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Our Bestselling Lent & Easter Books for Children

Tue, 30 Jan 2024 13:21:00 +0000

Explore our bestselling Lent and Easter books for children. Add our favourite Easter books to your basket - perfect for entertaining little ones this Easter!

Lent Starts On March 2nd

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 11:55:00 +0000

This year, Lent begins on Wednesday, March 2nd - also known as Ash Wednesday. It's never too early to start preparing for Lent. Sign up for our daily Lent reflections delivered straight to your inbox and explore our wonderful selection of Lent titles, including Embracing Justice, the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book for 2022.

The Entombment

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 12:22:00 +0000

'When Titian painted the Entombment, the plague was raging in Venice. The consciousness of death must have been on everyone’s mind, and perhaps specially on Titian’s, because he was very old'. In this blog post you will find an extract from The Art of Holy Week and Easter by Sister Wendy Beckett. Many will agree that this specific extract is extremely touching at this present time.

Taking Action to Save Water

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 13:03:00 +0000

Water is a key theme throughout Saying Yes to Life: The Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent Book 2020. Whilst Ruth Valerio reflects on light and water in relation to the Days of Creation (Genesis 1), she also relates this back to the environmental, ethical and social concern that we face today with Climate Change. In this extract from the book Ruth explores three ways that we as individuals and as churches can take action to save water.

News from the Independent Publishing Guild Awards

Fri, 12 Apr 2019 17:04:00 +0000

Struggling to find space? Follow Jesus into the desert.

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 09:56:00 +0000

The desert is a vast and beautiful. The colours of the sky and the sand and the piercing blue against the reds and the yellow, are intense. A few years ago, on an 8 days retreat in the Egyptian desert, three days of which were solitary and fasting, I was struck by the space and sheer beauty of the desert.

It was a struggle to get away, with four children at home and a fulltime job, but I needed space and after all, many people, including Jesus, have gone into the desert and have found solace and purpose.

I often feel I need space, space from the constant demands of daily life such as e mails and domestic tasks. I find that when I have a moment spare all too easily my hand can move to my phone or instead of sitting down I move to clear something away. I need to space to think, to remember who I am and space to breathe, for my body to stretch, to be alone, but I struggle to make it happen, even for a moment.

The desert provided me with space to expand because there, of course, the usual demands could not crowd in. At first I was struck by the beauty of the sky at night and landscape by day, a beauty that stays with me whenever I think of those biblical stories of the desert.

Gemma Simmonds on things she'd tell her younger self

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 11:13:00 +0000

Gemma Simmonds is a religious sister of the Congregation of Jesus. She began her ministry teaching at secondary level in the UK and went on from there to missionary work among women and street children in Brazil. She trained in Christian spirituality at the Ignatian spirituality centre in Wernersville, USA and this led to work as a retreat giver and spiritual director and as chaplain in the Universities of Cambridge and London. Alongside this she spent 26 years as a volunteer chaplain in Europe’s largest women’s prison. Until 2018 Gemma taught pastoral theology at Heythrop College in the University of London. She now teaches at the Margaret Beaufort Institute of Theology in Cambridge.

Gemma has been involved in training others for Christian ministry for nearly 30 years. She is an international speaker and lecturer, a simultaneous translator and a regular broadcaster on religious programmes for the BBC.

We asked her about the advice she’d give her younger self.