Sacred Visitations recounts one woman's wondrous spiritual experiences in the midst of creative work, family obligations, and everyday chaos (indcluding a couple close brushes with death). Interspersed throughout these affectingly written stories are contemplative tips about how to Outsmart Your Mind using 5 Steps to Sacred Awareness - easy steps readers of any tradition can use to unravel inner experiences and sacred insights, and enter the heart of spiritual life.

The biblical encounter between the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, before the births of Jesus and John the Baptist, is at the heart of Gifts of the Visitation by popular speaker and syndicated columnist Denise Bossert. She uses their story to highlight nine gifts experienced by both women as they awaited the arrival of their sons and to encourage readers to develop these gifts themselves. In her debut book, speaker, columnist, and Catholic convert Denise Bossert showcases the seasons of birth, grief, newness, and challenge experienced in the hearts of Mary and Elizabeth at the Visitation and invites readers to see these times in their own lives as opportunities to let God make all things new. Within each of those seasons, nine gifts emerge—spontaneity, courage, joy, readiness, humility, adventure, hospitality, wonder and awe, and thanksgiving—equipping readers to present Christ to the world as Mary and Elizabeth did. Bossert's encounter with Mary, which led her to Catholicism, serves as the window for discovering and exploring the gifts and helps readers look inside their own hearts to discover what the gifts of the visit between Mary and Elizabeth mean to them and how they can be Christ-bearers to others.

Increasingly, counselors are practicing spiritual or complementary interventions. In balance, how counselors use such interventions is under closer examination by law. This effort to protect clients is embedded in ethical and legal principles, but rarely addressed in the mental health literature. This book will fill that gap by offering a clear understanding of the context of the law. Detailed case studies are given in each chapter as a centerpiece to the understanding, interpretation, and application of the laws. The author, with his unique qualifications in legal and spiritual areas, pays critical attention to the issues of culture throughout this resource that includes handy appendices of a legal glossary, abbreviations, literature review, and an exercise on how to find the law.

Sacred Stories brings together the work of leading scholars writing on the history of religion and religiosity in late imperial Russia during the critical decades preceding the 1917 revolutions. Embodying new research and new methodologies, this book reshapes our understanding of the place of religion in modern Russian history. Topics examined include miraculous icons and healing, pilgrim narratives, confessions, women and Orthodox domesticity, marriage and divorce, conversion and tolerance, Jewish folk beliefs, mysticism in Russian art, and philosophical aspects of Orthodox religious thought. Sacred Stories demonstrates that belief, spirituality, and the sacred were powerful and complex cultural expressions central to Russian political, social, economic, and cultural life. Contributors are Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heather J. Coleman, Gregory L. Freeze, Nadieszda Kizenko, Alexei A. Kurbanovsky, Roy R. Robson, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Gabriella Safran, Vera Shevzov, Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Mark Steinberg, Paul Valliere, William G. Wagner, Paul W. Werth, and Christine D. Worobec.

Power of Sisterhood serves as an historical record of the Apostolic Visitation initiated by the Vatican Congregation for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life. This book delves into the meaning of the Visitation for women religious as they experienced ...

The Politics of Sacred Places is a study of the socio-political dimensions of sacred sites in Israel–Palestine, drawing on over 20 years of in-depth ethnographic research which introduces cutting-edge theories on secularization, struggles for recognition, and diversity issues. This book focuses on contemporary sacred sites and their socio-political meanings for minorities within a hegemonic and a secularizing state-system. It argues that sacred places provide a space that is less scrutinized by the state and where alternative visions of the socio-political may be produced. A plethora of sites and case studies are examined, including the rural shrine of Maqam abu al-Hijja in the lower Galilee, the Mosque of Hassan Bek in the heart of Tel Aviv-Jaffa and the most disputed sacred place in the region, the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. These sites are explored through mostly a phenomenological lens and in various contexts, from the individual body to the global. This book offers a critical-analytical study of the socio-political aspects of sacred sites in contemporary societies within the broader understanding of scale and the spatial turn in the study of religion.