A Holy Tradition of Working


Book Description

It is evident that a major reassessment of Eric Gill is taking place, and while this process has begun for his sculpture and for his engravings, as yet his writings have remained inaccessible. A new generation, recognizing the necessity of an holistic view of life in which art, work, and spiritual values form a unity, stands to gain much from a re-examination of Gill's thought. Almost nothing of the material included in this anthology has been reprinted since his death in 1940. The anthology has been devised around 14 chapters in each of which extracts of various lengths from Gill's many books are arranged to give a concise and as near comprehensive as possible exposition of his thought. A long introduction relates Gill's thought to its roots in traditional doctrine and the English radical thinkers who were his masters, as well as an assessment of the validity and relevance of Gill's standpoint to contemporary conditions.




Giver of Life


Book Description

Presents the Orthodox perspective on who the Holy Spirit is, where the mystery of God comes alive. Delving deep and subtly into Orthodox tradition and theology, Giver of Life articulates the identity of the Holy Spirit as the third Person of the Trinity as well as the role of the Holy Spirit in the salvation of the world. Written with a poetic sensibility, Fr. Oliver begins with Pentecost, an event uniquely celebrated in Orthodoxy as a time when greenery of all kinds is brought into churches. “The splash of green foliage calls to mind not just life, but a special kind of life. It is the life that transcends biological existence and flows from the very Godhead Itself; it is life that's a state of being—immortal, everlasting, changeless. Ferns and flowers fade and die, but souls filled with this 'life from above' flourish forever.” Reflecting on the relationship of the Holy Spirit to the Church, to the world, and to the human person, Giver of Life looks to the impressive biblical and liturgical tradition of Orthodox Christianity. This is a book weighty in content but accessible in tone, not an academic study of the mind, but a lived experience of the heart.




Holy Book and Holy Tradition


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Holy Tradition


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Life with God


Book Description

Too often, our study of the Bible focuses on searching for specific information or some formula that will solve our pressing needs of the moment. But what if we approached the Bible differently, and instead of transforming the text to meet our needs, allowed it to transform us? That's exactly the idea behind Life with God, Richard J. Foster's much-anticipated book on the Bible. Foster, bestselling author of Celebration of Discipline and general editor of The RenovarÉ Spiritual Formation Bible, claims that God has superintended the writing of Scripture so that it serves as the most reliable guide for Christian spiritual formation. According to Foster, the Bible is all about human life "with God." As we read Scripture, we should consider how exactly God is with us in each story and allow ourselves to be spiritually transformed. By opening our whole selves—mind, body, spirit, thoughts, behavior, and will—to the page before us, we begin to grasp all the Bible has to teach about prayer, obedience, compassion, virtue, and grace and apply it to our everyday lives to achieve a deeper relationship with God. With a wealth of examples and simple yet crucial insights, Life with God is an indispensable guide to approaching the Bible through the lens of Christian spiritual formation, revealing that reading the Bible for interior transformation is a far different endeavor than reading the Bible for historical knowledge, literary appreciation, or religious instruction.




Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition


Book Description

The Platonic tradition affords extraordinary resources for thinking about the meaning and value of work. In this historical survey of the tradition, Jeffrey Hanson draws on the work of its major thinkers to explain why our contemporary vocabulary for appraising labor and its rewards is too narrow and cramped. By tracing out the Platonic lineage of work Hanson is able to argue why we should be explaining its value for appraising it as an element of a happy and flourishing human life, quite apart from its financial rewards. Beginning with Plato's extensive thinking about work's relationship to wisdom, Hanson covers the singularly powerful arguments of Augustine, who wrote the ancient world's only treatise dedicated to the topic of manual labor. He discusses Bernard of Clairvaux, introduces the priest-craftsman Theophilus Presbyter, and provides a study of work and leisure in the writings of Petrarch. Alongside Martin Luther, Hanson discusses John Ruskin and Simone Weil: two thinkers profoundly disturbed by the conditions of the working class in the rapidly industrializing economies of Europe. This original study of Plato and his inheritors' ideas provides practical suggestions for how to approach work in a socially responsible manner in the 21st century and reveals the benefits of linking work and morality.




The Holy Spirit


Book Description

This book is a commentary on all the major biblical texts dealing with the Spirit, from Genesis to Revelation. It is an invaluable reference book for students, teachers, ministers, Bible study groups, or anyone interested in the Person and work in the Holy Spirit. It perhaps found its widest use during the Charismatic renewal among both Protestants and Catholics, and has remained a classic ever since. The author, George T. Montague, has not only provided a rich and thoughtful commentary on individual passages, but he has, by the nature of this work, offered a multifaceted overview of the growth of the biblical doctrine on the Spirit covering many centuries. From the time of the Yahwist, when the Spirit was pictured as God's breath of life, to the personalized understanding of the Spirit in the Fourth Gospel, the biblical doctrine of the Spirit has evidenced steady development. Using the findings of reliable scholarship, but never burdening the reader with academic trivialities, Professor Montague places a wealth of theological knowledge within the grasp of persons seeking to learn more about the Holy Spirit and striving to enrich their own spirituality.




Life and Work


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Redeeming Beauty


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Redeeming Beauty explores the richness of orthodox Christian tradition, both Western and Eastern, in matters of 'sacral aesthetics' - a term used to denote the foundations, production and experience of religiously relevant beauty. Aidan Nichols investigates five principal themes: the foundation of beauty in the natural order through divine creative action; explicitly 'evangelical' beauty as a quality of biblical revelation and notably at its climax in Christ; the legitimacy of making and venerating artworks; qualities of the self in relation to objective presentation of the religiously beautiful; and the difficulties of practising a sacral aesthetic, whether as producer or consumer, in an epoch when the visual arts themselves have left behind not only Church but for the greater part the public as well. The thought of theologians such as Augustine, Aquinas, Balthasar, Ratzinger, Bulgakov, Maritain and others is explored.