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Great Christian Thinkers - 14 St, Gregory of Nyssa
Great Christian Thinkers - 14 St, Gregory of Nyssa
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
St. Gregory of Nyssa Theologian of Life in the Spirit In the last chapters, I spoke of two great fourth-century Doctors of the Church, Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, a bishop in Cappadocia, in present-day Turkey. Today, we are adding a third, St. Gregory of Nyssa, Basil’s brothe…
Barefoot Prayers - The Voice of Prayer
Barefoot Prayers - The Voice of Prayer
by SPCK - Stephen Cherry
An introduction in three parts The voice of prayer Prayer is an extremely common human activity. As John Ellerton put it in a famous hymn, ‘the voice of prayer is never silent / nor dies the strain of praise away’.1 It takes myriad forms and transpires in countless contexts. Yet …
Twelve Months of Sundays Year A - Proper 21 Year A
Twelve Months of Sundays Year A - Proper 21 Year A
by SPCK - N T Wright
Twelve Months of Sundays – Year A Ordinary Time Proper 21 Exodus 17.1–7 Philippians 2.1–13 Matthew 21.23–32 It sounded like a trick, but for those with ears to hear it answered the authorities’ challenge head on. Jesus’ Temple action was an affront to the power of the chief pries…
Gazing on the Gospels Year B - The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B
Gazing on the Gospels Year B - The Fourth Sunday of Easter Year B
by SPCK - Judith Dimond
The Fourth Sunday of Easter John 10.11-18 Gaze on the desolate mountains, the stony ground where sheep must scavenge for food, and the scant grass that only blazed in brief spring. Other dangers abounded, snakes lurked and wolves prowled and threatened the flocks and who was ther…
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - The Fifth Sunday of Easter Year B
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - The Fifth Sunday of Easter Year B
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Fifth Sunday of Easter Acts 8.26-40 1 John 4.7-21 John 15.1-8 If you like evangelism, you’ll love Philip’s story. A spirit-led meeting with a court official, who happens to be reading Isaiah 53 and asking the right questions. There is time to converse at leisure; there is wat…
New Testament Prayer for Everyone - Praying With Mind As Well As Spirit
New Testament Prayer for Everyone - Praying With Mind As Well As Spirit
by SPCK - N T Wright
PART 1 NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING ON PRAYER THE TEACHING OF PAUL PRAYING WITH MIND AS WELL AS SPIRIT 1 Corinthians 14: 13-19 When you look at another person, what do you see? I don’t mean what shape, what colour, what size of person are you looking at; I mean, how do you think about …
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - Proper 14 Year B
Twelve Months of Sundays Year B - Proper 14 Year B
by SPCK - N T Wright
Proper 14 2 Samuel 18.5-9, 31-33 Ephesians 4.25-5.2 John 6.35, 41-51 Come, believe, and eat. Simple yet profound, carrying us with characteristic Johannine effortlessness from bread by the lake to the bread of life. The bridge between them is Jesus himself, who will give his fles…
God’s messenger‚ in times long past
God’s messenger‚ in times long past
by Norman J Goreham (1931-2021)
The final stanza of this hymn attempts to recapture something of the atmosphere of Candlemas as described by St. Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, c 560- 638: “Our bright shining candles are a sign of the divine splendour of the One who comes to expel the dark shadows of ev…
Mere Apologetics - 5 The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith
Mere Apologetics - 5 The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith
by SPCK - Alister McGrath
The Reasonableness of the Christian Faith Apologetics is about persuading people that Christianity makes sense. C. S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, describes the capacity the Christian faith has to make sense of things with characterist…
Mere Apologetics - 6c Clue 5: Desire— Homing Instinct for God
Mere Apologetics - 6c Clue 5: Desire— Homing Instinct for God
by SPCK - Alister McGrath
Clue 5: Desire— Homing Instinct for God Many arguments for the existence of God involve an appeal primarily to reason. Others involve an appeal to experience, finding their plausibility within the human heart as much as in human reason…
Great Christian Thinkers - 26 St. Leo The Great
Great Christian Thinkers - 26 St. Leo The Great
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
St. Leo The Great Continuing our journey through the Fathers of the Church, true stars that shine in the distance, we next encounter a pope who, in 1754, Benedict XIV proclaimed a Doctor of the Church: St. Leo the Great. As the nickname soon attributed to him by tradition suggest…
Great Christian Thinkers - 39 John Damascene
Great Christian Thinkers - 39 John Damascene
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
John Damascene John Damascene was a personage of prime importance in the history of Byzantine theology and a great doctor in the history of the universal Church. Above all, he was an eyewitness of the passage from the Greek and Syrian Christian cultures shared by the Eastern part…
Great Christian Thinkers - 28 St. Benedict of Nursia
Great Christian Thinkers - 28 St. Benedict of Nursia
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
St. Benedict of Nursia Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, is also the patron of my pontificate. I begin with words that St. Gregory the Great wrote about St. Benedict: “The man of God who shone on this earth among so many miracles was just as brilliant in the eloquent …
Great Christian Thinkers - 43 Sts. Cyril and Methodius
Great Christian Thinkers - 43 Sts. Cyril and Methodius
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
Sts. Cyril and Methodius Saints Cyril and Methodius were brothers by blood and in the faith, the so-called Apostles to the Slavs. Cyril was born in Thessalonica to Leo, an imperial magistrate, in 826 or 827. He was the youngest of seven. As a child, he learned the Slavonic langua…
Great Christian Thinkers - 62 St. Gertrude the Great
Great Christian Thinkers - 62 St. Gertrude the Great
by SPCK - Pope Benedict XVI
St. Gertrude the Great St. Gertrude the Great brings us once again to the monastery of Helfta, where several of the Latin-German masterpieces of religious literature were written by women. Gertrude belonged to this world. She is one of the most famous mystics, the only German wom…
Meanderings