Three Blessings Of Worship

Named a 2010 Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine! Jewish prayers from tale and synagogue; Subapostolic Era: the Didache, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Pastor Hermas; Second Century: Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Melito of Sardis; Third Century: Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, Hippolytus of Rome, the Didascalia of the Apostles, Origen, the Apostolic Church Order; and others. Lawrence J. Johnson is the former executive secretary of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions and the former editor/director of The Pastoral Press. He has written several books on the liturgy and its music, including The Mystery of Faith: A Study of the Structural Elements of the Order of the Mass.

This versatile collection provides a wealth of supplementary material to help you customize Common Worship services for any locality, age group, special occasion or festival. It offers: • Advice and guidance on planning, preparing and structuring services. • Over 250 pages of prayers and liturgy, conveniently organised by function, e.g. Gathering and Greeting, Praise and Thanksgiving, Action and Movement. • 22 easy-to-adapt sample services for eucharistic, non-eucharistic, all-age worship and seasonal services.

Volume 1: Jewish prayers from table and synagogue; Subapostolic Era: the Didache, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Pastor Hermas; Second Century: Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Melito of Sardis; Third Century: Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage, Hippolytus of Rome, the Didascalia of the Apostles, Origen, the Apostolic Church Order; and others.

Family Worship offers solid solutions to the increasingly dysfunctional family in today's secularized society, and it provides constructive suggestions to those who want to reestablish their homes on biblical foundations. The Hebraic foundations fo the Christain faith establish the home as a small temple. This insight dramatically changes the dynamics of the home for those who believe in the God of the Bible and in his will for their lives. The Christian family was always designed by God to be the center for social, educational, and spiritual growth and maturity--a place of fellowswhip, study, and prayer. Now, you, too can experience these same powerful dyunamics that made the home the center of sanctity and security that it was for the biblical peoples. Family Worship presents these vivid images of a rich biblically Hebraic tradition for Christians today: The Domestic Temple, A Temple of Blessing, The Family Altar, A House of Prayer, A House of Study, Temples in Time, The Domestic Priesthood, and The Domestic Church. As you read this book, you'll be amazed at how your own family life will be revolutionized and enriched simply by restoring biblically Hebraic dynamics to your home.

Designed to empower preachers as they lead congregations to connect their lives to Scripture, Connections features a broad set of interpretive tools that provide commentary and worship aids on the Revised Common Lectionary. This nine-volume series offers creative commentary on each reading in the three-year lectionary cycle by viewing that reading through the lens of its connections to the rest of Scripture and then seeing the reading through the lenses of culture, film, fiction, ethics, and other aspects of contemporary life. Commentaries on the Psalms make connections to the other readings and to the congregations experience of worship. Connections is published in partnership with Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

A major influence on the development of rabbinic liturgical custom after the destruction of the Temple was the need to establish that this innovative worship of the heart was as acceptable to God as biblically prescribed sacrificial worship. Later Jewish communities and their leaders continually refined the details of the system they inherited to reflect their changing understandings of acceptable, meaningful, and constructive worship. These understandings have in turn been shaped not only by liturgical halakhah and active custom, but by new intellectual and social currents and by the vicissitudes of Jewish history. Ruth Langer uses the tools of historical scholarship and anthropological study of ritual to analyze some of the dynamics that have shaped Jewish liturgical law and determined the broader outlines of the prayer life of the Jews. After a consideration of the talmudic issues upon which the acceptability of prayer depends, she offers a basic list of legal principles derived by later generations from talmudic literature to ensure that prayer takes the form of blessings composed according to a very specific pattern and invoking God in a very precise way. She then investigates the development and implementation of the corollary that invoking this blessing formula in ways that deviate from the specific directions of the Talmud constitutes precisely inefficacious and even dangerous prayer. Questions about appropriate prayer language go beyond the blessing formula to the contents of the prayers themselves. Langer analyzes the battles fought over the legitimacy of inserting liturgical poetry into the fixed texts of the statutory liturgy and over the requirement of community for the proper recitation of certain prayers, specifically those that include the angelic liturgy. Although in each of these controversies the rabbis compromised by reinterpreting either legal theory or custom-or both-to bring them into harmony, their solutions have never been monolithic or simple. In its lucid illumination of those complexities, To Worship God Properly adds to our understanding of the history of Jewish liturgy and the general history of rabbinic leadership and law.

In the traditional Jewish liturgy, a man praises God daily for not having been made a gentile, a woman, or a slave. Manuscript editions of the Babylonian Talmud teach that recitation of this prayer is obligatory for all Jewish men. Despite the fact that these blessings have been officially part of the daily morning liturgy for more than a thousand years, the propriety of whether and how to recite them is an ongoing subject of debate. Yoel Kahn offers the first longitudinal study of the evolving language, usage, and interpretation of a Jewish liturgical text over its entire 2000 year life-span.