New York City’s magnificent Eldridge Street Synagogue was built in 1887 in response to the great wave of Jewish immigrants who fled persecution in eastern Europe. Finding their way to the Lower East Side, the new arrivals formed a vibrant Jewish community that flourished from the 1850s until the 1940s. Their synagogue served not only as a place of worship but also as a singularly important center in the development of American Judaism. A near ruin in the 1980s that was recently reopened after a massive twenty-year restoration, the Eldridge Street Synagogue has been named a National Historic Landmark. But as Bill Moyers tells us in his foreword, the synagogue is also “a landmark of the spirit, . . . the spirit of a new nation committed to the old idea of liberty.” Annie Polland uses elements of the building’s architecture—the façade, the benches, the grooves worn into the sanctuary floor—as points of departure to discuss themes, people, and trends at various moments in the synagogue’s history, particularly during its heyday from 1887 until the 1930s. Exploring the synagogue’s rich archives, the author shines new light on the religious life of immigrant Jews, introduces various rabbis, cantors and congregants, and analyzes the significance of this special building in the context of the larger American-Jewish experience. For more information, go to: www.EldridgeStreet.org

Vols. 10- include the Union's Annual report, 9th, 11th, 16th-18th, 1929, 1936,

This landmark book shows how five African civilizations—Yoruba, Kongo, Ejagham, Mande and Cross River—have informed and are reflected in the aesthetic, social and metaphysical traditions (music, sculpture, textiles, architecture, religion, idiogrammatic writing) of black people in the United States, Cuba, Haiti, Trinidad, Mexico, Brazil and other places in the New World.

Debate about the Holy Spirit has been around for a long time. In Holy Fire, best-selling author and respected theologian R. T. Kendall sets the record straight about the Holy Spirit’s role in our lives and in the life of the church.

“Every generation has its hot-button issue,” writes David P. Gushee, “For us, it’s the LGBT issue.” In Changing Our Mind, Gushee takes the reader along his personal and theological journey as he changes his mind about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender inclusion in the Church. With 19 books to his name, Gushee is no stranger to the public arena. He is the author of the “Evangelical Declaration Against Torture” and drafted the “Evangelical Climate Initiative. “For decades now, David Gushee has earned the reputation as America's leading evangelical ethicist. In this book, he admits that he has been wrong on the LGBT issue.” writes Brian D. McLaren, author and theologian. In the definitive third edition of this book, David Gushee issues a scholarly response to his critics. Brian D. McLaren says it best: “Not only is David Gushee's work deep, thoughtful and brilliant; and not only is David philosophically and theologically careful and astute; he is also refreshingly clear and understandable by ‘common people’ who know neither philosophical nor theological mumbo jumbo.”

Romano Guardini's The Spirit of the Liturgy "helped us to rediscover the liturgy in all its beauty, hidden wealth, and time-transcending grandeur, to see it as the animating center of the Church, the very center of Christian life.... We were now willing to see the liturgy as the prayer of the Church, a prayer moved and guided by the Holy Spirit himself, a prayer in which Christ unceasingly becomes contemporary with us, enters into our lives." — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council wrote that liturgical reform and renewal must accord with what they called "the spirit of the liturgy". But what did they mean by this? Popes had written and spoken about this spirit in the decades before the council, but another important source is the 1918 book The Spirit of the Liturgy by Romano Guardini, which Pope Benedict XVI credits with sparking the liturgical movement in Germany. The Seven Gifts of The Spirit of the Liturgy is a study of Guardini's watershed text. With contributions from Bishop Arthur Serratelli, Cassian Folsom, O.S.B., Michon Matthiesen, David Fagerberg, Daniel Cardó, Bishop James Conley, Emery de Gaál, and Susan Benofy, as well as Christopher Carstens, it analyzes each of the seven core features of the liturgical spirit as Guardini defined it: objective, corporate, universal, symbolic, meaningful, beautiful, and logical. The Second Vatican Council saw each of these seven characteristics as integral to authentic liturgical reform. Too often they remain absent from liturgical celebrations even today, when subjectivism and individualism take the place of an objective, corporate spirit; when custom-made liturgies neglect the dimension of universality; when frivolous, anemic symbols stand in for a robust symbolism that truly manifests Christ; when beauty and seriousness fade into the background. We hold back the spirit of the liturgy if we don't know what it is, if we don't desire it, and if we don't work to let it animate liturgical prayer and practice. For this reason, nine experts on the liturgy recall in this book Guardini's key spiritual insights, showing how these can deepen our liturgical understanding and practice today.