Bücher veröffentlicht von Cascade Books

These essays in this book are pastoral and scholarly, to encourage parents to nurture and foster Christian family life by learning from scripture and history. The Bible, in both testaments, offers us stories that provide moral and spiritual substance to the nurture of the child and the family. Beginning with the mythopoetic story of Adam and Eve, and the fratricide of Abel by the envy of Cain, the stories of the sacrifices parents made, then moving on to the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Ruth and her mother-in-law, Hannah and her son Samuel, Jeremiah the child prophet, these stories form our moral imaginations. Further, for Christians, they all augur the promise of the Incarnation, with the birth of Jesus to Mary and Joseph. Then through the history of the Church the role of the Child is further unfolded. It begins with Jesus teaching that to be as one of his disciples is to be a child. This is so radical that the subsequent churches have found it hard to follow. Perhaps one symbolic attempt was that of the monks' cowl which is a child's garment, and still worn in their monasteries. The book even explores the way that Christian maturity is one of childlikeness.

This book is a collection of sermons preached at home and abroad, intended mainly for a lay audience, which presents teachings and applications of biblical texts from both the Old and New Testaments. It builds around the theme of the Christian life being a walk with a hidden and revealed God, a walk requiring understanding, a walk in which one remains faithful, a walk that has developmental stages, and a walk requiring wisdom.

Since Vatican II, the key question that has developed in Catholic theology, often unstated or unrecognized, is, what is theology? The thesis presented here is that contemporary theologizing is ""fractured"" in many places and to varying degrees. These fractures can vary in seriousness between theologians, and a particular theologian may suffer from some fractures but not others. The fractures addressed here are between -theology and spirituality-theology and philosophy-theology and liturgy-the literal and spiritual senses of sacred scripture-theology, preaching, and apologetics-theology and ethics-theology and social theory-dogmatic and pastoral theology-theology and the ""koinonial"" Christian life-theologians and non-theologians- the generation gap between Gen X and Millennial/Post-Millennial Catholics, and -theology and the Magisterium. For each of these, an attempt is made to examine the symptoms, give a diagnosis, and write a prescription.

What is it that makes discipleship authentic? Discipleship involves learning how to be in the world but not of the world. The first Christians were ambivalent about ""the world"": God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son but friendship with the world is enmity with God. So discipleship involves learning how to live with this ambivalence and an ancient tension between loving and hating the world. This book offers a deeper understanding of what discipleship means by tracing the history of this ambivalence from the New Testament to the present. It presents a revisionary account of this history as a continuing and nonnegotiable tension between loving and hating the world rather than a simple transition from medieval world-denial to modern world-affirmation. It argues that this tension helped produce our own secular age and it considers modern Jewish and Christian philosophical and theological responses to this history that suggest ways that Christians can negotiate this tension to be more authentic disciples today.

What words from our Christian vocabulary would you miss if you could no longer use them? If you pronounced them and no one understood? If you spoke and people gave them a meaning at odds with your conviction? What words do you fear are falling into misuse? If you could save some word or phrase from disuse or misuse what would it be?Saving Words is a collection of personal, provocative essays by lay people, clergy, poets, theologians, musicians, and scholars on words they want to preserve and proclaim, urgent and important reflections on the language we need for the facing of these days. Open this volume and find saving words that matter.