A Place at the Altar illuminates a previously underappreciated dimension of religion in ancient Rome: the role of priestesses in civic cult. Demonstrating that priestesses had a central place in public rituals and institutions, Meghan DiLuzio emphasizes the complex, gender-inclusive nature of Roman priesthood. In ancient Rome, priestly service was a cooperative endeavor, requiring men and women, husbands and wives, and elite Romans and slaves to work together to manage the community's relationship with its gods. Like their male colleagues, priestesses offered sacrifices on behalf of the Roman people, and prayed for the community’s well-being. As they carried out their ritual obligations, they were assisted by female cult personnel, many of them slave women. DiLuzio explores the central role of the Vestal Virgins and shows that they occupied just one type of priestly office open to women. Some priestesses, including the flaminica Dialis, the regina sacrorum, and the wives of the curial priests, served as part of priestly couples. Others, such as the priestesses of Ceres and Fortuna Muliebris, were largely autonomous. A Place at the Altar offers a fresh understanding of how the women of ancient Rome played a leading role in public cult.

A reminder of the Divine, a space for spiritual encounter, or a focal point for meditation--the altar is a powerful tool for people of all faiths. Sandra Kynes demonstrates how to create personal altars and empower these sacred spaces according to your needs. Discover how to harness energies to manifest change, make decisions, receive wisdom, find balance, explore your soul, and grow spiritually. Kynes's unique approach provides nine overall matrices--each one corresponding to the number of objects placed on the altar--and the numerological significance of each. You'll also find suggested meditations and a wealth of helpful information--spanning chakras, colors, days of the week, elements, gemstones, gods/goddesses, runes, and more--for choosing appropriate symbols and objects that reflect your needs.

Few believers experience God's altar--a place of pure and wholehearted relationship and worship where our holy God can meet with us and the fire of his presence can fall. But such an altar is necessary in our personal lives, our marriages, our churches, and our nations so that we are strengthened, empowered, and equipped for every good work. In this influential, modern-day call back to the altar, Chuck D. Pierce and Alemu Beeftu invite readers to find their way to rebuild the place of God's presence to allow the fire of God--his presence and power--to fall. When we rekindle the altar fire, our lives, prayer, and worship are transformed. The time to rebuild altars for fresh fire is now!

Transform your home into a calm, balanced and harmonious oasis using architect Anjie Cho's helpful advice, drawing on her background in green design and feng shui. You don't have to get rid of all your possessions and become an ascetic to change your space and discover the benefits that living in a considered, organic way can bring. The easy suggestions in Holistic Spaces show you how to implement the principles of feng shui and green design in your home. Written for the way we live today, as we move toward a more mindful approach to health, diet and the way that we choose the objects in our homes, this is the perfect guide to help you to clear and refresh your living environment. Learn how to make every room in your home serve its highest purpose, create eco-friendly spaces, bring nature indoors, choose colours for maximum impact, select a space for meditation practice, and overall, create a peaceful and organic home. From the bedroom to the home office, these intuitive, straightforward tips will teach you to how improve your spaces to boost the flow of energy through your life.

Father Kaleeg Hainsworth, an Eastern Orthodox priest with a lifetime of experience in the Canadian wilderness, grounds this manifesto in the literary, philosophical, mystical and historical teachings of the spiritual masters of both East and West, outlining the human experience of the sacred in nature. The spiritual ecology described here is fully engaged with the wilderness beyond our backyards; it is an ecology which takes in nature as "red in tooth and claw" and offers a way forward in the face of accelerating climate change. This manifesto also challenges our modern self-conception as dominators or stewards of the natural world, claiming these roles emerged from western industrial history and are directly responsible for the environmental damage and alienation from nature we know today. The ecological scope of this book begins with a meditation on natural beauty as the divine that breathes through all aspects of life. We discover along the way that awe and mystery are so vital to the human experience of the natural world that without them we are doomed to treat nature as little more than a resource, a science or a playground for recreation alone. Instead, a new role emerges from these pages, one which accounts for the sacred in nature and places us in relationship to the world of which we are inextricably a part. This role is a priestly one, and Father Hainsworth outlines the significance and benefits of it in detail while also offering a vision of life in which a human being stands in the world of nature as at an altar built in the wilderness, a sacred offering in a holy place.

Ellie Quicke, newly widowed, is sure she saw something the night a body was left in the church opposite her house, but now her own life seems to be under threat.

Rooted in the crisis over slavery, disagreements about child labor broke down along sectional lines between the North and South. For decades after emancipation, the child labor issue shaped how Northerners and Southerners defined fundamental concepts of American life such as work, freedom, the market, and the state. Betsy Wood examines the evolution of ideas about child labor and the on-the-ground politics of the issue against the backdrop of broad developments related to slavery and emancipation, industrial capitalism, moral and social reform, and American politics and religion. Wood explains how the decades-long battle over child labor created enduring political and ideological divisions within capitalist society that divided the gatekeepers of modernity from the cultural warriors who opposed them. Tracing the ideological origins and the politics of the child labor battle over the course of eighty years, this book tells the story of how child labor debates bequeathed an enduring legacy of sectionalist conflict to modern American capitalist society.