TOUCH

TOUCH PDF Author: Pastor Rudy Rasmus
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418573361
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Before God touched his heart and transformed his life, Rudy Rasmus was a businessman running a "borderline bordello" in Houston. But thousands now know him simply as "Pastor Rudy"-with a downtown ministry at St. John's Church that he and his wife Juanita started to reach out to those who Jesus called "the least of these." TOUCH is the amazing story of Rudy's life and ministry of grace that is changing lives daily. The church has become one of the most culturally diverse congregations in the country with people from every social and economic background, including the homeless, sharing the same pew. Pastor Rudy's message to touch the lives of those in our own communities has a lesson for us all. Pastor Rudy is also a featured contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine-answering questions on ethics and marking one of the few times O has asked a Pastor to serve in this manner.

TOUCH

TOUCH PDF Author: Pastor Rudy Rasmus
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
ISBN: 1418573361
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Before God touched his heart and transformed his life, Rudy Rasmus was a businessman running a "borderline bordello" in Houston. But thousands now know him simply as "Pastor Rudy"-with a downtown ministry at St. John's Church that he and his wife Juanita started to reach out to those who Jesus called "the least of these." TOUCH is the amazing story of Rudy's life and ministry of grace that is changing lives daily. The church has become one of the most culturally diverse congregations in the country with people from every social and economic background, including the homeless, sharing the same pew. Pastor Rudy's message to touch the lives of those in our own communities has a lesson for us all. Pastor Rudy is also a featured contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine-answering questions on ethics and marking one of the few times O has asked a Pastor to serve in this manner.

Touch the Wounds

Touch the Wounds PDF Author: Tomáš Halík
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268204888
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this masterfully written book, Tomáš Halík calls upon Christians to touch the wounds of the world and to rediscover their own faith by loving and healing their neighbors. One of the most important voices in contemporary Catholicism, Tomáš Halík argues that Christians can discover the clearest vision of God not by turning away from suffering but by confronting it. Halík calls upon us to follow the apostle Thomas’s example: to see the pain, suffering, and poverty of our world and to touch those wounds with faith and action. It is those expressions of love and service, Halík reveals, that restore our hope and the courage to live, allowing true holiness to manifest itself. Only face-to-face with a wounded Christ can we lay down our armor and masks, revealing our own wounds and allowing healing to begin. Weaving together deep theological and philosophical reflections with surprising, trenchant, and even humorous commentary on the times in which we live, Halík offers a new prescription for those lost in moments of doubt, abandonment, or suffering. Rather than demanding impossible, flawless faith, we can look through our doubt to see, touch, and confront the wounds in the hearts of our neighbors and—through that wounded humanity, which the Son of God took upon himself—see God.

Resurrecting Wounds

Resurrecting Wounds PDF Author: Shelly Rambo
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781481306799
Category : Bible
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Gospel of John's account of doubting Thomas is often told as a lesson about the veracity and triumph of Christian faith. And yet it is a story about wounds. Interpretations of this Gospel narrative, by focusing on Christ's victory in the resurrection, reflect Christianity's unease with the wounds that remain on the body of the risen Jesus. By returning readers to this familiar passage, Resurrecting Wounds expands the scope of the Upper Room to the present world where wounds mark all of humanity. Shelly Rambo rereads the Thomas story and the history of its interpretation through the lens of trauma studies to reflect on the ways that the wounds of race, gender, and war persist. Wounds do not simply go away, even though a close reading of John Calvin reveals his theological investments in removing wounds. This erasure reflects a dominant mode of Christian thinking, but it is not the only Christian reading. By contrast, Macrina's scar, in Gregory of Nyssa's account of her life and death, displays how resurrection can be inscribed in wounds, particularly in the illumination of her body after her death. The scar, produced in and through a mother's touch, recalls a healing, linking resurrection to the work of tending wounds. Much like Christ's wounds and Macrina's scar, racial wounds can be found on the skin of America's collective life. The wounds of racial histories, unhealed, resurface again and again. The wounds of war persist as well, despite a cultural calculus that links the suffering of a soldier with that of Christ. Again, the visceral display of Jesus' wounds, when placed at the center of Thomas' encounter in the Upper Room, enacts a vision of resurrecting that addresses the real harm of the real wounds of war. The powerful Upper Room images of resurrection--encounters with wounds, the invitation to touch, and the formation of a community--present visions of truth-telling and of healing that grapple with the pressing questions of wounds surfacing in the midst of human encounters with violence, suffering, and trauma. While traditional accounts of resurrection in Christian theology have focused on the afterlife, this book forges a theology of resurrection wounds in the afterliving. By returning again and again to Christ's woundedness, we discover ways to live with our own.

Healing Invisible Wounds

Healing Invisible Wounds PDF Author: Richard F. Mollica
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826516416
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Get Book Here

Book Description
In these personal reflections on his thirty years of clinical work with victims of genocide, torture, and abuse in the United States, Cambodia, Bosnia, and other parts of the world, Richard Mollica describes the surprising capacity of traumatized people to heal themselves. Here is how Neil Boothby, Director of the Program on Forced Migration and Health at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, describes the book: "Mollica provides a wealth of ethnographic and clinical evidence that suggests the human capacity to heal is innate--that the 'survival instinct' extends beyond the physical to include the psychological as well. He enables us to see how recovery from 'traumatic life events' needs to be viewed primarily as a 'mystery' to be listened to and explored, rather than solely as a 'problem' to be identified and solved. Healing involves a quest for meaning--with all of its emotional, cultural, religious, spiritual and existential attendants--even when bio-chemical reactions are also operative." Healing Invisible Wounds reveals how trauma survivors, through the telling of their stories, teach all of us how to deal with the tragic events of everyday life. Mollica's important discovery that humiliation--an instrument of violence that also leads to anger and despair--can be transformed through his therapeutic project into solace and redemption is a remarkable new contribution to survivors and clinicians. This book reveals how in every society we have to move away from viewing trauma survivors as "broken people" and "outcasts" to seeing them as courageous people actively contributing to larger social goals. When violence occurs, there is damage not only to individuals but to entire societies, and to the world. Through the journey of self-healing that survivors make, they enable the rest of us not only as individuals but as entire communities to recover from injury in a violent world.

From the Underground Church to Freedom

From the Underground Church to Freedom PDF Author: Tomáš Halík
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268106797
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Get Book Here

Book Description
International best-selling author and theologian Tomáš Halík shares for the first time the dramatic story of his life as a secretly ordained priest in Communist Czechoslovakia. Inspired by Augustine's candid presentation of his own life, Halík writes about his spiritual journey within a framework of philosophical theology; his work has been compared to that of C. S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, and Henri Nouwen. Born in Prague in 1948, Halík spent his childhood under Stalinism. He describes his conversion to Christianity during the time of communist persecution of the church, his secret study of theology, and secret priesthood ordination in East Germany (even his mother was not allowed to know that her son was a priest). Halík speaks candidly of his doubts and crises of faith as well as of his conflicts within the church. He worked as a psychotherapist for over a decade and, at the same time, was active in the underground church and in the dissident movement with the legendary Cardinal Tomášek and Václav Havel, who proposed Halík as his successor to the Czech presidency. Since the fall of the regime, Halík has served as general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to John Paul II and Václav Havel. Woven throughout Halík’s story is the turbulent history of the church and society in the heart of Europe: the 1968 Prague Spring, the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the self-immolation of his classmate Jan Palach, the “flying university,” the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the difficult transition from totalitarian communist regime to democracy. Tomáš Halík was a direct witness to many of these events, and he provides valuable testimony about the backdrop of political events and personal memories of the key figures of that time. This volume is a must-read for anyone interested in Halík and the church as it was behind the Iron Curtain, as well as in where the church as a whole is headed today.

The Healing Touch of Jesus

The Healing Touch of Jesus PDF Author: Richard Lee
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1582291268
Category : Healing
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book is for those who hunger for a healing they have yet to find. If you want to learn what is standing between you and wholeness and how to connect with the healing touch of Jesus, then this book is for you. For our loving God has both the power and the passion to make you whole.

Wounds

Wounds PDF Author: Nathan Ballingrud
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
ISBN: 1534449922
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Get Book Here

Book Description
“[Ballingrud's] evocative and strangely beautiful.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite contemporary authors and any time he’s got a new book out I run to the front of the line. His work is elegant and troublingly, wonderfully disturbing.”—Victor LaValle, award–winning author of The Changeling “Nathan Ballingrud's brilliant fiction brims with imagination, integrity (I do not use that term lightly), and an authentic world-weary dread that bores directly into your heart. With Wounds you'll gladly follow Nathan to Hell and (maybe) back.”—Paul Tremblay, award-winning author of The Cabin at the End of the World and A Head Full of Ghosts “Nathan Ballingrud is one of my favorite short fiction writers.” —Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation and Borne “Stretch[es] the boundaries of the genre by employing these grand, horrific worlds. “The Butcher’s Table” reminds me of the first time I read Clive Barker’s “In the Hills, the Cities.” It’s horrifying, but there’s beauty.” —The New York Times “In only two slender collections, Nathan Ballingrud has emerged as one of the field’s most accomplished short story writers.” —The Washington Post “Ballingrud’s work isn’t like any other.”—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing “One of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—The New York Review of Books “Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell is without a doubt one of the best, most accomplished horror collections in recent memory.”—Hellnotes “Wounds will no doubt be remembered as one of the most disquieting and memorable short story collections to come out this year.”—New York Journal of Books “There’s enough nightmare fuel here to inspire weeks of insomnia — all told with an even hand with a penchant for precise storytelling. How else do you chart the furthest reaches of the uncanny?”—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn A gripping collection of six stories of terror—including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture—by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado—“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives—both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown.

The Forgotten Touch

The Forgotten Touch PDF Author: Nigel W. D. Mumford
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1596271841
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 153

Get Book Here

Book Description
From marine to lay minister, an inspirational story on the power of healing and faith. “My journey has transformed me from Royal Marine Commander to lay minister of healing. Twenty-five years ago, I was trained to kill or be killed. Now it is my privilege to teach people to heal and be healed.” This long-awaited sequel to Hand to Hand: From Combat to Healing, Mumford's experience of healing in the trenches, offers vivid snapshots of God at work in the world. These true tales from the author's healing ministry and prayers gives the reader insight into the little-known world of modern miracles. Inspiring to Christians and non-Christians alike, these accessible stories challenge us to explore the depths of our faith. They will encourage healers in their ministry of prayer and those who are ill to seek physical and spiritual healing for themselves.

Touch of Power

Touch of Power PDF Author: Maria V. Snyder
Publisher: MIRA
ISBN: 1488098336
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 403

Get Book Here

Book Description
A magic healer must journey to cure a sick prince in this fantasy adventure series launch by the New York Times–bestselling author of the Study series. Laying hands upon the injured and dying, Avry of Kazan absorbs their wounds and diseases into herself. But rather than being honored for her skills, she is hunted. Healers like Avry are accused of spreading the plague that has decimated the Fifteen Realms, leaving the survivors in a state of chaos. Stressed and tired from hiding, Avry is abducted by a band of rogues who, shockingly, value her gift above the golden bounty offered for her capture. Their leader, an enigmatic captor-protector with powers of his own, is unequivocal in his demands: Avry must heal a plague-stricken prince—leader of a campaign against her people. As they traverse the daunting Nine Mountains, beset by mercenaries and magical dangers, Avry must decide who is worth healing and what is worth dying for. Because the price of peace may well be her life . . . Originally published in 2010 Praise for Touch of Power “Filled with Snyder’s trademark sarcastic humor, fast-paced action and creepy villainy, Touch of Power is a spellbinding romantic adventure that will leave readers salivating for the next book in the series.” —USA Today “A great read, it had a great adventure, a likable heroine, a band of merry men and the exasperating yet sexy Kerrick.” —Under the Covers Book Blog

I Want You to Be

I Want You to Be PDF Author: Tomáš Halík
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268100756
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
In his two previous books translated into English, Patience with God and Night of the Confessor, best-selling Czech author and theologian Tomáš Halík focused on the relationship between faith and hope. Now, in I Want You to Be, Halík examines the connection between faith and love, meditating on a statement attributed to St. Augustine—amo, volo ut sis, “I love you: I want you to be”—and its importance for contemporary Christian practice. Halík suggests that because God is not an object, love for him must be expressed through love of human beings. He calls for Christians to avoid isolating themselves from secular modernity and recommends instead that they embrace an active and loving engagement with nonbelievers through acts of servitude. At the same time, Halík critiques the drive for mere material success and suggests that love must become more than a private virtue in contemporary society. I Want You to Be considers the future of Western society, with its strong division between Christian and secular traditions, and recommends that Christians think of themselves as partners with nonbelievers. Halik’s distinctive style is to present profound insights on religious themes in an accessible way to a lay audience. As in previous books, this volume links spiritual and theological/philosophical topics with a tentative diagnosis of our times. This is theology written on one’s knees; Halik is as much a spiritual writer as a theologian. I Want You to Be will interest both general and scholarly readers interested in questions of secularism and Christianity in modern life.