This anthology reflects the life and witness of the Iona Community and is intended to encourage creativity in worship. Liturgies include: pilgrimage and journeys, healing, acts of witness and dissent, a sanctuary and a light, resources: beginnings and endings of worship, short prayers, prayers for forgiveness, words of faith, thanksgiving, concern, litanies and responses, cursings and blessings, reflections, readings and meditations.

This collection of liturgies and resources reflects the life and engagement of the Iona Community. Worship has been fundamental to the community since it began: it is the mainspring of all its activities and the beginning and end of its commitment to world peace, social justice and the recovery of an integrated spirituality. Ever since the original members worked and worshipped together while rebuilding the Abbey on the Isle of Iona, the aim of the Iona Community has been to integrate work, worship and recreation into one daily, practical spiritual path. Designed to encourage creativity in worship, this book includes liturgies for pilgrimage and journeys; healing; acts of witness and dissent; and safe space and empowerment. A section of resources includes prayers of concern, forgiveness, thanksgiving and blessing, and reflections and meditations.

A resource book for planning baptisms, naming ceremonies, weddings and civil partnerships and marking the many other significant moments of our nights and days. There are resources that do not assume any faith commitment, as well as ones that reflect Christian belief.

The services and resources in The Iona Abbey Worship Book reflect the Iona Community's commitment to the belief that worship is all that we are and all that we do, both inside and outside the church, with no division into the 'sacred' and the 'secular'.

You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building. And you can use it to guide you in the actual process of construction. After a ten-year silence, Christopher Alexander and his colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure are now publishing a major statement in the form of three books which will, in their words, "lay the basis for an entirely new approach to architecture, building and planning, which will we hope replace existing ideas and practices entirely." The three books are The Timeless Way of Building, The Oregon Experiment, and this book, A Pattern Language. At the core of these books is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets, and communities. This idea may be radical (it implies a radical transformation of the architectural profession) but it comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people. At the core of the books, too, is the point that in designing their environments people always rely on certain "languages," which, like the languages we speak, allow them to articulate and communicate an infinite variety of designs within a forma system which gives them coherence. This book provides a language of this kind. It will enable a person to make a design for almost any kind of building, or any part of the built environment. "Patterns," the units of this language, are answers to design problems (How high should a window sill be? How many stories should a building have? How much space in a neighborhood should be devoted to grass and trees?). More than 250 of the patterns in this pattern language are given: each consists of a problem statement, a discussion of the problem with an illustration, and a solution. As the authors say in their introduction, many of the patterns are archetypal, so deeply rooted in the nature of things that it seemly likely that they will be a part of human nature, and human action, as much in five hundred years as they are today.

Anthropologist Myerhoff's penetrating exploration of the aging process is brilliant sociology--as well as living history--that tells readers about the importance of ritual, the agonies of aging, and the indomitable human spirit. "(The book) shines with the luminous wit of old age".--Robert Bly.

The ministry of healing plays a vital and central part in the life of the Iona Community. It is a ministry in which justice is as important as medicine, reverence for the earth is as vital as respect for the individual person and the health of the body politic matters as much as the health of the body personal. In addition to giving a taste of the background, context and range of this work, Praying for the Dawn offers detailed resources for those who wish to introduce the ministry of healing to their own churches or groups but are unsure of where to start.