Act Of Love

Faith-Based ACT for Christian Clients balances empirical evidence with theology to give mental health professionals a deep understanding of both the "why" and "how" of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) for Christians. The new edition includes updated discussions in each chapter, more than 20 new and updated exercises, and new chapters on couples and trauma. The book includes a detailed exploration of the overlap between ACT and the Christian faith, case studies, and techniques that are explicitly designed to be accessible to both non-Christian and Christian (including evangelical Christian) counselors and therapists. Chapters also present the established research on Buddhist-influenced mindfulness meditation and newer research on Christian-derived meditative and contemplative practices and lay a firm theological foundation through the use of engaging biblical stories and metaphors..

Reprint of the original, first published in 1859. The publishing house Anatiposi publishes historical books as reprints. Due to their age, these books may have missing pages or inferior quality. Our aim is to preserve these books and make them available to the public so that they do not get lost..

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The NIV Application Commentary helps you communicate and apply biblical text effectively in today’' context. To bring the ancient messages of the Bible into today's world, each passage is treated in three sections: Original Meaning. Concise exegesis to help readers understand the original meaning of the biblical text in its historical, literary, and cultural context. Bridging Contexts. A bridge between the world of the Bible and the world of today, built by discerning what is timeless in the timely pages of the Bible. Contemporary Significance. This section identifies comparable situations to those faced in the Bible and explores relevant application of the biblical messages. The author alerts the readers of problems they may encounter when seeking to apply the passage and helps them think through the issues involved. This unique, award-winning commentary is the ideal resource for today's preachers, teachers, and serious students of the Bible, giving them the tools, ideas, and insights they need to communicate God's Word with the same powerful impact it had when it was first written..

'Sixty years ago I found myself distracted.' So begins the introduction to As Kingfishers Catch Fire. What follows is the record of the collaboration of pastor and congregation in acts of worship and a life together. What Eugene Peterson, for thirty years pastor of a Maryland church, discovered is that the pastor's life is much more than just the preaching. It is also made up of attending to the details in all the circumstances and relationships specific to a people and a place - prayers at a hospital bed, conversations with the elderly, small talk on a street corner. This collection of spiritual writings presents Peterson's distinctive approach designed to communicate to his congregation, and the reader, 'the full counsel of God.' Seven sections containing seven teachings, each expertly crafted to stir the biblical imagination. In these teachings, Peterson walks the reader through Scripture to bring fresh insight to familiar names such as Moses, David, Isaiah, Solomon, Peter, Paul, and John of Patmos..

Veneration of the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ is a devotion as old as our Holy Faith. In "Glories of the Precious Blood," Fr. Max Walz powerfully revisits the seven times that Christ shed His Precious Blood, poignantly reminding us just how much Jesus and His Father love us. These pages readily inspire a devotion to the Precious Blood, and Fr. Walz lays out a number of ways readers can nurture this devotion: through praying the Rosary and chaplets dedicated to the Precious Blood, meditating on the Passion of Our Crucified Savior, and prayerfully dedicating each day of the week to one of the seven different times Christ shed His Blood. "Those who are oppressed by the memory of their sins, diffident about the efficacy of their prayers or doubtful about their salvation, should experience an awakening of confidence through devotion to the Precious Blood." - Fr Max Walz.

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This volume approaches questions concerning the status and meaning of suffering in Christian life and Christian theology through the lens of a variety of theological disciplines – biblical, historical, practical, political and systematic theology. Scholars from this range of fields concentrate on a number of questions: Is love intrinsically linked with suffering? Are suffering and loss on some level fundamentally good? How is – and how should – suffering and diminishment be viewed in the Christian tradition? Featuring leading voices that include Linn Tonstad, Bernard McGinn, Anna Rowlands, John Swinton and Paul Murray, this volume brings together essays touching on concrete issues such as cancer, mental health, and the experience of refugees, and discusses broad themes including vulnerability, kenosis and tragedy. In correlating these themes with the examination of texts ranging from Paul's letters to works of the Cappadocians, Thomas Aquinas, John of the Cross and Mother Teresa, Suffering and the Christian Life offers fresh and accessible academic approaches to a question of vital personal, existential significance..

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it..

In 1978, Tim James sold his butcher shop in Ogburn Station, NC and moved with his wife, Debbie, to Cherokee, North Carolina. A small group on the reservation had invited him to pastor their church. Over 43 years later, Tim continues to pastor at Sequoyah Sovereign Grace Baptist Church. For all of those years, Tim has preached expositorily through books of the Bible, having preserved his notes in large three-ring binders. Although visitors to his home have seen them, none had read them. In 2018, a pastor friend asked Tim if he could use his notes for reference in his expositions through a book of the Bible at his church. Astounded at the narrative style in which he had written them along with their simplicity, he could not keep them secret. As a result, Tim has graciously given permission for his entire library of notes to be scanned and published. You need not expect his expositions to be a lesson in history from the Old Testament, nor a list of goals for posting to your refrigerator from the New Testament. No matter the book or text reference on which you read Tim’s expositions, Old Testament or New Testament, you will rejoice as you read of the glorious faithfulness and work of the Lord Jesus Christ for God’s elect. In simple but profound everyday language you will be comforted in reading of Christ’s fulfillment of God’s law on behalf of the elect. Whether you read his expositions of the Old Testament or New Testament, you will see the revelation of Christ, the justification of his elect through his imputed righteousness and the glorious liberty and freedom he has obtained for them. In speaking of the true Christian experience of grace from his own experience of gospel freedom in Christ, Tim’s writings may well cause you to pump your fist and declare, “That is me!” God’s revelation of his electing grace in Christ has enabled Tim to write a commentary that captures the spirit and meaning of the Old Testament and New Testament alike—Christ is all!.

While the question "Is faith reasonable?" has continually occupied philosophers and theologians, little attention has been paid to what faith itself is. The Act of Faith remedies this neglect by looking at what it means for a person of Christian faith to believe. Eric Springsted contrasts modern views of faith with the Christian tradition running from Augustine through Aquinas and Calvin. In reviewing such thinkers as Locke and Hume, Springsted discovers that behind modern discussions of the reasonableness of faith lie key assumptions about the human self, including the views that the good is a matter of choice and that we can exercise objective, uninvolved reason. According to Springsted, however, the church has not viewed faith in this way. His survey of the Augustinian tradition shows that the self our most esteemed Christian thinkers had in mind when talking about faith was a "moral self"--one defined by character and self-involvement. Christian faith is at root a participation in the good, and reasoning within faith is reasoning within the life of God. Drawing on contemporary philosophers and theologians like John Henry Newman and Simone Weil, Springsted builds a fresh understanding of faith for today. He shows how the "inner act" of faith is ultimately a radical willingness to be open to God, and he argues that the faithful self is one that develops within a community that shapes its members through the morally formative activities of interaction, teaching, and sacramental practice..

"The Summa Theologica is the best-known work of Italian philosopher, scholar, and Dominican friar SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS (1225 1274), widely considered the Catholic Church s greatest theologian. Famously consulted (immediately after the Bible) on religious questions at the Council of Trent, Aquinas s masterpiece has been considered a summary of official Church philosophy ever since. Aquinas considers approximately 10,000 questions on Church doctrine covering the roles and nature of God, man, and Jesus, then lays out objections to Church teachings and systematically confronts each, using Biblical verses, theologians, and philosophers to bolster his arguments. In Volume III, Aquinas addresses: faith and heresy charity peace and war mercy, anger, and justice prayer truth and much more. This massive work of scholarship, spanning five volumes, addresses just about every possible query or argument that any believer or atheist could have, and remains essential, more than seven hundred years after it was written, for clergy, religious historians, and serious students of Catholic thought.".

Bread from Heaven offers a contemporary theological synthesis on the Eucharist that brings together classical and critical biblical exegesis, debates on the early history of the Christian liturgy, patristic doctrine, the teachings offered by the Councils of Florence, Trent and Vatican II, and the Church’s lex orandi, all within a framework provided by the Eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas. The volume begins with Christ’s Bread of Life discourse in John 6, in light of the Old Testament theme of the manna, and the Synoptic accounts of the Last Supper. These biblical texts offer solid foundation for a theology of Eucharistic sacrifice, presence and Communion. It then continues with a historical and systematic study of the institution of the Eucharist by Christ, with special attention given to the emergence of the first Eucharistic prayers. Then follows a survey of key Christological and ecclesiological themes which undergird Eucharistic theology. The chapters on Eucharistic sacrifice and presence form the heart of the work. Here, the focus moves to key conciliar, patristic and Thomistic insights on these themes. Bread from Heaven clarifies misunderstandings of Eucharistic sacrifice and renders transubstantiation accessible to beginners. Blankenhorn concludes with a study of the consecration, the minister of the Eucharist and the fruits of communion. The chapter on the debate over the words of institution and the epiclesis gives a fresh perspective that integrates both eastern and western tradition. The study of the Eucharistic celebrant strikes a balance between a spirituality of the priest as acting in persona Christi and of the priest as praying in persona ecclesiae. The concluding chapter centers on the Eucharist’s unitive, mystical fruits in the Church. This textbook is ideal for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course on Eucharistic theology. It also seeks to advance the debate on several controversial historical and speculative issues in sacramental theology..

This book provides an important study of the theology of Thomas F. Torrance, who is generally considered to have been one of the most significant theologians writing in English during the twentieth century, with a view toward showing how his theological method and all his major doctrinal views were shaped by his understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. Torrance pursued a theology that was realist because he attempted to think in accordance with the unique nature of the object that is known. In holding to such a methodology, he drew an analogy between theology and natural science. This book demonstrates how, for Torrance, God relates with humanity within time and space so that creation finds its meaning in relation to God and not in itself; this enabled him to avoid many theological pitfalls such as agnosticism, subjectivism and dualism while explaining the positive implications of various Christian doctrines in a penetrating and compelling manner. This book offers an important resource for students of theology and for scholars who are interested in seeing how serious dogmatic theology shapes and should shape our understanding of the Christian life..

The Bible is an enduring source of inspiration for the human heart and mind, and readers of Thinking about the Torah will be rewarded with an enhanced understanding of this great work's deeper meanings. Drawing on Western philosophy and particularly Jewish philosophy, Kenneth Seeskin delves into ten core biblical verses and the powerful ideas that emerge from them. He speaks to readers on every page and invites conversation about topics central to human existence: how finite beings can relate to the infinite, what love is, the role of ethics in religion, and the meaning of holiness. Seeskin raises questions we all ask and responds to them with curiosity and compassion, weaving into his own perceptive commentary insights from great Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas, as well as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Luther, Kant, and Kierkegaard. The Bible is concerned with how we think as well as how we follow the commandments, rituals, and customs. Seeskin inspires us to read the Torah with an open mind and think about the lessons it teaches us..

This carefully crafted ebook: "Summa Theologica (All Complete & Unabridged 3 Parts + Supplement & Appendix + interactive links and annotations)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. This ebook is the best-known work of Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274). Although unfinished, the Summa is "one of the classics of the history of philosophy and one of the most influential works of Western literature." It is intended as an instructional guide for moderate theologians, and a compendium of all of the main theological teachings of the Catholic Church. It presents the reasoning for almost all points of Christian theology in the West. The Summa Theologica is divided into three parts, and each of these three parts contains numerous subdivisions. Part 1 deals primarily with God and comprises discussions of 119 questions concerning the existence and nature of God, the Creation, angels, the work of the six days of Creation, the essence and nature of man, and divine government. Part 2 deals with man and includes discussions of 303 questions concerning the purpose of man, habits, types of law, vices and virtues, prudence and justice, fortitude and temperance, graces, and the religious versus the secular life. Part 3 deals with Christ and comprises discussions of 90 questions concerning the Incarnation, the Sacraments, and the Resurrection. Some editions of the Summa Theologica include a Supplement comprising discussions of an additional 99 questions concerning a wide variety of loosely related issues such as excommunication, indulgences, confession, marriage, purgatory, and the relations of the saints toward the damned. Scholars believe that Rainaldo da Piperno, a friend of Aquinas, probably gathered the material in this supplement from a work that Aquinas had completed before he began working on the Summa Theologica. It seeks to describe the relationship between God and man and to explain how man’s reconciliation with the Divine is made possible at all through Christ. To this end, Aquinas cites proofs for the existence of God and outlines the activities and nature of God. Approximately one-half of the Summa Theologica then examines the nature and purpose of man. Finally, Aquinas devotes his attention to the nature of Christ and the role of the Sacraments in effecting a bridge between God and man. Within these broad topical boundaries, though, Aquinas examines the nature of God and man in exquisite detail. His examination includes questions of how angels act on bodies, the union of body and soul, the cause and remedies of anger, cursing, and the comparison of one sin with another. Aquinas is attempting to offer a truly universal and rational view of all existence. Thomas Aquinas, O.P. (1225 – 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, within which he is also known as the "Doctor Angelicus", "Doctor Communis", and "Doctor Universalis". He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived in development or refutation of his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory..

Although it’s probably the most important job many people will have, most of us enter parenthood seriously unprepared. Regardless of how much we believe we know, we raise our children pretty much by what feels like instinct, doing what our parents did or what we wish they had done. When a child veers off course, our parenting approach has to change. In her book From Monsters to Miracles: Parent-Driven Recovery Tools that Work author Anette Edens, PhD, shares her experience as a parent and psychologist helping families with children who have addictions. From Monsters to Miracles: Parent-Driven Recovery Tools that Work is a must-read for parents of substance-abusing teens. You’ll learn how to maneuver through the chaos to create a harmonious family life. Even if your teen is not ready or willing to change, there is help and hope..