Religion, Education and Culture

This is a ground-breaking study into a crucial area of theological education. It traces the origin and evolution of the formation model of training and identifies what difference this paradigm makes to present practice. It uncovers significant and surprising functions of prayer in the formational and learning process as discovered in empirical research (informed by theological and psychological perspectives on prayer) among a sample of newly ordained clergy and tutors. The practical implications of the research are identified, offering creative ideas for a renewed understanding and praxis of the role of prayer in learning. This is essential reading for theological students and teachers alike, and calls for a clearer articulation of a spirituality of education as needed by our present culture and context.

A significant collection of essays by leading scholars on the vital decade of the 1670s in Britain, Ireland and North America. This was a period of profound tension and uncertainty (culminating in the exclusion crisis of 1678-83),, in which the 1660s restoration settlement began to break down, and debates came to seem much more complex and ambiguous than the earlier simple polarity between royalist Anglicanism and a radical, non-conformist opposition. New issues included the disturbing prospect of open catholicism at court, realisation that religious dissent would not simply be persecuted out of existence, confusion over the correct response to the rise of Louis XIV's France on the continent, the evident emergence of public opinion in the form of the press and coffee house culture;, new questions about the proper relationship between England, Ireland, Scotland and the North American colonies, and refashionings of national identities connected to all these issues. These essays explore the political, cultural and religious turbulence which resulted; and break new ground in the interdisciplinary study of the newly confusing, but highly innovative world. Taken together they suggest the 1670s was a crucial period in the emergence of 'modern' assumptions and concerns.

Spiritual Encounters with Unusual Light Phenomena: Lightforms is a study of unusual light phenomena based on almost four hundred unpublished accounts of modern-day encounters with strange lights collected over approximately thirty years. With echoes within the popular field of spiritual, religious and paranormal experience this book explores lights encountered during angelic experiences, near-death experiences and after-death communications. However, it goes much further and attempts to show that experiences of such unusual lights are cross-cultural, trans-historical and reported widely in the present day. By drawing on a large number of vivid, previously unpublished and dramatic testimonies this book demonstrates that experiences of light phenomena share to a remarkable degree a common core; typically manifested at times of crisis, overwhelmingly benign and loving, often resulting in 'turning-points' in the lives of those who experience them toward new spiritual and creative directions.