Volume three in a three-part series that functions as a pastoral tool for sharing the word of God; focuses on Cycle C and emphasizes using the lectionary in catechesis throughout the year.

Breaking Open Gods Word: A Three-year Cycle of Reflections on the Sunday Readings of the Liturgical Year invites readers to embark upon a journey through the riches of the Catholic Churchs three-year lectionary for readings for Sunday Mass. The lectionary, a sequence of appointed passages from the texts of the Old and New Testaments, pairs readings with the seasons and feasts of the church year. Sister Celine Goessl, a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, has taken a lifetime practice of prayerful listening to the messages God shares through scriptural texts and brought it into conversation with her immersion in the details of daily life to create the collection of reflections appearing in Breaking Open Gods Word. The intent of this collection is to help Gods Word enflesh itself in the readers daily life and to empower him or her to take action to live as Christs presence in other peoples lives. You may watch the changing of the seasons in your parishs worship and hear the variety of texts read at Mass. As you do, and you find life presenting you with ever-changing challenges to your faith, Breaking Open Gods Word offers to accompany you on your daily journey. Along the way, Sister Celine Goessls prayerful reflections can offer you inspiration and guidance for living and witnessing faithfully in whatever circumstances you face each day.

Will help those who Break open the Word in RCIA and those involved in Lectionary-based faith sharing or Bible study groups to hear the Word as a living Word and to know that the Word they are hearing is compatible with what the biblical authors are teaching.

The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence?"This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.' Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science

The Dancing Hand of God: Unveiling the Fullness of God through Apostolic Signs, Wonders, and Miracles combines two purposes in each of its two volumes. This first volume begins the journey that will unveil the qualities of God by telling the story of the life of its author, James Maloney, and by exploring the apostolic witness to God. He likens the approach to discovering a balance between storytelling and teaching that helps the reader to turn the face of a hurting world toward God. This volume of The Dancing Hand of God explores Gods fullness, fatherhood, otherness, acceptance, burden, glory, rule, and availability. Each of the chapters concludes with an outline that lists the main insights offered by each of the sections in the chapter, making the book useful both for ones personal reflection and for shared conversation. When you take stock of your spiritual life, you might find yourself confronting a series of challenges, such as loneliness, anxiety, and a lack of godliness. The Dancing Hand of God proposes a remedy for these sources of spiritual sickness: a full-contact embrace in the strong and healing hands of God. By learning from James Maloneys own journey and his studied explorations of the teachings of the faith, you will find the energy to play your part in unveiling Gods fullness through your working of apostolic signs, wonders, and miracles.

Drawing on performance studies and sacramental and liturgical theology, Ruthanna B. Hooke develops a theology of proclamation grounded in the body’s experience of preaching. The author explores the claim that preaching is a sacramental event of communion with the triune God by comparing the steps involved in voice production with the fourfold shape of the Eucharist. This comparison yields a description of preaching as an event of self-offering that allows space for the humanity of the preacher and as an encounter with the Holy Spirit that is communal and prophetic. Preaching draws participants into Christ’s dying and rising, and hence into a mode of power known in vulnerability. Calling hearers into the eschatological event of the resurrection, preaching inherently moves toward proclamation on political and ethical issues. Hooke uses this theological framework to offer ways of preaching on environmental crisis and on racism. The author calls preachers to embodied engagement with preaching and describes a way for preachers to bear witness to Jesus Christ not only in the content of their proclamation, but in their way of being in the preaching event.

Reading Karl Barth provides a cluster of major themes and signposts by which to orient one’s reading of Barth’s theology. It assists readers in (a) recognizing and understanding what Barth is doing theologically and why and how he is doing it; and (b) assessing the extent to which Barth’s theology is or is not a fruitful resource for their own context, as individuals and communities of faith. The distinctive value of the book’s approach lies in its demonstration of the ways in which Barth’s theology—in both his own time and in ours—“cuts both ways,” to the theological left and right. This involves identifying various theological logics that constitute the diverse and conflictual landscape of shared Christian identity and faith—both in Barth’s time and in our own—enabling readers to recognize not only where and why Barth is located in that landscape, but also where and why they themselves are located, together with their respective faith communities. This makes the book of particular interest to individuals and communities of faith who feel themselves homeless in today’s polemical polarization between theological conservatives and theological progressives, especially those who are hungry for the possibility of a progressive socio-political vision of the gospel rooted in relatively traditional confessions of Christian faith.