Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice

by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Publisher:

Eerdmans

, 2016

Overview

Beautifully written meditations on fifteen well-chosen words

In What's in a Phrase? — winner of the 2015 Christianity Today Book Award in Spirituality — Marilyn McEntyre showed readers how brief scriptural phrases can evoke and invite. In Word by Word McEntyre invites readers to dwell intentionally with single words — remembering their biblical and literary contexts, considering the personal associations they bring up, and allowing them to become a focus for prayer and meditation.

McEntyre has thoughtfully chosen fifteen words, and she gives each word a week, guiding readers in examining the word from seven different angles throughout the week. She draws on the spiritual practices of lectio divina and centering prayer as she encourages readers to allow these small words to help them pause and hear the voice of the Spirit. "I invite you to discover," says McEntyre in her introduction, "how words may become little fountains of grace. How a single word may, if you hold it for a while, become a prayer."

Key Features

• Uses centering prayer and lectio divina
• Invites to dwell with and reflect on a single word over the course of a week
• Encourages readers to discover how words can become little fountains of grace

Contents

• Listen
• Accept
• Rejoice
• Receive
• Resist
• Ask
• Enjoy
• Allow
• Dare
• Let Go
• Be Still
• Leave
• Watch
• Follow
• Welcome

Praise for Word by Word

With her profound summonings, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre recovers for many contemporary readers an ancient practice that is reminiscent of rabbinic attention to the dark sayings of Scripture, those compelling, curious, often challenging passages that would nudge us into seeing more, would have us glimpse the inexhaustibility of the One in Whom we live and move and have our being, even the inexhaustibility of His Word.

Scott Cairns, author of Idiot Psalms

McEntyre has again written with conspicuous grace and truth. She sees deeply into the Christian life. She writes simply and nobly, but with an enormous weight of discernment and suggestion. Some passages here are as powerful and lovely as any I’ve encountered in years.

Cornelius Plantinga Jr., author of Reading for Preaching: The Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists

Seamlessly blending exegesis, philology, lectio divina, and prayer, Marilyn Chandler McEntyre teaches us how to listen for the divine word in all times and circumstances.

Carol Zaleski, coauthor of Prayer: A History

Product Details

• Title: Word by Word: A Daily Spiritual Practice
• Author: Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Print Publication Date: 2016
• Logos Release Date: 2022
• Pages: 223
• Era: era:contemporary
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
• Subjects: Meditations; Vocabulary › Miscellanea; Language and languages › Religious aspects--Christianity
• ISBNs: 9780802873866, 0802873863
• Resource ID: LLS:WRDWRDSPRTPRCTC
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-09-30T03:53:13Z

About Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

Marilyn Chandler McEntyre is a fellow of the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California. She also teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. McEntyre is also the author of Drawn to the Light: Poems on Rembrandt’s Religious Paintings, In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer’s Women, and Patient Poets: Illness from Inside Out.