As winter recedes and the soil starts to stir with the promise of new life, gardeners everywhere feel the tug of something ancient and holy—a call to return to the earth, to begin again. In this powerful devotional***,*** readers are invited to engage with gardening as a spiritual practice just as the Easter season begins.Eastertide—the 40 days following Easter Sunday—is a season of resurrection, hope, and unfolding life. It also just so happens to...

The user-friendly, interfaith guide to making and using labyrinths—for meditation, prayer and celebration—updated, revised and expanded!A labyrinth is a circuitous path that people have used as a form of prayer and meditation for thousands of years—a path that is being rediscovered as a spiritual tool in our own day. There are now thousands of labyrinths in North America, made of stone, cement, sunflowers, grass or canvas; indoors and outdoors; in Christian, Pagan ...

The complete guide to spirit-filled speech and speaking with spiritThis book is a spiritual guide to using the holy gift of speech. It is a ... how-to ... grounded in a humble way of being, expressing an attitude of gratitude toward the tongue, in the knowledge that speech is a gift from God and we have a choice to use our mouths virtuously, in the most humble and searching sense of that word.—from the IntroductionSo much of our time is spent in conv...

Everyone is paying attention to Pope Francis, and that includes the most unlikely of admirers: a female Baptist pastor. Veteran minister and social justice advocate Donna Schaper has become a fan of the pope, covering him for Religion Dispatches, traveling to see him speak, and taking up many of his issues. Schaper says that Francis is a pope for all of us, and she has written him a series of letters—love letters, of a sort. She agrees with him on the environment, climate change, love of a...

The user-friendly, interfaith guide to making and using labyrinths—for meditation, prayer and celebration—updated, revised and expanded!A labyrinth is a circuitous path that people have used as a form of prayer and meditation for thousands of years—a path that is being rediscovered as a spiritual tool in our own day. There are now thousands of labyrinths in North America, made of stone, cement, sunflowers, grass or canvas; indoors and outdoors; in Christian, Pagan ...

Grace at Table advocates prayer at table as a way to solve everything. By everything we mean the dismay, dis-ease, and fear of the future that permeates way too many human souls. Addiction is one response to the moment, fear another, and despair a third. Widespread immobility and lack of focus come to mind as indications of over-stimulation by the negatives and under-stimulation by the positives. Prayer at table stimulates the positives. It is a pause that refreshes the spirit, reorienting...

At the beginning of the Common Era, Jewish renewal movements, including Jesus' ministry, had similar views: embracing moderate ascetic behavior. Over the next three centuries, however, they moved in opposite directions. Christianity came to firmly privilege anti-pleasure views and female lifelong virginity while the Babylonian Talmud strongly embraced positive views on bodily pleasures and female sexuality. The books most distinguishing feature is that it is the first time that one book co...

Money, like sex or politics, is one of our last taboos. We earn it, spend it, worry about it-but rarely talk about it honestly. Meditations on Money invites readers to break the silence and explore the deeper meanings behind what we earn and how we live.Written with the warmth and wisdom of a trusted friend, this book offers gentle, thought-provoking reflections on our relationship with money-how it shapes our choices, our relationships, and our sense of self. It's not a ho...

As membership in traditional churches or religious institutions plummets, the meaning of marriage is changing rapidly. Interfaith marriages are on the rise, creating new challenges from wedding planning to childraising. People of faith are marrying nonreligious people. Many question the institution of marriage itself. At a time when those identifying as spiritual but not religious is on the rise, Pastor Donna Schaper provides a roadmap to help readers to understand this continuing transiti...

“When I saw the title, I wanted to shout from the rooftop: It’s time! Donna Schaper makes a compelling case for clearing space, both architecturally and in our ministry journeys. This little book is a gift to a tired and caged-in church!”—Paul Nixon, author of Multi and I Refuse to Lead a Dying ChurchPastor Donna Schaper takes the long view of religious institutions in an age of rapid change. The question of who the Church is today—and how it empl...

While there are no easy answers to loss and death, Mature Grief offers a compass to anyone navigating the unknown and uncharted waters of grief.Each life comes from God. It begins with God and has no end. Our parents came from God, out from the circle of eternity, bestowed with goodness, and in dying they return to God. Their circle is complete. And in between, their spirits splashed-down here briefly in a quiet eddy at the edge of the flowing river of time. Our lives began as a rip...

The third in Cowley's Cloister Book series, Sabbath Keeping is a collection of ten meditations, each exploring a different aspect of keeping the sabbath and ending with a prayer. Since it is a difficult art in a society that does not value rest, Schaper encourages small acts of sabbath keeping that initially focus on physical and mental renewal but soon broaden to questions of justice and power.She begins with a chapter called “What is Sabbath?” and goes to the Bible for definition...