Collegeville Institute Staff Books

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  Grief: Finding Hope in Sorrow

  Laura Kelly Fanucci

  Loss comes to each of us, without fail. Scripture can serve as a companion to us in the grief we bear and ultimately in our surrender to our compassionate God. Through this set of insightful reflections on the stories of Ruth and Naomi, the death and raising of Jesus' friend Lazarus, and the promise of a new heaven and earth, Laura Kelly Fanucci invites us to a deepening experience of God's healing presence in our lives.

  Laura Kelly Fanucci is the research associate for the Collegeville Institute Seminars. She is the author of Mercy: God's Nature, Our Challenge and Dashed Hopes: When Our Best-Laid Plans Fall Apart in the Alive in the Word series; Everyday Sacrament: The Messy Grace of Parenting (Liturgical Press, 2014); and the coauthor of Living Your Discipleship: 7 Ways to Express Your Deepest Calling (23rd Publications, 2015). She blogs about spirituality and parenting at www.motheringspirit.com

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  To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation

  Laura Kelly Fanucci

  To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation is an ecumenical collection that supports the callings of everyone within the Christian community. This valuable resource of over two hundred prayers, blessings, poems, and sacred songs from diverse Christian traditions speaks to the heart of vocation’s richness.

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  Sister Churches: American Congregations and Their Partners Abroad

  Janel Kragt Bakker

  The growth of Christianity in the global South and the fall of colonialism in the middle of the twentieth century caused a crisis in Christian mission, as many southern Christians spoke out about indignities they had suffered and many northern Christians retreated from the global South. American Christians soon began looking for a fresh start, a path forward that was neither isolationist nor domineering. Out of this dream the ''sister church'' model of mission was born. Rather than western churches sending representatives into the ''mission field,'' they established congregation-to-congregation partnerships with churches in the global South.

  Janel Kragt Bakker draws on extensive fieldwork and interviews with participants in these partnerships to explore the sister church movement and in particular its effects on American churches. Because Christianity is numerically and in many ways spiritually stronger in the global South than it is in the global North--while the imbalance in material resources runs in the opposite direction--both northern and southern Christians stand to gain. Challenging prevailing notions of friction between northern and southern Christians, Bakker argues that sister church relationships are marked by interconnectivity and collaboration.

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  Opening the Field of Practical Theology: An Introduction

  Kathleen A. Cahalan and Gordon S. Mikoski

  Opening the Field of Practical Theology introduces students to practical theology through an examination of fifteen different approaches—ranging from feminist to liberationist, Roman Catholic to evangelical, Asian American to Latino/a.

  After an introduction to the field of practical theology and its broad range of practice today, the book features chapters written by leading experts in the discipline. Each chapter has an identical structure to facilitate comparison, covering historical context, key features and figures, norms and sources of authority, theory-practice, contexts, interdisciplinary considerations, areas of current and future research, and suggested readings.

  Opening the Field of Practical Theology is an ideal introduction to the field, highlighting the diverse ways practical theology is engaged today.

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  Introducing the Practice of Ministry

  Kathleen A. Cahalan

  Ministry is often examined in terms of who the minister is, not what the minister does. But the vocation to ministry must be understood as a call to identity as well as to practice, one that is rooted in Jesus' life and ministry as well as the Spirit's charisms. In Introducing the Practice of Ministry Kathleen A. Cahalan defines ministerial leadership as carried out through the practices of teaching, preaching, pastoral care, worship, social ministry, and administration for the sake of nurturing the life of discipleship in the community of believers. In her examination of charisms for each of the practices of ministry, Cahalan presents readers with a Trinitarian foundation, noting that "the practices of discipleship and ministry have their origin in the very practices of God."

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  Formed in the Image of Christ : The Sacramental-Moral Theology of Bernard Häring, C.Ss.R.

  Kathleen A. Cahalan

  The Christian life is an imitation of Christ's response to God—a religious response to God’s initiative. We are called to make all responses—religion and morality—acts of adoring worship and praise. This sacramental theology is the fundamental moral theology of Bernard Häring, CSsR, whose contributions as a twentieth-century theologian have prepared the way of renewal in Catholic theology today.

  Part One of this book introduces Bernard Häring and his place in the history of Roman Catholic moral theology. Part Two examines the central concepts of Häring’s sacramental-moral theology: responsibility, Christ as Word of God and High Priest, the human person as word and worshiper, and the sacraments as dialogue and response. In Part III the author illustrates how Häring takes a minor category—the virtue of religion—and places it at the center of moral life.