Now Available
Mission Trips That Matter: Embodied Faith for the Sake of the World
By Don C. Richter
Upper Room Books, February 2008 {ISBN-0835899470}


Explore Christian practices for pondering the body as your group prepares for, engages in, and interprets mission trips and outreach projects. Life in the body is at the heart of Christian faith. What wisdom might the Spirit whisper as mission team members get immunization shots, pack bags, fill water bottles, lace up walking shoes, strap on cameras, and pull out maps for the journey? Focusing on faith practices can shift mission trips from being episodic and event-focused to being woven into the larger fabric of a way of life, weaving human activities into God’s redemptive activity for the sake of the world.






Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People
edited by Dorothy C. Bass
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Paperback-1998 {ISBN-0787938831}


This book explores twelve central Christian practices -- shared activities that address fundamental human needs and that, woven together, form a way of life that is faithful and has integrity. The book's thirteen contributors, from diverse denominational and ethnic backgrounds, explore each practice - such as honoring the body, forgiving one another, and keeping Sabbath - by placing it in its historical and biblical context, reexamining its relevance to our times, and showing how it gives depth and meaning to daily life.



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Way to Live: Christian Practices for Teens
edited by Dorothy C. Bass and Don C. Richter
Nashville: Upper Room Books, Paperback-2002 {ISBN-0835809757}

Like its parent book Practicing Our Faith, this book advocates a set of Christian practices that are crucial to human well-being and that, together, shape a life well lived. Reflecting on and growing stronger in such practices, teens encounter the possibility of a more faithful way of life, one that is both attuned to present-day needs and taught by ancient wisdom. To deepen their insights and ground their images, adult authors partnered with teenaged colleagues throughout the planning and writing of Way to Live.




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Lord, Have Mercy: Praying for Justice with Conviction and Humility
by Claire E. Wolfteich
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Hardcover-2006 {ISBN-0787982695}

This compelling book is a guide for those who want to move prayer beyond private devotion and engage faithfully with the questions, decisions, policies, and movements that shape our lives in society. Filled with stories from around the world, Lord, Have Mercy will help you ponder how you pray about vital -- and often confounding -- social and political questions. Claire Wolfteich pays special attention to how the practice of prayer has been embodied in actual communities in times of historic confrontation with social injustice




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In the Midst of Chaos: Caring for Children as Spiritual Practice
by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Hardcover-2006 {ISBN-0787976768}

Theologian, mother, and writer Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore gives us some answers to this question and shows us how to integrate and strengthen the practice of faith in the everyday -- and often mundane -- experience of raising children. In the Midst of Chaos reveals what it takes to find the spiritual wisdom in the messy, familial ways of living. By rethinking parenting as an invitation to discover God in the middle of our busy and overstuffed lives, it relieves parents of the burden of being the all-knowing authority figures who impart spiritual knowledge to children. Finding spirituality in family activities such as reading bedtime stories, dividing household chores, and playing games can empower parents to notice what they are already doing as potentially valuable and to practice it more consciously as part of their own faith journey.




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A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice
by Don Saliers and Emily Saliers
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Hardcover-2005 {ISBN-0787967173}

Church musician and liturgical theologian Don Saliers joins with daughter Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls fame to reflect on the what, the how, and the why of music as a vital spiritual dimension of our lives. Don and Emily reflect on how music shapes our souls in relation to justice, grief, delight, healing, and hope. This book bridges two generations, two approaches to the life of faith, and two genres of music—the music of Saturday night and Sunday morning.




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Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian
by Thomas G. Long
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Hardcover-2004 {ISBN-0787968323}

In this groundbreaking book, Tom Long -- a theologian and respected authority on preaching -- explores how Christians talk when they are not in church. Testimony breaks the stained-glass image of religious language to show how ordinary talking in our everyday lives -- talking across the backyard fence, talk with our kids, talk about politics and the events of the day -- can be sacred speech. In a world of spin, slick marketing, mindless chatter, and easy deceptions, Testimony shows that the hunger for truthful, meaningful, and compassionate speech is ultimately grounded in truth about God.



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Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice
by Stephanie Paulsell
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Hardcover-2002 {ISBN-078794856X},
Paperback-2003 {ISBN-0787967572}


This winsome book offers readers a much-needed guide for cherishing the human body and countering the corrosive cultural messages that prevent us from knowing that we are children of God in our bodies as in our spirits. Written for anyone who has struggled with weight gain and loss, body image, illness, birth and death, Honoring the Body does more than help us cope with these issues - it helps us enrich our practice of faith. Throughout this book, the author leads us on a remarkable journey born of gestures large and small, in ordinary life and in extraordinary circumstances, in every moment of every day. From Paulsell, we can learn how to regain a sense of awe and wonder about our bodies and to cultivate the healing practices that lead to joyful, mindful, and embodied living.



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Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time
by Dorothy C. Bass
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publisher, Paperback-2001 {ISBN-0787956473}

For busy people who see time as an adversary to be managed, manipulated, and controlled, this book provides a fresh vision of time as a gift from God, waiting to be unwrapped and savored with true presence and delight.


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Practicing Theology: Beliefs and Practices in Christian Life
edited by Miroslav Volf and Dorothy C. Bass
Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
Paperback-2002 {ISBN-0802849318}


In a time when academic theology often neglects the lived practices of the Christian community, this volume seeks to bring balance to the situation by showing the dynamic link between the task of theology and the practices of the Christian life. The work of thirteen first-rate theologians from several cultural and Christian perspectives, these informed and informative essays explore the relationship between Christian theology and practice in the daily lives of believers, in the ministry of Christian communities, and as a needed focus within Christian education.


Educating People Of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities
edited by John Van Engen, Foreword by Dorothy C. Bass.
Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company
Paperback-2004 {ISBN-0802849369}

Creates a vivid portrait of the lived practices that shaped the faith of Jews and Christians in synagogues and churches from antiquity up to the seventeenth century. Rather than focusing solely on either intellectual or social life, the authors all use the concept of “practices” as they attend to the embodied, contextual character of religious form.

Contributors: John C. Cavadini, Anne L. Clark, Lawrence S. Cunningham, Joseph Goering, Robert Goldenberg, Stanley Samuel Harakas, Robert M. Kingdon, Blake Leyerle, Michael A. Signer, Philip M. Soergel, David C. Steinmetz, John Van Engen, Lee Palmer Wandel, Robert Louis Wilken, Elliot R. Wolfsonation.


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