Best-selling author Richard J. Foster offers a warm, compelling, and sensitive primer on prayer, helping us to understand, experience, and practice it in its many forms-from the simple prayer of beginning again to unceasing prayer. He clarifies the prayer process, answers common misconceptions, and shows the way into prayers of contemplation, healing, blessing, forgiveness, and rest. Coming to prayer is like coming home, Foster says. "Nothing feels more right, more like what we are created to be and to do. Yet at the same time we are confronted with great mysteries. Who hasn't struggled with the puzzle of unanswered prayer? Who hasn't wondered how a finite person can commune with the infinite Creator of the universe? Who hasn't questioned whether prayer isn't merely psychological manipulation after all? We do our best, of course, to answer these knotty questions but when all is said and done, there is a sense in which these mysteries remain unanswered and unanswerable . . . At such times we must learn to become comfortable with the mystery." Foster shows how prayer can move us inward into personal transformation, upward toward intimacy with God, and outward to minister to others. He leads us beyond questions to a deeper understanding and practice of prayer, bringing us closer to God, to ourselves, and to our community.

This is the first Handbook of the Reformations to include global Protestantism, and the most comprehensive Handbook on the development of Protestant practices which has been published so far. The volume brings together international scholars in the fields of theology, intellectual thought, and social and cultural history. Contributions focus on key themes, such as Martin Luther or the Swiss reformations, offering an up-to-date perspective on current scholarly debates, but they also address many new themes at the cutting edge of scholarship, with particularly emphasis on the history of emotions, the history of knowledge, and global history. This new approach opens up fresh perspectives onto important questions: how did Protestant ways of conceiving the divine shape everyday life, ideas of the feminine or masculine, commercial practices, politics, notions of temporality, or violence? The aim of this Handbook is to bring to life the vitality of Reformation ideas. In these ways, the Handbook stresses that the Protestant Reformations in all their variety, and with their important "radical" wings, must be understood as one of the lasting long-term historical transformations which changed Europe and, subsequently, significant parts of the world.

This book is a great introductory Bible study all by itself - for it brings out the Catholic teachings that are hidden in Sacred Scripture! A famous book - one which received recommendations from 14 bishops when first published and which went through at least 16 editions - this commentary is not a work for scholars; but rather a very practical book for the ordinary Catholic.

Until his untimely death, Vitor Westhelle's incisive scholarship shaped a generation. As a continuation of that legacy, presented here for the first time in English is a collection of Westhelle's Portuguese-language essays. In this collection, he addresses the most important issues of our day, including the cross and death, the ecological crisis, the ecumenical movement, the church's misuse of power, Luther's law-gospel dialectic, and the role of European theology in the conquest of the Americas.