Reflections On Sacred Teachings Volume 2

Madhurya-Kadambini (Cloud Bank of Nectar), by the renowned Gaudiya Vaisnava acarya Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura, is a short work, and it is a commentary on an even shorter work – just two verses that appear in Srila Rupa Gosvami’s Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu.

The Seven Sacred Teachings is a message of traditional values and hope for the future. The Teachings are universal to most First Nation peoples. These Teachings are aboriginal communities from coast to coast. They are a link that ties First Nation, Inuit and Métis communities together.

Sri Isopanisad is an ancient work. It is counted as the first of the 108 Upanisads, and is part of the Yajur Veda-among those literatures which are accepted by followers of the Vedic tradition to have come from God Himself at the time of creation. As such it is, one could say, about as foundational a text as one could hope to find, anywhere, dealing with the most primeval and fundamental concepts of reality as we know it, presented in a context that is both timeless, in that it comes from the person who put time into motion, and simultaneously eternal.

Bhakti Caru Swami writes in the foreword: “Although these principles are not yet widely recognized in our society in their original form, our success lies in the implementation of these sacred instructions. They fully reveal the true essence and framework of the International Society for Krsna Consciousness. As we progress and mature, we must realize that ISKCON carries the responsibility to epitomize the ideals on which Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati created the Gaudiya Matha. In order to share these potent instructions with the community of devotees, I translated the original guidelines and printed them in Spiritual Connections, a magazine published for my disciples and friends.”

In this companion to The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr and Patrick Boland offer forty reflections and practices exploring what it means to live “in Christ.” In his landmark book The Universal Christ, Richard Rohr articulated a transformative view of what it means to recognize Jesus as “Christ”—as a portrait of God’s constant, unfolding work in the world. Now, in partnership with Patrick Boland, a psychotherapist and member of Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation community, he invites readers to engage with the themes of the book through spiritual practice. Each reflection in this book draws on a key passage of The Universal Christ, paired with prayers, journal prompts, and embodied exercises that invite readers into a more personal encounter with the truth that the presence and compassion of the Christ are in every thing. Whether read daily for the season of Lent or explored over the course of a year, Every Thing Is Sacred is a hope-filled journey into the love at the heart of all things.

In My Life of Ministry, Writing, Teaching, and Traveling: The Autobiography of an Old Mines Missionary, I present my life as a child growing up in a French village about sixty miles south of St. Louis in the middle of the twentieth century. After eighteen years of life in Old Mines, the oldest settlement in the state of Missouri, I moved to St. Louis for four years and then to St. Meinrad, Indiana, for four years where education opened my eyes to a world very much larger than my village of origin. Life continued for me after ordination as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in Springfield and Joplin, Missouri. Because my life is the thread stitching together this book, I have made it manageable by dividing it into four categories: ministry, writing, teaching, and travel. These categories contain the stories of others whose life threads of seventy years are woven into my lifetime tapestry. This is my autobiography—one of a missionary from Old Mines to the thirty-nine counties forming the southern third of the state of Missouri—composed during my seventieth year of life.

The first presentation of John Wesley's doctrinal teachings in a systematic form that is also faithful to Wesley's own writings in ebook format. Wesley was a prolific writer and commentator on Scripture, yet it is commonly held that he was not systematic or internally consistent in his theology and doctrinal teachings. On the contrary, Thomas C. Oden intends to demonstrate here that Wesley displayed a remarkable degree of consistency over sixty years of preaching and ministry. The book helps readers to grasp Wesley's essential teachings in an accessible form so that the person desiring to go directly to Wesley's own writings (which fill eighteen volumes) will know exactly where to turn.

Many teachers share an interest in bringing a better appreciation of ritual into their religious studies classes, but are uncertain how to do it. Religious studies faculty know how to teach texts, but they often have difficulty teaching something for which the meaning lies in the doing. How do you teach such "doing"? How much need be done? How does the teacher talk about the religiosity that exists in personalized relationships, not textual descriptions or prescriptions? These practical issues also give rise to theoretical questions. Giving more attention to ritual effectively suggests a reinterpretation of religion itself-an understanding less focused on what people have thought and written, and more focused on how they engage their universe. Many useful analyses of ritual derive from anthropological and sociological premises, which may be foreign to religious studies faculty and even seen by some as theologically problematic. This is the first resource to address the issues specific to teaching this subject. A stellar cast of contributors, all scholars of ritual and teachers experienced in using ritual in a wide variety of courses and settings, explain what has worked for them in the classroom, what has not, and what they have learned from the experience of being more real about religion. Their voices range from personal to formal, their topics from ways to use field trips to the role of architecture. The result is a rich guide for teachers who are new to the subject as well as the experienced willing to think about new angles and fresh approaches.