All too often Scripture is read only to find answers to life’s perplexing questions, to prove a theological point, or to formulate doctrine. But William Brown argues that if read properly, what the Bible does most fundamentally is arouse a sacred sense of life-transforming wonder. In this book Brown helps readers develop an orientation toward the biblical text that embraces wonder. He explores reading strategies and offers fresh readings of seventeen Old and New Testament passages, identifying what he finds most central and evocative in the unfolding biblical drama. The Bible invites its readers to linger in wide-eyed wonder, Brown says -- and his Sacred Sense shows readers how to do just that.

There have been many histories of Christian art and architecturebut none written be a theologian such as Kevin Seasoltz. Following a chapter on culture as the context for theology, liturgy, and art, Seasoltz surveys developments from the early church up through the conventional artistic styles and periods. Comprehensive, illuminating, ecumenical.

In a series of pioneering studies, this book examines the creation—and the conflict behind the creation—of sacred space in America. The essays in this volume visit places in America where economic, political, and social forces clash over the sacred and the profane, from wilderness areas in the American West to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and they investigate visions of America as sacred space at home and abroad. Here are the beginnings of a new American religious history—told as the story of the contested spaces it has inhabited. The contributors are David Chidester, Matthew Glass, Edward T. Linenthal, Colleen McDannell, Robert S. Michaelsen, Rowland A. Sherrill, and Bron Taylor.

This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the phenomenology of self and self-transformation."--BOOK JACKET.

"Using Bernard Lonergan's categories of experience, New Paths Toward the Sacred highlights the intimate connection between human experience and an awareness of the Sacred, analyzed by the author's practical research based on studying people's reactions and experiences in a sculpture garden. A movement from "ah" to "awe" in everyday living is emphasized. This is presented by the author's reliance upon the reflective insights into the thoughts of the best theological scholars."--BOOK JACKET.

Crowe speaks to tens of thousands each year, instilling leadership skills and motivating his audience to imagine what you would do for the glory of God, if you knew with certainty that you absolutely could not fail.

Invariably, people who read Scripture are forced to answer the question, "What is the 'literal sense'?" This question is not new. In the seventeenth century, John Lightfoot--signer of the Westminster Confession of Faith and a master of Hebrew and of rabbinic writings--wrestled with the same question, and his conclusions had a profound impact in the world of hermeneutics. In an age of much animosity towards the Jews, Lightfoot embraced the insights found in the Jewish writings while staying grounded in his reformational dogmatic theology. In so doing, his exegesis could properly be considered a via media between Reformed Scholasticism and Judaism. Lightfoot's hermeneutical principles and presuppositions outlined in this book not only provide valuable insight into his thinking but also reject the previously normative notion that Reformed Scholasticism has little to offer dogmatically or exegetically. The current tensions between systematic and biblical theology, the rise of interest in Second Temple and medieval Judaica, and the never-ending question of biblical authority make What Is the Literal Sense? an important read.

This is a major study of the Nobel prize-winning French novelist Claude Simon. Simon is a complex figure: for all that he writes in a distinctively modern fictional tradition (exemplified by Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Robbe-Grillet), his novels contain strong elements of visual representation alongside a very different king of free-floating, anti-realist writing.

The Sacred Santa is an inquiry into the religious dimension of postmodern culture, seriously considering the widespread perception that contemporary culture witnesses a profound struggle between two antithetical systems -- a collision of two worlds, both religious, yet each with vivid visions of the sacred that differ radically with regard to what the sacred is and what it means to human life and social endeavor.

How do we talk meaningfully about the sacred in contexts where conventional religious expression has so often lost its power? Inspired by the influential work of David Jasper, this important volume builds on his thinking to identify sacrality in a world where the old religious and secular debates have exhausted themselves and theology struggles for a new language in their wake. Distinguished writers explore here the idea of the sacred as one that exists, paradoxically, in a space that is both possible and impossible: profoundly theological on the one hand, but also deeply this-worldly and irreligious on the other. This is a sacredness that is simultaneously 'present' and 'absent': one which encompasses – as Jasper himself characterises it – 'the impossible possibility of an absolute vision'. The book teaches us that the sacred assumes a renewed potency when fully engaged with the creativity that happens across religion, literature, philosophy and the arts.