Holy Play

In Holy Play popular author and teacher Kirk Byron Jones shows how to move forward together with God to imagine and live your true life purpose with creativity and joy. This extraordinary book gives you permission to stop waiting for God to tell you what to do and start doing what God has been inspiring you to do all along. Through provocative stories and helpful exercises, Jones shows you how to foster the openness and energy that allow you to engage with and construct a fulfilling life that uses all your God-given talent. Jones shows how to humbly and gladly accept the sacred incredible in you--in particular the creator in you.

Heaven is my destination, but it is not my destiny. Many will reach their destination, but few will achieve their destiny. Prophetic parable matures into prophetic reality as His presence draws us into the realm of 'all God.' Here, what we believe becomes what we experience and what we know becomes flesh in mere mortal man. When we leave Egypt, we leave the bondage we hate, but when we leave the wilderness, we must leave the sin we crave. But He will not condemn what He has redeemed. His Blood covers us until His Power delivers us. This book is not for the casual reader. It is for those who hunger, not for education, but for reality; not for religion, but for Him. The world awaits the love of a people who know they are forgiven.

This title surveys two centuries of Russian history through a succession of ambitious architectural projects designed for a single construction site in central Moscow. It explores each project for this ideologically-charged site and documents the grand projects that were built as well as those that were only dreamed.

Preaching is a central task in the lives of clergy, and yet it sometimes seems as though the pressure to produce, combined with other duties of parish life, becomes a burden and contributes to the busyness that squeezes out time for spiritual practices. Steeped in the Holy seeks to reclaim the spiritual foundations for preaching, inviting clergy and students to see preparation and preaching not as an intrusion, but as an opportunity to engage with God and to develop practices that deepen a relationship with God and feed preaching.

"Steven Fine's This Holy Place is a comprehensive treatment of the synagogue as a place of sanctity in Late Antiquity. This book is essential for an understanding of how the synagogue became the central Jewish communal institution and how it served as a substitute for the destroyed Jerusalem Temple during the long period of Jewish exile from the Land of Israel. Fine's mastery of both archaeological evidence and a wide variety of literary sources makes this a major contribution to the field." --Lawrence H. Schiffman, New York University "Fine has mastered an unusually wide range of disciplines--rabbinical sources, archaeology, art and epigraphy. . . . His book is thoroughly researched, well written, and engagingly presented. It should be required reading for anyone interested in how this most central institution of Jewish life was perceived and presented." --Lee I. Levine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem "I read [This Holy Place] with the greatest profit and enjoyment. It is an important contribution to the entire nature of late antique civilization and not only to Jewish studies." --Peter Brown, Princeton University

Religion ist untrennbar mit der Frage nach heiligen Stätten und religiösen Räumen verbunden. Dabei gewinnen diese Orte ihre Bedeutung weniger aus bestimmten physischen Gegebenheiten als durch sprachliche und gesellschaftliche Konstruktion. Dieser Bedeutung versuchen die Beiträge dieses Bandes an ausgewählten Texten des Alten und des Neuen Testaments und zu Philo von Alexandrien nachzugehen. Dabei fördern sie in der Beschreibung der virtuellen Topographie zugleich theologische und religiöse Kernaussagen der Texte zutage. Geographisch gesprochen bewegt sich der Band zwischen Mesopotamien und der Arabischen Halbinsel über Jerusalem bis zu den Griechischen Inseln – wobei auch Orte wie der Berg, der Tempel – aber auch das Bett des Beters enthalten sind.