Handel's Messiah is one of the most beloved musical works of the western world, playing an especially sentimental role in many people's Christmas traditions. The text of the work has turned many otherwise forgettable phrases into memorable, singable, cherished lines of Scripture. This lovely gift book will delight and inspire classical music fans and those for whom Messiah is a beloved Christmas tradition with devotions exploring the Scriptures that make up Handel's Messiah. Forty reflections journey in order through Messiah, taking the reader deeper into less-often studied texts like Malachi 3:3 and bringing new light to popular passages like Luke 2:9-14. Each reflection offers the text from Messiah, the same passage in NRSV, and a brief devotion on the text. Readers can peruse the book at leisure or examine one reflection per day throughout the Advent and Christmas seasons.

From New York Times bestselling historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Charles King, the moving untold story of the eighteenth-century men and women behind the making of Handel’s Messiah George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is arguably the greatest piece of participatory art ever created. Adored by millions, it is performed each year by renowned choirs and orchestras, as well as by audiences singing along with the words on their cell phones. But this work of triumphant joy was born in a worried age. Britain in the early Enlightenment was a time of astonishing creativity but also of war, enslavement, and conflicts over everything from the legitimacy of government to the meaning of truth. Against this turbulent background, prize-winning author Charles King has crafted a cinematic drama of the troubled lives that shaped a masterpiece of hope. Every Valley presents a depressive dissenter stirred to action by an ancient prophecy; an actress plagued by an abusive husband and public scorn; an Atlantic sea captain and penniless philanthropist; and an African Muslim man held captive in the American colonies and hatching a dangerous plan for getting back home. At center stage is Handel himself, composer to kings but, at midlife, in ill health and straining to keep an audience’s attention. Set amid royal intrigue, theater scandals, and political conspiracy, Every Valley is entertaining, inspiring, unforgettable.

In high medieval France, men and women saw the world around them as the product of tensions between opposites. Imbued with a Christian culture in which a penniless preacher was also the King of Kings and the last were expected to be first, twelfth-century thinkers brought order to their lives through the creation of opposing categories. In a highly original work, Constance Brittain Bouchard examines this poorly understood component of twelfth-century thought, one responsible, in her view, for the fundamental strangeness of that culture to modern thinking.Scholars have long recognized that dialectical reasoning was the basic approach to philosophical, legal, and theological matters in the high Middle Ages. Bouchard argues that this way of thinking and categorizing--which she terms a "discourse of opposites"--permeated all aspects of medieval thought. She rejects suggestions that it was the result of imprecision, and provides evidence that people of that era sought not to reconcile opposing categories but rather to maintain them. Bouchard scrutinizes the medieval use of opposites in five broad areas: scholasticism, romance, legal disputes, conversion, and the construction of gender. Drawing on research in a series of previously unedited charters and the earliest glossa manuscripts, she demonstrates that this method of constructing reality was a constitutive element of the thought of the period.

Originally written in 1701, this classic work has seen several reprinted versions in the nineteenth century and beyond. In this volume, Benjamin Keach introduces each parable as a sermon, with lessons that help the reader find application. Keach’s thorough familiarity with Scripture shines in every page of this study as he compares epistle messages and Old Testament commands with the lessons of each parable, providing the reader wide and deep access to scriptural study surrounding the parables.