work from one of today’s most important religious voices.£12.99 -
Sacred Strangers: what the Bible’s outsiders can teach Christians
Culture & Mission, Everyday Life, Scripture & PrayerThe Bible is laced with stories in which strangers behave better than believers. What do these encounters with "others"--people from different cultures, religions, genders, economic and social classes--teach us about our own spiritual values, about the faith and God behind them? In Sacred Strangers, Nancy Haught leads readers through these stories, line by line, offering insight to open hearts to sacred strangers at a time when personal encounters can make us or break us--as people and citizens of the world.£10.99 -
Untamed Gospel: protest, poems and prose for the Christian year
Church & Leadership, Creativity, Resources for the Christian Year, Scripture & PrayerUntamed Gospel complements The Bright Field and Darkness Yielding, and offers meditations, reflections, stories, prayers and poems for use throughout the church year. Each one focuses on the often startling nature of Jesus' sayings and teachings, the raw honesty of the psalms and other biblical texts, and on contemporary issues, such as mental health and displacement, seen in the light of the demands of the kingdom of God. A rich resource for worship, preaching, teaching and personal reflection throughout the year, Untamed Gospel contains hundreds of reproducible items, including seasonal reflections, stories, homilies, poems and some of Jim Cotter's last writings as he was being treated for cancer: a moving sequence of prayer poems inspired by the psalms.£17.99 -
Timeless Beauty: in the arts and everyday life
Creativity, Everyday Life, Spiritual Growth, The Inner JourneyOnce people were instinctively tuned to the beautiful. In those distant days before the advent of the motor car and the washing machine, the electric toothbrush and the wheel, craftsmen and musicians, masons and poets, painters and dancers simply did not know how to make an ugly thing; they could not close their hearts to the light of heaven. For them countless numbers of them beauty was as necessary as the air they breathed. It gave dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives, and inspired great (but often brutal) civilizations in which people lived creative and useful lives. Beauty is the nourishment of the soul. It is something that gives us dignity as a species. John Lane calls us to awaken to the possibilities of a culture that recognizes the importance of beauty, and to acknowledge that we are only fully human in contact with the beautiful.£9.95