Product Description: This is the first book about the meals of Early Judaism. As such it breaks important new ground in establishing the basis for understanding the centrality of meals in this pivotal period of Judaism and providing a framework of historical patterns and influences.

Product Description: This book provides three categories of investigation: 1) The Typology and Context of the Greco-Roman Banquet, 2) Who Was at the Greco-Roman Banquets, and 3) The Culture of Reclining. Together these studies establish festive meals as an essential lens into social formation in the Greco-Roman world...read more

Product Description: This is the first book-length treatment in English of the Nag Hammadi text, The Thunder: Perfect Mind - a poem of 'I am' statements that has garnered a strong following in mainstream culture. This book offers a fresh, current translation (with detailed Coptic annotations) and ten chapters of introductory analysis of the text...read more

Product Description: What were the origins of the Eucharist? Taussig, a founding member of the SBL Seminar on Meals in the Greco-Roman World, brings a wealth of scholarship to bear on the question of Christian origins. He shows that in the Augustan age, common meals became the sites of dramatic experimentation and innovation regarding social roles and relationships, challenging expectations regarding gender, class, and status...read more

Product Description: A new kind of Christianity is emerging at the grass roots. Full of heart-felt expression, artistic creativity, and liberal social values, progressive churches and small Christian communities have established themselves across the denominational spectrum...read more

Product Description: What difference does scholarship on the historical Jesus make for the way we think about the meaning of Christian faith in the twenty-first century? In The Historical Jesus Goes To Church, biblical scholars--Fellows of the Jesus Seminar--speak directly to the ways in which new knowledge of the Jesus of history requires and enables us to think differently about the significance of Jesus and about the reliability and authority of the Bible...read more

Product Description: America is known for, and prides itself on, its individualism. But bubbling beneath the surface of rugged independence is a hunger for community, for connectedness, for solidarity. While much of the literature on the importance of community―ranging from Bellah's Habits of the Heart to Wuthnow's Loose Connections to Putnam's Bowling Alone―affirms the central role of churches in helping bring people together, none of them treats in depth the role of the local churches in revisioning community...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: What happens inside the church doors is its liturgy. It is there that life and fulfillment should be found, but too often today liturgy seems stale and lacking in vitality. The problem is not a lack of faith so much as it is a lack of life in the liturgy itself...read more

Product Description: Jesus Before God examines new ways the historical Jesus can teach us to pray. The prayer that emerges is very different from the prayers of Jesus' contemporaries, from traditional church prayers, and from new fashions of spirituality...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Discusses feminist spirituality, looks at the concept of wisdom and provides exercises, meditations, and sermons

(view table of contents)

Attempts to reconcile spirituality and feminism, discusses the role of Sophia in the scriptures, and examines spirituality from the perspective of modern social issues