Holy Power Holy Presence

Western theology is frequently criticized for not having a fully developed pneumatology. According to these critics, preoccupation with Christology and an excessive focus on the nature and unity of God have come at the expense of a full theology of the three persons. While admitting that there is some truth to these criticisms, Elizabeth Dreyer maintains that those who level them base their conclusions on a narrow range of texts and thus fail to establish a true neglect of the Holy Spirit. Medieval authors offer a wealth of creative language and insight that speaks to the role of the Holy Spirit in contemporary spirituality and contributes to a renewed pneumatology for the twenty-first century. Book jacket.

The God revealed in the Bible loves us and has a wonderful plan for us. For us to experience God's nearness, we must have a right understanding of who He is. Today's world offers many alternative "gods" to whom we can pray: Allah, Buddha, a Higher Power, and even our "higher self"! There is only one true God and He exists as Three Persons in One, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. We accept by faith what the Bible tells us about God and that He sent His Son to die for us on the cross so we may have an intimate and right relationship with God.The Holy Spirit is co-equal with God the Father and God the Son. He possesses all of the attributes of God.

Barbara speaking to God's children: He hung there: he hung there for you and Me. He hung there, my brothers and sisters, on the foretold Tree. He expressed a Divine unselfish love for the whole world to See. He hung there, my brothers and sisters, for you and Me.

Explains why Augustine, who experienced God's love in the humble Christ and was a witness of Christian unity, can be considered to be a spiritual guide for a Christian today.

Augustine has put an important mark on later Christian thinking. Moreover, he composed a lot of writings: more than eight hundred sermons, some three hundred letters, and a hundred works in which he unfolds his theological vision. This book presents some basic thoughts on the spirituality of this great church father. In different ways the author clarifies in which sense the spirituality of Augustine can be a breath of fresh air for our times. The conversion experience that Augustine went through ultimately became the experience of a growing trust in God who first loved us. Step by step, Augustine unfolded Christ in his many sermons and writings as a humble physician, mediator, and shepherd. Augustine developed a spirituality of togetherness: inner life is intrinsically linked to community life and apostolate. The spirituality of the Church as the Whole Christ is expressed in the loving care of the poor and vulnerable. His lived experience of the value of friendship and hospitality, the precious treasure of faith in Christ, the humble Physician, his concept of the Pilgrim-Church, and his vision of Mary, the dignity of the earth remain invaluable for the twenty-first century.

This book explores a modern path for the ancient hunger to grow closer to God. By engaging powerful stories of God’s deep connections with people across the country you can grow your own faith and deepen the vitality of your congregation. In these pages you will discover the seven different ways God connects with people through a juxtaposition of God’s powerful work in the world today and the biblical text. While many of us have encounters with God, read to discover which faith practices you can focus on to make the greatest impact in your faith life overall.

The Present Testament Volume Eleven is one of a series of my God-dictated published books. My books reveal the presence of Almighty God during this generation as his presence was revealed within the Hly Bible. The Present Testament Volume Eleven reveals my position as Gods sent modern-day messenger and prophetess. The passages within my books are messages from the Lord God today. Because Almighty God is unchanging, some of the contents of this book may be familiar to the Christian readers. Oh, what a blessed period of time that we live in! For Almighty God has shown his holy presence and visibility through me, one of his humbled servants and bride. Let us give him continuous praise, glory, and acknowledgment!

A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God’s embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God’s incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world—its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves—as a locus for divine encounter. Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world’s re-creation—their notion of the world’s re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God’s presence and promise of salvation.