Product Description: Paul Bradshaw, one of the world's foremost scholars on the history of Christian liturgy, has shared this expertise in several works that have become standard texts for students of liturgy. In Rites of Ordination, Bradshaw turns his attention to the ways that Christians through the ages have understood what it means to ordain someone as a minister and how that has been expressed in liturgical practice...read more

Product Description: A straight-forward, readable introduction to worship in the first four centuries of the church's existence. How did early Christians see and understand their own worship? How did this interact with early Christian beliefs? The book has been brought up to date and revised, with some chapters rewritten and an updated bibliography...read more

Product Description: Building on the approach set out in his Search for the Origins of Christian Worship, Paul Bradshaw attempts to drill down at several key points beneath the surface impression of early Christian worship that has been accepted in most studies of the primary sources...read more

Product Description: More than a series of rites of passage through the landmarks of growing up and growing old, Jewish and Christian life-cycle rituals give the members of each religious tradition theological and ritualized definitions of what a life should be...read more

Product Description: The conventional view of scholars has tended to be that the Last Supper, as recorded in the New Testament, was both the source and the pattern for the early Christian Eucharist. 'Eucharistic Origins' argues that, while the eucharistic sayings of Jesus did play an important part in shaping the beliefs of many early Christian communities: - the actual forms of their litugical celebrations were quite varied; - the association of the Eucharist with an evening meal continued, at least in some places, much longer than has usually been thought; and - the link between the eucharistic prayers found in later sources and the Jewish grace after meals is much more tenuous than previously imagined...read more

Product Description: This reference work incorporates the insights and expertise of leading liturgists and scholars of liturgy at work today, comprising 200 entries on important topics in the field, from vestments and offertories to ordination and divine unction...read more

Traditional liturgical scholarship has generally been marked by an attempt to fit together the various pieces of evidence for the practice of early Christian worship in such a way as to suggest that a single, coherent line of evolution can be traced from the apostolic age to the fourth century. Paul Bradshaw examines this methodology in the light of recent developments in Jewish liturgical scholarship, of current trends in New Testament studies, and of the nature of the source-documents themselves, and especially the ancient church orders. In its place he offers a guide to Christian liturgical origins which adopt a much more cautious approach, recognizing the limitations of what can truly be known, and takes seriously the clues pointing to the essentially variegated character of ancient Christian worship. (view table of contents)

Product Description: "In these companion volumes of essays, Jewish and Christian liturgical scholars examine, from historical, theological, and aesthetic perspectives, the practices and intricate interrelationships of Passover and Easter. Several essays lament the antisemitism that has infected the Easter liturgy, and one-Israel Yuval's 'Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue'-pushes beyond the oft-told tale of Jewish-Christian enmity to explore ways the development of worship patterns of the two faiths have influenced one another...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Very little in this world stays fresh and life-giving for 1,500 years. But when that happens we should ask ourselves why and what that had to do with us.In this book, The Radical Christian Life: A Year with Saint Benedict, Joan Chittister encourages us to look at that question...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Bradshaw attempts to reestablish the union of private and corporate prayer, arguing that for 200 years, mainly in North America, we have been divorcing our personal spiritual disciplines from those that we learn in the Christian congregation...read more

This is a study of the early texts used in ordination to the offices of greatest antiquity in the Christian churches of East & West. These offices include bishop, presbyter, deacon, deaconess, subdeacon, acolyte, & reader. The Rev. Dr. Paul Bradshaw, assoc. prof. of theology at Notre Dame Univ., introduces the primary sources of the texts. He outlines the nuclear structure of the ordination ritual & comments on the prayers & ceremonies proper to each order. Then, in the second part of the book, he offers English translations of the texts available.