Books by "William Norman Pittenger"
4 books found
This much-needed book seeks to understand the nature of Anglicanism's adaptation to modern culture.
Demonstrates how worship and pastoral care can be blended to sustain and enrich each other. Using insights gained from pastoral care and pastoral psychology, William H. Willimon explores what happens to people when they become involved in Christian worship. True pastoral care, he shows, cannot take place apart from an active worshiping community of faith. Worship as Pastoral Care sensitizes pastors to the many ways Christian worship and pastoral care methods can be blended to enrich and support one another. It encourages pastors to broaden their understanding of corporate worship and to become aware of the importance of their role as priests. To illustrate his concepts, Dr. Willimon examines four familiar acts of worship: the funeral, the wedding, baptism, and the Lord's Supper. The psychological dimensions are discussed and suggestions are given on ways pastors can nurture and sustain their congregations through these services.
Introducing two Stringfellow/Towne reprints about Bishop Pike: The Bishop Pike Affair The Death and Life of Bishop Pike The Bishop Pike Affair presents the climactic showdown between James A. Pike and his peers at the Wheeling meeting of the Episcopal House of Bishops, in October 1966. It dramatized for millions the struggles for reform and relevance within the church in the mid-twentieth century. This book reveals the whole chronicle of the historic controversy. Thousands of documents were researched. The authors disentangle the web of political, racial, theological, traditional, and personal interests that account for the accusation that Bishop Pike is a heretic and that culminated in his censure at Wheeling. The authors relate The Bishop Pike Affair to celebrated heresy trials of the past, probe the issues of fairness and due process of law, explore the ethics of the fraternity of bishops, examine the dynamics of the Episcopal Church as an institution, and expose the design of the ultra-right whites to stage a coup d'eglise in America.
It's not that the dignified and rarefied old Episcopal Church quit believing in God. It's that the God you increasingly hear spoken of in Episcopal circles is infinitely tolerant and given to sudden changes of mind - not quite the divinity you thought you were reading about in the scriptures. Episcopalians of the twenty-first century, like their counterparts in other churches of the so-called American mainline - such as Methodists and Presbyterians - seem to prefer a God that the culture would be proud of, as against a culture that God would be proud of. While they work to rebrand and reshelve orthodox Christianity for the modern market, exponents of the new thinking are busy reducing mainstream Christian witness to a shadow of its former self. Mortal Follies is the story of the Episcopal Church's mad dash to catch up with a secular culture fond of self-expression and blissfully relaxed as to norms and truths. An Episcopal layman, William Murchison details how leaders of his church, starting in the late 1960s, looked over the culture of liberation, liked what they saw, and went skipping along with the shifting cultural mood - especially when the culture demanded that the church account for its sins of heterosexism and racism. Episcopalians have blended so deeply into the cultural woodwork that it's hard sometimes to remember that it all began as a divine calling to the normative and the eternal.