Stories for the Christian Year
Books / Hardcover
ISBN: 0025254308 / Publisher: Macmillan Pub Co, October 1992
Madeline L'Engle, William Griffin, Calvin Miller, and many other writers offer contemporary retellings of events in the life of Jesus to mark the year's progress and the passing of Lent, Easter, Advent, Christmas, and other important days and seasons
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Telling time and telling stories go hand in hand in what is often referred to as the Christian year.The first Christians inherited a Roman calendar that was perfectly adequate for getting up in the morning and going to bed on time, for setting a wedding day, even for calculating the equinox. But they soon found the stories attached to the Roman calendar to be entirely inadequate when it came to defining who they were and what they were doing. Hence, they developed stories of their own about Jesus and their religious experience with him.As these new stories were told and retold, they clustered around the calendar dates, soon pushing the Roman stories into obsolescence. The Roman year slowly gave way to the Christian year, which was eventually divided into two parts, roughly equal in time. The first half, from Advent to Ascension, tells the stories of Jesus' arrival, life, death, and resurrection. The other half tells the stories of Pentecost, Trinity, the communion of saints, and the kingship of Christ.Not everyone these days sees the calendar as a storybook, let alone a Christian one. Advent is buried under "shopping days before Christmas." The joyful disciplines of Lent are exchanged for the anxious penitentials of filling out income tax forms.As the forces of commercialism advance, forcing the Christian stories off the calendar, the Chrysostom Society has thought it timely to tell again - albeit in contemporary ways - the stories of the Christian year, stories that define God as revealed in the Lord Jesus Christ. Walter Wangerin, Jr., writes about the Annunciation, Philip Yancey about Easter Sunday, Calvin Miller about Pentecost, Madeleine L'Engle about the Transfiguration and Stephen R. Lawhead about the kingship of Christ.
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