Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community draws on the spiritual practices of Northern Ireland's longest established peace and reconciliation organisation. For over fifty years, it has been bringing fractured communities together and resourcing others in the work of healing conflict.
At the heart of its life is a simple pattern of daily worship. This prayer book captures the essence of the Corrymeela prayer experience to help you incorporate its spirituality into your practice of prayer. Structured over 31 days, it offers a daily Bible reading with accompanying prayer by Pádraig Ó Tuama. as well as an introduction to the spirituality that sustains Corrymeela's remarkable work.
Advent is a season of waiting and anticipation in which the waiting itself is strangely rich and fulfilling. Poetry can help us fathom the depths of Advent's many paradoxes: dark and light, emptiness and fulfilment, ancient and ever new.
For every day from Advent Sunday to Christmas Day and beyond, the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses a favourite poem from across the Christian spiritual and English literary traditions and offers incisive seasonal reflections on it. In the spirit of the season, he blends the familiar and the new, ranging from from spiritual classics such as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, George Herbert and Christina Rossetti, to contemporary voices Luci Shaw and Scott Cairns. His own acclaimed sequence of sonnets for the great Advent antiphons are also included.
The Being With course is an introduction to Christianity with a difference. Rather than being a Bible study or a series of arguments to try to convince you that God exists, it starts with the conviction that you already have a wealth of understanding of truth, beauty and goodness that will help you, in the company of others, to recognise God's presence in your life and your everyday experiences.
At its heart is the idea that God's greatest desire is to be with us in Jesus. That's the reason the world was created; that's why you were created. Over a period of ten weeks, you will discover dimensions of this presence and what it means to live abundantly with God, with one another and with creation.
As a collection of 66 books spanning thousands of years, the Bible can be daunting in size and scope. In The Heart of It All, the Canterbury Press Lent book for 2020, Samuel Wells simplifies the Bible's complexity and presents the entire sweep of its narrative in eighteen key themes.
Although its contents range from history to poetry, law, narrative, letters and even apocalyptic literature, at the Bible's heart are relationships between God, creation, Jesus, the Church, the Spirit and the Kingdom. Samuel Wells argues that this provides a lens through which the whole Bible can be understood.
Rooted in the best of contemporary biblical theology and scholarship, The Heart of It All will deepen understanding of the Bible and increase confidence in reading it. It includes questions for reflection, making this an ideal resource for Lent groups as well as for individual reading.
Poetry has always been a central element of Christian spirituality and is used in worship, in pastoral services and guided meditation. In Sounding the Seasons, Cambridge poet and priest Malcolm Guite transforms seventy lectionary readings into lucid, inspiring poems, for use in regular worship, seasonal services, meditative reading or on retreat. This second edition includes further sonnets for the Christian year written since the original edition, including a sequence of 19 sonnets on the resurrection appearances recorded in scripture. Immediate, striking, simple yet profound, Malcolm Guite's poetry resonates deeply and widely across the churches of all traditions throughout the English speaking world.
As well as the name of a virus, a corona is a crown, the pearly glow around the sun in certain astronomical conditions and a poetic form where interlinking lines connect a sequence. It is the perfect name therefore for this new collection of 150 poems by the bestselling poet Malcolm Guite, each one written in response to the Bible's 150 psalms as they appear in William Coverdale's timeless translation.
The Psalms express every human emotion with disarming honesty, as anger and thankfulness alike are directed at God. All of life is here with its moments of beauty and its times of despair and shame. Like the Psalms themselves, the poems do not avoid the cursing and glorying over the downfall of your enemies, but wrestle honestly with them as we do when we come to say them.
In the Bleak Midwinter explores the power of Advent and the joy of Christmas through the poetry of Christina Rossetti. Best known for her poems-turned-carols In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas, Rossetti's rich and wondrous faith provides an inspiring seasonal companion.
For each day from Advent Sunday to the Epiphany, Rachel Mann selects a poem and reflects on it, drawing on Rossetti's many other writings including her devotional journals and commentary on biblical narratives.
At a time when commercial pressures are at their most intense, this volume aims to lead readers to an encounter with God's time and space, to find our true identity beyond all that would limit and diminish our humanity.
In Every Corner Sing is the first collection of priest-poet Malcolm Guite's widely-acclaimed columns on the back page of the Church Times. His lucid, perceptive and imaginative musings follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned.
Each column draws together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, and fuses them to create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar that at the same time open a doorway in to a new and enchanted world.
A leading poet and a theologian reflect on the Old Testament story of Ruth, a tale that resonates deeply in today's world with its themes of migration, the stranger, mixed cultures and religions, law and leadership, women in public life, kindness, generosity and fear. Ruth's story speaks directly to many of the issues and deep differences that Brexit has exposed and to the polarisation taking place in many societies.
Pádraig Ó Tuama and Glenn Jordan bring the redemptive power of Ruth to bear on today's seemingly intractable social and political divisions, reflecting on its challenges and how it can help us be effective in the public square, amplify voices which are silenced, and be communities of faith in our present day.
Over the last year, the material that inspired this book has been used with over 6000 people as a public theology initiative from Corrymeela, Ireland's longest-established peace and reconciliation centre. It has been met with an overwhelming response because of its immediacy and relevance, enabling people with opposing views to come together and be heard.
Poet's Corner is Malcolm Guite's delectable column that appears on the back page of the Church Times each week. This second collection brings together more than seventy columns created from little glimpses and reflections from all corners of the country, the musings of a poet's mind, and the corners and alleyways of our literary heritage.
Malcolm's lucid, perceptive and imaginative columns follow a similar pattern to the sonnets for which he is so renowned, with a sense of development, of a turn or volta part way through, and a sense that the end revisits and re-reads the opening.
They draw together everyday events and encounters, landscape, journeys, poetry, stories, memory and a sense of the sacred, fusing them to create richly satisfying portraits of the familiar that at the same time open a doorway into a new and enchanted world.
The bestselling poet Malcolm Guite chooses forty poems from across the centuries that express the universal experience of loss and reflects on them in order to draw out the comfort, understanding and hope they offer.
Some of the poems will be familiar, many will be new, but together they provide a sure companion for the journey across difficult terrain. Some of Malcolm's own poetry is included, written out of his work as a priest with the dying and the bereaved and giving to the volume a powerful authenticity.
The choice of forty poems is significant and reflects an ancient practice still observed in some European and Middle Eastern societies of taking extra-special care of a bereaved person in the forty days following a death - our word quarantine come from this. They explore the nature and the risk of love, the pain of letting go and look toward glimpses of resurrection.
Created by Pádraig Ó Tuama five years ago, the Spirituality of Conflict website is one of the most exciting and vibrant online lectionary resources. For each Sunday there is an extended reflection, a prayer, and questions for lectio divina or group discussion. Featuring Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian and Pentecostal writers from Corrymeela, the Iona Community, Holy Island, Coventry Cathedral's Centre for Reconciliation, the Church of Scotland and elsewhere, it reflects the broad nature of the witness to peace.
Approaching conflict in its various forms - personal, social, global - through the lens of the gospels, conflict, it explores the conflicted nature of Jesus' world and how people navigated routes through it. It enables the scriptures to speak to the conflicts in our lives and reveals how they can have positive as well as negative outcomes.
This volume of collected material focuses on the beginning and the end of Jesus' human life and covers the gospels for Advent, Christmas. Lent, Holy Week and Easter.
The Being With course is an introduction to Christianity with a difference. At its heart is the idea that God's greatest desire is to be with us in Jesus. Grounded in the conviction that we already have a wealth of understanding of truth, beauty and goodness that signify God's presence in our lives and everyday experiences, it aims to enable participants to discover dimensions of this presence and to live abundantly with God, with one another and with creation.
This Leaders' Guide provides:
- an introduction to the theological perspective underpinning the course;
- an explanation of its structure and an overview of each session;
- practical guidelines for leading a group;
- complete materials for hosting its ten 90-minute sessions in person or online.
The sessions focus on the themes of Meaning; Essence; Jesus; Church; Bible; Mission; Cross; Prayer; Suffering and Resurrection. Drawing on the practices of Godly Play, the course uses storytelling, wondering and reflection to encourage and welcome the insights that each person brings.
The Being With course was devised and created by Samuel Wells and Sally Hitchiner. It is one of many initiatives of St Martin-in-the-Fields, alongside HeartEdge, the Nazareth Community, the classical music and arts programmes and work with those experiencing homelessness. Located in London's Trafalgar Square, St Martin's is a community of hope, transforming church and society through commerce, culture, compassion and congregational life.
This major new poetry collection from bestselling poet and priest Malcolm Guite features more than seventy new and previously unpublished works.
At the heart of this collection is a sequence of twenty seven sonnets written in response to George Herbert's exquisite sonnet 'Prayer', each one describing prayer in an arresting metaphor such as 'the church's banquet', 'reversed thunder', 'the Milky Way', 'the bird of paradise' and 'something understood'. In conversation with each of these, Malcolm's sonnets offer profound insights into the nature of communion with God in all circumstances and conditions.
Recognising that all poetry is a pursuit of prayer, After Prayer also includes forty five more widely ranging new poems, including a sonnet sequence on the seven heavens.
A Future that's Bigger than the Past sets out a vision for renewing the local church that is energising, realistic and practical for small and large congregations alike.
In response to prevailing narratives of decline, it reimagines how the church can live its vocation of receiving the abundance God gives us, and sharing that abundance far and wide. It recognises the surprising, exuberant and plentiful things that the Holy Spirit is doing in the world and calls the church to celebrate creation, enjoy culture and share in their flourishing.
With a rich theological foundation and borne out in the practical experience of a growing number of local church communities, this groundbreaking book will enable churches to discover fresh ways in which they can become a blessing to the communities they serve.