Fairacres Publications 154 Sister Pauline Margaret provides wise guidance in the practice of the Jesus Prayer, or the invocation of the name of Jesus in prayer. She draws on the tradition of the gospels and on her own experience of using this prayer and of sharing her insights in retreats, prayer workshops and quiet days. Noting that the primary meaning of ‘amateur’ is ‘lover’, she points out that when it comes to prayer, everyone is an amateur, a person who practises prayer for love.

Fairacres Publications 206 I have conversations with people about how they pray the Jesus Prayer as they walk the city streets, as they travel on buses or on the Tube, as they cycle, or as they sit at home. From these experiences I have come more and more to see the Jesus Prayer as a way of praying well suited to urban life; a form of attentiveness practice that can help us to grow in God-experience amid the changes and chances of metropolitan living. This book explains the prayer, its ethos, and how to begin to practise it in daily life.

Fairacres Publications 111 The watershed shown on the front cover is Striding Edge in the Helvellyn area of the Lake District. The shadow on one side of the ridge and light on the other are a striking visual image of the experience of forgiveness and new life which the author has come to associate with repentance. Her personal introduction to this sacrament explains why to go to confession and how to set about it. As Michael Mayne says in his foreword, ‘Those who have known that sense of liberation, even resurrection, within the context of sacramental confession will not need Chris North’s words to confirm their own experience. Others, who are not aware that confession is available or are suspicious of this good Anglican practice, may be reassured and encouraged to explore for themselves this most costly yet rewarding of ways of encountering the grace of God.

Fairacres Publications 139 The Discourses of Abba Isaiah of Scetis, a classical text of fifth-century desert literature, are grounded in Scripture and the teaching of the earliest Christian monks. The authors of this book present Abba Isaiah as one of the first of the Desert Fathers to examine the relationship between abba and disciple, the monastery and the outside world.

Fairacres Publications 62 Saint Anselm (1033–1109) was abbot of the Norman monastery of Bec, and later Archbishop of Canterbury under William Rufus and Henry I. In this short study of one of the most original thinkers of the earlier Middle Ages, Sister Benedicta discusses the relationship between Anselm’s scholarship and his life as a monk, showing how the one grew naturally out of the other. Anselm’s understanding of the inter-connections of reason and faith, thought and prayer, which can be traced throughout his writings, both theological and devotional, remains significant for Christian scholarship in any age. At the same time he was one of the most attractive, loving and compassionate of men. Simplicity, humanity and gentleness are joined in Anselm to the clear and sane mind of a great scholar.

Wendy Robinson (1934–2013) was a trained psychotherapist who became a member of the Russian Orthodox Church in England in 1980. To be able to combine these two vocations was, for her, to discover herself. She practised psychotherapy both with individual clients and, increasingly, with religious communities, both Catholic and Anglican, giving retreats and one-to-one counselling, and built up a strong and lasting connection with the Sisters of the Love of God in Oxford. She reflected on her dual vocation in lectures and articles, a selection of which are published in the companion volume to this book, Cosmos Crisis and Christ: Essays of Wendy Robinson, collected and edited by Andrew Louth, Fairacres Publications 211 (SLG Press, 2024)

Fairacres Publications 197 This collection of short prayers seeks to support and sustain individuals in private devotion throughout the changing seasons of the liturgical year, also celebrating the lives of the saints, and addressing a number of day-to-day concerns. Their purpose is to support those seeking a deeper, more devotional prayer life. They are intended to induce the wonder and mystery of intimacy with God encountered in all things, visible and invisible.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 14 St Frideswide, or Frithuswith, was an important saint during the medieval period and is patron of the City of Oxford. Her shrine was a place of pilgrimage but was destroyed during the Reformation and since then she has largely disappeared from view. Embertide is not a simple retelling of her biography, but engages with all the different versions of her life and seeks to understand her importance in the past and her significance today. It is liminal, elusive and delicately balanced; a kind of spiritual pilgrimage towards understanding elements of faith. Spiritual pilgrimage is a lifetime journey of rethinking and revisiting our perceptions and understanding, just as saints’ written lives have been refashioned to appeal to different audiences at different points in time. This poem is the outcome of one such spiritual pilgrimage, and each reader will encounter it differently, on their own terms. Our saints, in their afterlives, are still travelling, and we follow in their wake.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 10 This is a collection of personal reflections on faith and the struggle to meet and serve God that is part of our Christian journey. Here there are no fractured poetic experiments except in the faith-struggle itself, that is, the thinking, which is the accomplishment and power of religious poetry, just as it is of religious life. This struggle is manifest here, expressed by different people with different impulses to write. Here, the little, the personal and the tightly-imagined have the most effect. The transfer of faith, doubt, struggle, praise, prayer into poetry is hard – and that struggle too is part of this collection.

St Gregory of Nyssa is the most important author of the fourth century in relation to theological anthropology, and was one of the most outspoken of the early Church Fathers on the subject of slavery. Gregory’s theology is built upon his perception that Jesus Christ was truly human; therefore, to be human is to be made in the image of Christ. We cannot justify slavery if we accept that humans are made in God’s image, because slaves are no less made in the image of God than those who are free. This book examines Gregory’s theology, how he understood and taught about the relationship of human beings to God, and how he applied this theology to the practical issue of slavery.