Seven gentle, meditative duet arrangements include: Amazing Grace * God Be with You Till We Meet Again * He Leadeth Me * Holy, Holy, Holy * My Faith Looks Up to Thee * Onward, Christian Soldiers! * This Is My Father's World

Sacred presents photographs of locations cloaked in mysticism and imbued with a spiritual energy, exploring the meaning of the sacred in a global, multicultural context. Countless cultures have found it in the magnificence of nature and what can be called the divine gestures of the nature landscape. We looked to the majesty of snowcapped mountains, the glow of the full moon, the power of a magical waterfall, the endless sands of the Sahara Desert, the towering height of the tallest trees and the subtle essence of a lotus flower. We created remarkable buildings to the essence of what we felt to be sacred. What is sacred and what do cultures around the world consider sacred? What is sacred to a Muslim, a Tibetan monk, a Native American, a Christian elder, an atheist, a mountaineer, a poet or an artist? Chris Rainier has spent the last forty years in search of the sacred––from the peaks of Tibet to the icebergs of Antarctica, from the vibrant mysticism of India to the mysteries of the Silk Road, from the jungles of New Guinea to the druid stones of Scotland, and from the deserts of the Southwest United States to the rock art of aboriginal Australia and Africa. Rainier’s photographs masterfully capture the wonder and awe inherent to all these sites. Sacred presents photographs from this lifelong journey. The collection offers spiritually driven glimpses of ancient monuments and haunting landscapes from around the world––each echoing with the energy of timeless and sacred power places. RENOWN PHOTOGRAPHER AND AUTHOR: Chris Rainier is a documentary photographer and National Geographic explorer who is highly respected for his documentation of endangered cultures and traditional languages around the globe. AWARD-WINNING PHOTOGRAPHY: Rainier was Ansel Adams last photo assistant and has contributed numerous photographs for the United Nations, UNESCO, Amnesty International, Conservation International, the Smithsonian Institution, CNN, BBC, NPR, National Geographic, TIME magazine, the New York Times, and LIFE magazine. CELEBRATED CONTRIBUTORS: Over twelve internationally recognized contributors discuss what sacred means to them and include British essayist and novelist Pico Iyer; ethnographer, writer, photographer, and filmmaker Wade Davis; and Pulitzer Prize winner and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek.

Josef Pieper claims, "The ultimate fulfillment, the absolute meaningful activity, the most perfect expression of being alive, the deepest satisfaction, and the fullest achievement of human existence must needs happen in an instance of beholding." He adds, "A particularly venerable form, particularly neglected as well, is religious meditation, the contemplative immersion of the self into the divine mysteries."But, we say, our attention spans are but seconds. We live in a fast paced world. It's static. There's noise pollution. How can we ever foster an attitude of contemplation? We close our eyes during the homilies, determined to listen without much gain. We kneel, opening our hearts to hear the Lord, and then our phone buzzes, breaking that fragile peace. We buckle down, eliminating the noise from our instagram accounts to only fill it with beauty, yet overexposure dulls our sense of wonder and awe. We are a visual generation, and we're lightning. But there is a yet. It looks like this: yet, there is a new way to draw us back to our Holy. And it is called Visio Divina.Visio Divina: Praying With Sacred Art is a compilation of nearly one hundred paintings with corresponding scripture passages and reflections to guide oneself into deeper prayer through focused meditation.This book can be used privately or within a group setting and is available in both soft and hardcover, as well as an electronic version.

For 15 years, Daniel Epstein, a Marketing Director at one of the world's largest corporations, Procter & Gamble, traveled the world for business and for faith. Motivated by his own search to fill the "God-sized hole" in his life, he did not know where it would lead. He felt that if he did not develop some type of spiritual faith he would die. Born and raised a Jew, Daniel's challenges with relationships, work, and "life" forced him at age 36 to get on his knees and pray to a God he did not know, a higher power not specific to either his own Judaism or any religion, and ask for help. In order to keep his new found sense of faith alive and to gain from the experience of others, Daniel created a spiritual exercise out of interviewing people around the world about the role of faith in their lives. As a photographer, Daniel also captured a moment with each person in a black and white portrait meant to evoke their true spirit. In 2012, Daniel launched Portraits on Faith online as the largest documentary project on faith ever compiled by a single person. Over 100 of the 500 portraits shot have been published from 27 countries, which have been viewed over 300,000 times by people around the world. As a culmination of all the work that has to this moment, Daniel is publishing the first volume of Portraits in Faith, which include over 100 portraits, quotes, and reflections on faith from people spanning the world, from over 40 faith traditions and denominations.

Giovanni Battista Moroni is considered one of the great portraitists of sixteenth-century Italy. Published with The Frick Collection to accompany the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in the United States, this sumptuous volume celebrates the painter's eye for exquisite detail in depicting his sitters' interior and material worlds. New scholarship includes in-depth studies of individual portraits, as well as essays on the artist in the context of portrait painting in northern Italy in the later cinquecento. Contents: Director's Foreword; Preface and Acknowledgements; Moroni's Eyes; Moroni between Likeness and Presence; Catalogue of the Exhibition; Bibliography; Index. The publication is linked to an exhibition running at The Frick Collection from February to June 2019. AUTHORS: Aimee Ng is an Associate Curator at The Frick Collection, New York. Arturo Galansino is the Director of the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. Simone Facchinetti is a Curator at the Museo Adriano Bernareggi, Bergamo. SELLING POINTS: * The only substantial treatment of this renowned Old Master's portraiture in print * Accompanies the major exhibition at The Frick Collection from February to June 2019 * Offers new insights by experts in the field with accessibly written text 90 colour images

This book focuses on the earliest surviving Christian icons, dated to the sixth and seventh centuries, which bear many resemblances to three other well-established genres of ‘sacred portrait’ also produced during late antiquity, namely Roman imperial portraiture, Graeco-Egyptian funerary portraiture and panel paintings depicting non-Christian deities. Andrew Paterson addresses two fundamental questions about devotional portraiture – both Christian and non-Christian – in the late antique period. Firstly, how did artists visualise and construct these images of divine or sanctified figures? And secondly, how did their intended viewers look at, respond to, and even interact with these images? Paterson argues that a key factor of many of these portrait images is the emphasis given to the depicted gaze, which invites an intensified form of personal encounter with the portrait’s subject. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, theology, religion and classical studies.

In Devotional Portraiture and Spiritual Experience Ingrid Falque analyses the meditative functions of early Netherlandish paintings including devotional portraits, that is portraits of people kneeling in prayer. Such paintings have been mainly studied in the context of commemorative and social practices, but as Ingrid Falque shows, they also served as devotional instruments. By drawing parallels between the visual strategies of these paintings and texts of the major spiritual writers of the medieval Low Countries, she demonstrates that paintings with devotional portraits functioned as a visualisation of the spiritual process of the sitters. The book is accompanied by the first exhaustive catalogue of paintings with devotional portraits produced in the Low Countries between c. 1400 and 1550. This catalogue is available at no costs in e-format (HERE) and can also be purchased as a printed hardcover book (HERE).

Accompanying an exhibition to be held in New York during late fall of 1998, Sacred Visions is a superbly illustrated volume of art works from the 11th to the mid-15th centuries which includes scholarly essays that relate to the paintings to be displayed.

"This book represents a selection of the artist's portfolio of works throughout his career. Over the past 30 years, Igor Babailov has painted more than 2,000 portraits and hundreds of other works of art, including half of which are in distinguished public, private, corporate and museum collections around the world"--Page 15.

Late antique and early medieval hagiographic texts present holy women as simultaneously pious and corrupt, hideous and beautiful, exemplars of depravity and models of sanctity. In Sacred Fictions Lynda Coon unpacks these paradoxical representations to reveal the construction and circumscription of women's roles in the early Christian centuries. Coon discerns three distinct paradigms for female sanctity in saints' lives and patristic and monastic writings. Women are recurrently figured as repentant desert hermits, wealthy widows, or cloistered ascetic nuns, and biblical discourse informs the narrative content, rhetorical strategies, and symbolic meanings of these texts in complex and multivalent ways. If hagiographers made their women saints walk on water, resurrect the dead, or consecrate the Eucharist, they also curbed the power of women by teaching that the daughters of Eve must make their bodies impenetrable through militant chastity or spiritual exile and must eradicate self-indulgence through ascetic attire or philanthropy. The windows the sacred fiction of holy women open on the past are far from transparent; driven by both literary invention and moral imperative, the stories they tell helped shape Western gender constructs that have survived into modern times.