Fairacres Publications 145 Translated into English for the first time by John Chryssavgis, these Reflections present, with great simplicity, the day-to-day teaching and example of one of the great sixth-century eremitical Fathers of the Palestinian desert. For Abba Zosimas, obedience to the gospel implies a radical disposition of love for the neighbour in every thought, word and action. This is the key to freedom and joy.

Fairacres Publications 208 This book brings together essays by two outstanding Orthodox theologians to examine the paradox of time in relation to the eternity of God: Dumitru Stăniloae’s, ‘Eternity and Time’, a talk given to the Sisters of the Love of God in 1971, was expanded in the first volume of his Teologia dogmatica ortodoxa (3 vols., Bucharest, 1978). The preface to the 1994 English translation of that work, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, written by Kallistos Ware, was based on his essay, ‘Time: Prison or Path to Freedom?’, which was first published in 1989 by SLG Press. These reflections, brought together for the first time here, remain at the forefront of modern theology. Stăniloae illuminates time as a journey on which we may grow in response to the love that God offers us, a journey towards sharing in the eternity of the perfect, interpersonal communion of the Trinity. God, in His Incarnation, shares the journey with us in Christ, so that time enters into eternity, and eternity is brought into time. At every moment we are free to choose between responding to His love or rejecting it. Ware’s essay explains that it is the vocation of time to be open to eternity; time is fulfilled when God’s eternity breaks into the temporal sequence, as happened supremely at Christ’s birth in Bethlehem, as happens also at every Eucharist. Our faith is the true rationale of time: mutual love after the image of the Trinity.

Fairacres Publications 160 These theological reflections on the Cross and Passion of Jesus Christ touch upon some central paradoxes of the Christian faith. Jesus was put to death publicly by crucifixion which, according to traditional Jewish teaching, was a scandal and an affront to God. Yet a Roman centurion present was able to exclaim in awe, ‘Truly this man was the Son of God!’ The book invites us to ponder instances where strength was manifested in weakness, not only for Jesus – in Gethsemane, at his Trial and on the Cross – but also for those two pillars of the early Church, Peter and Paul, as they too wrestled with ‘the Scandal of the Cross’.

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.

In 1996 Bishop Martin Lönnebo (1930–2023), recently retired after fifteen years as Lutheran Bishop of Linköping in Sweden, was exploring the Aegean when his boat was overtaken by a storm and he and his fellow-passengers had to take refuge on a tiny island with a single guest house. While the storm blew itself out Bishop Martin set about designing what he described as a ‘prayer ribbon’ that could summarize the message of the Christian faith. The result was a bracelet known as Frälsarkransen. The word means ‘life-belt’—hence the sub-title for this short book, which provides an introduction to Bishop Martin’s thinking behind the beads, and suggestions for using them for prayer and contemplation.

Fairacres Publications 195 Most of us live, in our prayers and our worship, and in our understanding of Christian discipleship, with one Passion story. We take incidents from the four Gospel accounts of the suffering and death of Jesus and weave them into a single ‘harmonized’ whole. In this essay, Tony Dickinson unravels these four narrative strands to reveal an understanding of the events that shape each one. He also examines how each account is influenced by the sacred writings of Israel, especially the Psalms.

Fairacres Publications 128 In recent decades there has been a notable renewal of interest in St Isaac the Syrian, a seventh-century master of the ascetic life. This selection of short sayings is part of Dr Brock’s work on a fuller, long-neglected manuscript which he is making available to English readers. Each sentence holds the mind steadily in the light of a truth about the spiritual life. St Isaac’s vivid images drawn directly from nature, husbandry and general human experience speak for themselves and draw us to penitence and prayer.

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 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.

SLG Press Contemplative Poetry 9 This book contains poems by Henry Vaughan, all of them selected from the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans. Almost all are followed by a related poem from George Herbert’s 1633 collection, The Temple. For Vaughan, Herbert was that ‘blessed man, whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts’: poets who wisely exchanged ‘vain and vicious subjects’ for ‘divine Themes and Celestial praise’. Vaughan thought of himself as ‘the least’ of those converts, but the poetry in Silex Scintillans shows him matching and even sometimes surpassing his master’s work.