This book has been written for all who serve on Parish Pastoral Councils. It has been written particularly for women and men who exert a service of leadership, or who feel called to exert such a service in a spirit of coresponsibility with others.

As we have experienced the shifting sands of the Covid-19 pandemic, our everyday lives have undergone significant changes. The so-called ‘new normal’ of lockdowns, social distancing and limiting contacts have challenged us all physically, mentally and in many cases financially. These changes have also had a profound effect on our relationship with God and how we express and experience our faith. While some have found opportunity in this time to reconnect and refocus in their lives, for others the fear and uncertainty have raised many difficult questions, such as 'Where is God in all of this?' In I Am With You Still, seventeen voices from across Ireland and further afield, from different backgrounds and faiths, reflect on the impact of the pandemic on their lives and their faith, and look forward with hope to the future. Throughout the book, writer and broadcaster John Quinn provides a series of short reflections, memories and poems written during lockdown that capture something of our journey through the universal time of isolation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This book is a practical and spiritual guidebook to the Holy Rosary, which not only examines the meaning of its mysteries, but also creates awareness that the Rosary is a prayer deeply rooted in Sacred Scripture. Meditating on the Mysteries of Salvation provides an extensive and joyful guide to praying the Rosary. It includes the basic prayers and the traditional sets of mysteries but also goes beyond that to provide new topics for meditation on a rosary, which either come from the German tradition or which have been newly developed. These include in particular the Miraculous and the Merciful Mysteries.

Pope Francis gives a very personal reflection on the importance of St Joseph as the husband of Mary, the father of Our Saviour and protector of the Church. Announcing a year dedicated to St Joseph the Holy Father presents St Joseph as an example of the type of tender, loving and courageous father so sorely needed in the world and in the Church. In St Joseph we find a sure intercessor in the most difficult moments and impossible situations. "We need only ask Saint Joseph for the grace of graces: our conversion." This volume includes the decree from the Apostolic Penitentiary detailing the conditions for the Special Indulgence available during the Jubilee Year in Honour of St Joseph.

In Seven Voices of Hope we hear from seven characters from the Easter story: Mary Magdalene; Peter; John; Thomas; Simon of Cyrene; the soldier; and Veronica. Each voice is unique. Each voice has a different tempo, feeling and resonance. Each contains comfort, inspiration and, above all, hope.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, rarely a day goes by when we are not bombarded with distressing images, statistics or forecasts that suggest the future of our planet hangs in the balance and that to avert disaster we must take affirmative action. Time to Call Home is a collection of short meditations inspired by Laudato Si', Pope Francis' landmark encyclical letter on climate change, that encourages the reader to take courage in the face of adversity and to ponder the astonishing gift of the natural world. Unlike many examinations of the environmental crisis, that are understandably prescriptive in approach, the aim of this particular work is not to admonish but to embolden. Readers are inspired to ponder the awesome gift of creation and to heed its attendant call to stewardship of our shared home. With recourse to poetry, scripture, art and music, Hugh O'Donnell takes the reader on an awesome ecological journey, from which we emerge coitted to redoubling our efforts to live at one with our natural surroundings.

Victor Bewley became director of Bewley's cafes at the age of twenty and, the following year, he became managing director - a position held by his father and grandfather before him. He never felt he was a natural businessman but, as the eldest son, he knew from a young age that he was expected to take over the running of the popular Grafton Street, George’s Street and Westmoreland Street cafes. He was thrust into this role following his father Ernest’s untimely death in 1932. There was far more to Victor's life, however, than the successful running of the of Bewley's cafes for forty five years. His memoirs, recounted to his granddaughter several years before his death in 1999, reveal a sensitive man with a quiet determination to increase social awareness and improve people’s lives in any way that he could. This revised edition of Victor Bewley's Memoirs, which includes a new foreword, gives a frank account of his life, revealing why in 1972 he and his brothers handed over Bewley's cafes to the staff, what drove him to dedicate great time and energy to improving the lives of many, why he described parts of his life as ‘undiluted hell’ and how he ended up carrying secret messages from the IRA to the British government.

This book collects systematically all the personal names found in Old Syriac sources in such a way as to enable them to be dealt with from a structural and lexical point of view, and compared with other corpora of Aramaic personal names as well as Hebrew and Arabic names. As far as possible, the personal names of the new finds of unpublished inscriptions discovered recently are included. This study covers all the personal names which are found in the Syriac corpus so far. The book fills a significant gap in scholarship, since there are dedicated works on Palmyrene, Hatran and Nabataean personal names, but no such work exists for early Syriac (pre-Christian Syriac) personal names.

The investigation of this book into early Jewish experiences of God begins with calls to discard any categorical and definitional approaches to the literature of early Judaism, and several enduring preconceptions about its mysticism and theology (particularly the relegation of its mysticism to particular texts and themes, and the molding of its theology in the image of medieval and post-medieval Jewish and Christian monotheisms). With this abandonment, the symbolic language of early Jewish texts gives sharper contours to a pre-formal theology, a theology in which God and divinity are more subjects of experience and recognition than of propositions. This clarity leads the investigation to the conclusion that early Judaism is thoroughly mystical and experiences a theology which is neither polytheistic, nor monotheistic, but deificational: there is only one divine selfhood, the divinity of “God,” but he shares his selfhood with “gods,” to varying degrees and always at his discretion. With some important differentiations which are also introduced here, this theology undergirds almost the entirety of early Judaism – the Bible, post-biblical texts, and even classical rabbinic literature. The greatest development over time is only that the boundaries between God and gods become at once clearer and less rigid.

This monograph explores the nature of the Elijah traditions in rabbinic literature and their connection to the wisdom tradition. By examining the diverse Elijah traditions in connection to the wisdom and apocalyptic traditions, Alouf-Aboody sheds new light on the manner in which Elijah’s role developed in rabbinic literature.

The biblical material translated into Arabic during the Middle Ages included texts from the Hexateuch contained in Codex Sinai Arabic 3, the first in the Christian Arabic Texts series now being published. This set of six texts (Pentateuch + Joshua) is of enormous interest, for what it tells us not only about translating into Arabic, and about the techniques and strategies adopted by the translators, but also about the revi-sions and reworkings to which the original translations were subjected, and in general about the transmission process undergone by biblical texts in the hands of successive copyists.

As the first volume of the Sebastianyotho series, this book collects Sebastian P. Brock’s articles related to Ephrem the Syrian. The articles cover a wide array of topics, including a biographical overview of the saint, an exposition of St. Ephrem’s importance for Christianity today and his relevance as a theologian, an analysis of some of his works, and a bibliographic guide to editions of these works. While most of the articles were previously published, many are updated and some are published in English for the first time.

In and Around Maimonides presents eight highly focused studies on Moses Maimonides and those around him.

Conflict or concord? Histories of Islam from its early seventh century beginnings in Arabia often portray its explosive growth into the wider Middle East as a story of struggle and conquest of the Christian people of Greater Syria, Palestine and Egypt. Alternatively these histories suggest that as often as not the conquerors were welcomed by the conquered and their existing monotheistic faiths of Christianity and Judaism tolerated and even allowed to flourish. In this short but in depth survey of the almost nine centuries that passed from the beginning of the spread of Islam up to the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Syria and Egypt beginning in 1516, Constantin Panchenko offers a more complex portrayal that opens up fresh vistas of understanding of these centuries focusing on the impact that the coming of Islam had on the Orthodox Christian communities of the Middle East and in particular the interplay of their Greek cultural heritage and experience of increasing Arabization. This work is drawn from the author's much larger work, Arab Orthodox Christians Under the Ottomans, being an updated and expanded version of the first chapter of that book which set the historical context for the period after 1516. It will deepen the readers understanding both of the history of the Middle East in these centuries and of how the faith of Orthodox Christians in these lands is lived today.

Following the success of his widely acclaimed The Pope Francis Agenda, renowned theologian Donal Dorr returns with a topical new work that explores the interplay between an ecological spirituality and traditional Christian faith at this critical juncture. Rather than seeing ecological spirituality as an adjunct to Christian doctrine, Donal Dorr views it as central to the understanding of Christianity today and integral to understanding our relationship with the natural world. Stressing the importance of our ‘new earth awareness’, the author lays out a compelling vision for how we should live at both a spiritual and practical level in terms of our Christian faith and our attendant role as stewards of the Earth.

Advent News: Too Good to Keep is a thought-provoking selection of scripture readings and reflections designed to accompany the reader through the season of Advent. This accessible and practical guide, which also includes inspirational quotations and questions to prompt the reader to effect change in their day-to-day lives, is the perfect companion for this essential period in the Church calendar.