Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

Product DescriptionChristianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year Winner - Spiritual FormationChristianity Today's 2018 Book of the Year - Beautiful OrthodoxyA Beloved Bestseller Now in Hardcover In the overlooked moments and routines of our day, we can become aware of God's presence in surprising ways. How do we embrace the sacred in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred? Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Each chapter looks at something?making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys?that the author does every day. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Tish Harrison Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday. Each activity is related to a spiritual practice as well as an aspect of our Sunday worship. Come and discover the holiness of your every day.Review"From the photograph of a peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich on the cover, Tish Harrison Warren's debut work, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, signals that it's rooted in the quotidian, the humble humdrum of day-after-day existence. This is spiritual guidance for the bed-maker, the teeth-brusher, the traffic-snarled among us. This is one ordinary day turned inside out, its hallowed script revealed, liturgical underpinnings exposed. . . . She beautifully ties making the bed to the Creation story, to God's making beauty from chaos. . . . it's the nitty-gritty of daily work where Warren illuminates holiness. She writ's of 'tiny theophanies,' church-bell moments, that jolt her?and us, her readers?to sacred attention. The purity of her vision, the clarity of her writing, makes effortless work of the notion that the small acts of our everydays are what shape us into the sacred vessels we are meant to be." -- Barbara Mahany, the Chicago Tribune, February 28, 2017"Warren's message flies in the face of our culture's love of distraction and pursuit of extreme sensation. We would do well to slow down for a bit and hear her out. . . . Liturgy of the Ordinary isn't the first book written in praise of prosaic moments, and Warren's isn't the first voice to counsel slowing down. But Warren admirably explores these themes from both a theological and practical perspective. Her words can help us grasp what my grandfather learned through a lifetime of commonsense faith?and a lot of sweeping: The 'new life into which we're being baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.'" -- Jamie A. Hughes, Christianity Today, December 2016"Sunday liturgy shapes our faith through its mix of prayers, songs, Scriptures, and sermons. We hear from and are shaped by God through these practices. Under Tish Harrison Warren's insightful gaze, our seemingly 'boring' daily routines become a liturgy of their own?calling us to confession and community, Scripture and Sabbath, baptism and embodiment. Some spiritual directors listen for God's invitations in our prayers. Tish discerns God's invitations in our everyday life. She reminds us that God intends to speak, to invite, and to transform us in every situation we find ourselves in. Tish confronts us with the reality that God will not be confined to 1.5 hours on a Sunday. She is the prophet and pastor that our churches desperately need. At least this harried working dad needs her voice. I am approaching the daily routines of housework and homemaking with my wife and kids with newfound expectation and hope." -- Gregory Jao, vice president director of campus engagement, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship"Sometimes the difference between drudgery and epiphany is just seeing things from the right angle, a frame that reframes everything, even the mundane. This marvelous little book is that certain slant of light that illuminates the everyday as an