Church of the Wild

Author: Victoria Loorz
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
ISBN: 1506469655
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
2024 Nautilus Book Awards Silver Winner in "Religion / Spirituality of Western Thought" CategoryWinner of the Living Now Book Award, Church of the Wild reminds us that once upon a time, humans lived in an intimate relationship with nature. Whether disillusioned by the dominant church or unfulfilled by traditional expressions of faith, many of us long for a deeper spirituality. Victoria Loorz certainly did. Coping with an unraveling vocation, identity, and planet, Loorz turned to the wanderings of spiritual leaders and the sanctuary of the natural world, eventually cofounding the Wild Church Network and Seminary of the Wild. With an ecospiritual lens on biblical narratives and a fresh look at a community larger than our own species, Church of the Wild uncovers the wild roots of faith and helps us deepen our commitment to a suffering earth by falling in love with it--and calling it church. Through mystical encounters with wild deer, whispers from a scrubby oak tree, wordless conversation with a cougar, and more, Loorz helps us connect to a love that literally holds the world together--a love that calls us into communion with all creatures.

Church in the Wild

Author: Brett Malcolm Grainger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674919378
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
A religious studies scholar argues that in antebellum America, evangelicals, not Transcendentalists, connected ordinary Americans with their spiritual roots in the natural world. We have long credited Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists with revolutionizing religious life in America and introducing a new appreciation of nature. Breaking with Protestant orthodoxy, these New Englanders claimed that God could be found not in church but in forest, fields, and streams. Their spiritual nonconformity had thrilling implications but never traveled far beyond their circle. In this essential reconsideration of American faith in the years leading up to the Civil War, Brett Malcolm Grainger argues that it was not the Transcendentalists but the evangelical revivalists who transformed the everyday religious life of Americans and spiritualized the natural environment. Evangelical Christianity won believers from the rural South to the industrial North: this was the true popular religion of the antebellum years. Revivalists went to the woods not to free themselves from the constraints of Christianity but to renew their ties to God. Evangelical Christianity provided a sense of enchantment for those alienated by a rapidly industrializing world. In forested camp meetings and riverside baptisms, in private contemplation and public water cures, in electrotherapy and mesmerism, American evangelicals communed with nature, God, and one another. A distinctive spirituality emerged pairing personal piety with a mystical relation to nature. As Church in the Wild reveals, the revivalist attitude toward nature and the material world, which echoed that of Catholicism, spread like wildfire among Christians of all backgrounds during the years leading up to the Civil War.

Creative Ideas for Wild Church

Author: Juno Hollyhock
Publisher: Canterbury Press
ISBN: 184825881X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
This innovative and imaginative resource offers learning and worship activities and whole service outlines to help churches engage with the outside world and increase connectedness with the communities where they are placed, whether rural or urban. Current trends encourage us to reconnect with nature – schools are building outdoor classrooms, 11,000 organizations belong to the Wild Network which encourages children to get outside, while Forest Church, the Eco-congregation and the rewilding spirituality movements reflect this trend in the church. Definitely not just for energetic outdoorsy types, it creatively blends the Christian year with the natural seasons – such as an all-age Advent outdoor adventure, creating an outdoor Easter garden, kite flying at Ascension, building life-size David and Goliath, going on a prayer pilgrimage, autumn leaves and tree ribbons for remembrance, and much more.

Wild at Heart

Author: John Eldredge
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1400200393
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
In all your boyhood dreams of growing up, did you dream of being a "nice guy"? Eldredge believes that every man longs for a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. That is how he bears the image of God; that is what God made him to be.

Cathedral of the Wild

Author: Boyd Varty
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1400069858
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
“This is a gorgeous, lyrical, hilarious, important book. . . . Read this and you may find yourself instinctively beginning to heal old wounds: in yourself, in others, and just maybe in the cathedral of the wild that is our true home.”—Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Own North Star Boyd Varty had an unconventional upbringing. He grew up on Londolozi Game Reserve in South Africa, a place where man and nature strive for balance, where perils exist alongside wonders. Founded more than eighty years ago as a hunting ground, Londolozi was transformed into a nature reserve beginning in 1973 by Varty’s father and uncle, visionaries of the restoration movement. But it wasn’t just a sanctuary for the animals; it was also a place for ravaged land to flourish again and for the human spirit to be restored. When Nelson Mandela was released after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, he came to the reserve to recover. Cathedral of the Wild is Varty’s memoir of his life in this exquisite and vast refuge. At Londolozi, Varty gained the confidence that emerges from living in Africa. “We came out strong and largely unafraid of life,” he writes, “with the full knowledge of its dangers.” It was there that young Boyd and his equally adventurous sister learned to track animals, raised leopard and lion cubs, followed their larger-than-life uncle on his many adventures filming wildlife, and became one with the land. Varty survived a harrowing black mamba encounter, a debilitating bout with malaria, even a vicious crocodile attack, but his biggest challenge was a personal crisis of purpose. An intense spiritual quest takes him across the globe and back again—to reconnect with nature and “rediscover the track.” Cathedral of the Wild is a story of transformation that inspires a great appreciation for the beauty and order of the natural world. With conviction, hope, and humor, Varty makes a passionate claim for the power of the wild to restore the human spirit. Praise for Cathedral of the Wild “Extremely touching . . . a book about growth and hope.”—The New York Times “It made me cry with its hard-won truths about human and animal nature. . . . Both funny and deeply moving, this book belongs on the shelf of everyone who seeks healing in wilderness.”—BookPage

Rewilding the Church

Author: Steve Aisthorpe
Publisher: Saint Andrew Press
ISBN: 0715209833
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 125

Book Description
Rewilding the Church explores afresh the compelling invitation of Jesus to ‘Follow me’ and the call to ‘throw off everything that hinders and entangles’. It poses provocative questions and issues a call to contribute to the great rewilding of the Church – and to be rewilded ourselves. The same human instincts that have disrupted our natural environment have also constrained and domesticated the Church and Rewilding the Church commends a rediscovery of the adventure of faith.

Church Girls Gone Wild

Author: Angela B. Braham
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 1481709941
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 47

Book Description
Harmony is the very sexy former exotic dancer who is now the Head Missionary of Destiny New Life Church. Owner of a very successful real estate firm she is very independent and successful. That is, she appears very successful. With the economy and housing market in a crisis Harmony struggles to hold on to the image of success. That is until she hooks up with the married Head Deacon of their mega church. Read on as we watch the struggle of a "church girl gone wild" in a desperate attempt to make ends meet.

Gaga Feminism

Author: J. Jack Halberstam
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807010995
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new kind of feminism, this “provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics . . . is as fun as it is illuminating” (Ariel Levy, New Yorker) Why are so many women single, so many men resisting marriage, and so many gays and lesbians having babies? Gaga Feminism answers these questions while attempting to make sense of the tectonic cultural shifts that have transformed gender and sexual politics in the last few decades. This colorful landscape is populated by symbols and phenomena as varied as pregnant men, late-life lesbians, SpongeBob SquarePants, and queer families. So how do we understand the dissonance between these real experiences and the heteronormative narratives that dominate popular media? We can embrace the chaos! With equal parts edge and wit, J. Jack Halberstam reveals how these symbolic ruptures open a critical space to embrace new ways of conceptualizing sex, love, and marriage. Using Lady Gaga as a symbol for a new era, Halberstam deftly unpacks what the pop superstar symbolizes, to whom and why. The result is a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem—a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century—that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity. Part handbook, part guidebook, and part sex manual, Gaga Feminism is the first book to take seriously the collapse of heterosexuality and find signposts in the wreckage to a new and different way of doing sex and gender.

"Ring Out, Wild Bells"

Author: Alfred Tennyson Tennyson
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3385326435
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 14

Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow

Author: Francis Weller
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583949763
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. As seen on All There Is with Anderson Cooper Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow. Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.