The picture above shows the image of a rosary. First are the introductory prayers located above the silver Medal: with the Cross you make the Sign of the Cross, and say the Apostles' Creed. Then one prays the Our Father (rose bead) and three Hail Marys (blue bead), followed by the Glory and Fatima prayers. Then one announces the First Mystery, and prays the Our Father.

Below the Medal are 50 blue beads in groups of ten, each bead representing the Hail Mary, separated by rose beads representing the Our Father.
One Our Father and ten Hail Marys comprise one decade of the Rosary.

There are five decades for one group of five Mysteries of the Rosary. You begin each decade reciting one of the Mysteries of the Rosary, then the Our Father, then ten Hail Marys, then the Glory and Fatima Prayers. One decade is prayed for each of the Five Joyful, Luminous (Mysteries of Light), Sorrowful, or Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary.

At the end of the Rosary, there are concluding prayers that may be said, such as the Hail Holy Queen, the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel, and the Memorare with a petition. One ends with the Sign of the Cross.

The Prayers of the Rosary are first listed, followed by a description of the Mysteries of the Rosary.

The Prayers of The Rosary

Prayer is the opening of one's heart and soul in a conversation with God, and thus is an expression of faith in a relationship with God. Humility is the foundation of prayer, as we learn in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). Jesus teaches us to pray: "All that you ask for in prayer, believe that you will receive it and it shall be yours" (Mark 11:24).

Prayer at home with the family is the first place to educate children in prayer! Forms of prayer include Adoration and Praise, Petition, Intercession, and Thanksgiving. There are three kinds of prayer: Vocal, Meditative, and Contemplative. Vocal prayer is the form of prayer in groups, as in Church. Meditation is a quest to understand the Christian life, in order to respond to what the Lord is asking. One may meditate on the Bible or the Rosary or other holy pursuits. One meditates in order to discern and come to the light: "Lord, what do you want me to do?" The Carmelite St. Teresa of Avila calls contemplative prayer a "close sharing between friends," a conversation with God in our hearts. Remember to be loving and thoughtful in your prayer with the Lord!

Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and throughout the New Testament continues the tradition of prayer found in Hebrew Scripture, our Old Testament, exemplified by the Patriarchs of Israel such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David. Examples of prayer in the Bible are the Psalms, Matthew 7:7, Matthew 18:20, Luke 9:35, John 17:11, Philippians 4:6, and James 5:14.

And listen in silence after you pray - you may receive an answer! 

The ideal prayer is the one Christ Jesus taught us, the Lord's Prayer, the Our Father (Matthew 6:9-13).  All Christian faiths say the Lord's Prayer.

THE OUR FATHER

"These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, 

that everything written about me in the law of Moses 

and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled." 

It really doesn’t take much.

It might happen when you hear your parents’ favorite Christmas carol. Immediately the song transports you out of your sterile workday back to your childhood, to a living room bursting with tinsel, gifts, and anticipation.

Or maybe it happens when you smell the spices of cider moving through your house this Christmas and you half-expect the memory of your grandfather to be standing in your kitchen, bragging about his perfect recipe, through his playful grin.

Worship with All Five Senses

Of course, the memories aren’t always that idyllic. For some, they’re unwelcome intrusions into a life under construction. Good or bad, sweet or bitter, the memories still come each Christmas. Just one small trigger, and everything we’ve loved, lost, and treasured seems to swell up in our hearts.

Nostalgia arrives through our senses. What we hear, see, taste, touch, and smell is the ink we use to write our mental autobiographies. We cannot escape our memories, because we cannot escape our senses, just like we cannot escape ourselves.

This is beautiful because we were created this way for a purpose. God gives us five senses to help us worship him: the sights, sounds, smells, textures, and tastes testify to the diversity of God’s gifts and to the depth of worship God deserves.

But in our pursuit to conform our hearts and minds to Christ, we often forget the physical elements in worship. When we lose this dimension, we often lose what it means to be altogether human, and ironically we lose a principal way God means to transform our hearts and minds. Our Lord consistently builds worship around our senses.

Remember the Passover

Standing on the precipice of Israel’s chaotic redemption, God commands his people to sit down for a meal — a directive that may seem slightly out of place and misguided. But when we see this scene in light of the whole drama, God’s instructions are perfect. The exodus is not just about God leading Israel out of Egypt; it is about God leading Israel into lifelong worship.

Passover is theological nostalgia. It defines the redemptive experience of a whole generation, so much so that God commanded an encore performance every year (Exodus 12:14). With every lamb, they smelled redemption. When they tasted bitter herbs, they tasted God’s goodness. When they fastened their sandals, every step reminded them of his grace. Every time they dipped hyssop into blood, they painted their theology.

Remember the Temple

The temple is the instrument God uses to overwhelm his people from the outside in. Its worship patterns shock each of the physical senses to press his purposes into his people. God tuned Israel and her priests to his presence and praise through the taste of showbread, the heat of the burnt offerings, the scent of cedar and incense, the gloss of gold, and the echoes of prayers. The temple’s multi-sensory experience brought the whole person before the presence and glory of God (2 Chronicles 7:1–2).

Like the Passover, every visit to the temple etched smells, touches, tastes, sounds, and sights into the worshiper’s consciousness. After leaving the temple, when a familiar scent or sound broke their routine, they were pulled back in memory to the place where God was present, where their sins went to die, and where God’s promises were on full display.

Remember the Incarnation

In Christ, God took on flesh and tabernacled in the midst of his people (John 1:14). In Christ, we see God and, simultaneously, what it means to be truly human.

This is why Jesus’s ministry invades every part of us, including our senses. Through mud-caked eyes, the blind can see. Through a touch of his garment, he heals the broken. Through voicing a simple prayer, the multitudes taste bread and fish without end.

In Jesus, the one who created our senses entered his world to redeem them. He comes to touch, smell, hear, see, and taste death for his people so that you and I may do what we were made to do: worship him with every part of our being (Romans 12:1).

We were made for this. God calls us to taste this Bread of Life, to drink this life-giving water, to see this light of the world, to smell the sheep on our Good Shepherd, to hear his question, “Who do you say that I am?” We were made to touch his nail-scarred hands and see him standing outside the empty tomb (John 20:27).

Remember the Good News

We need to hear and experience the gospel over and over again. God has made a way for this. Jesus gives us new-covenant nostalgia in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. And through the waters of baptism, we see, taste, hear, smell, and feel what it means to move from death to life.

God saves all of us — redeeming and reinterpreting our senses, too — so that we can worship him more fully. So, taste and see — and touch, hear, and smell — that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). You were made for this — every part of you.

James is a good friend of mine, and he knows God in a way that I can only aspire to. We first met over breakfast. I could immediately feel his deep love for Jesus and his great passion for people. That doesn't mean, however, that James wasn't at least a little confused about love for God and neighbor. After a few minutes of conversation about the Bible, James found his opportunity (a pause in the conversation) to tell me that he thought I cared too much about doctrine. “Doctrine divides, don’t you think? We just need to love people. That’s what it’s all about!”

In a world where feelings are easily hurt and love is often superficial, James had come to see love and truth as being in extreme tension. The author of the Second Letter of John sees things very differently.

As I got to know James better, I continually went back to 2 John to help clarify my own thoughts on the relationship between love and truth, pulling from its deep wells and directly into the heart of my new friend. By God’s grace, James came to see that love and truth are two sides of the same coin, and has since grown in love by strengthening his understanding of truth.

Is it possible that you need to find a better balance between love and truth? Do you see truth and love in competition with one another? If so, I’d like to invite you to take a cursory glance at John’s second letter with me. I really believe that if you do, it will shape your thoughts on the matter in a way that is much more in line with the Bible than contemporary American culture.

Old Truth, Good Truth

There’s nothing new about what I shared with James over the next several weeks and months. When people see two ideas that seem to be in competition with one another, they oftentimes try to reconcile the issue by inventing a third way.

But love and truth being two sides of the same coin is nothing new. We’ve been called to love since the beginning (Leviticus 19:18), and to do so with all of our reasoning faculties (Deuteronomy 6:5). When John calls his readers to walk in love, he is not giving them a new command, but simply echoing that which has been since the beginning (2 John 5).

What Is Hate?

To lie about Jesus is anti-love. The world is full of people who lie about who Jesus is (2 John 7). Such a one is the anti-Christ, and is characterized by his robust commitment to deception. There is nothing loving about lying to someone about God. No, that is hate. In 2 John we see the apostle dealing with those who claim to be loving, but actually show their true colors by lying about who Jesus is (2 John 7). Lying about Jesus is unloving because it bears false witness about God (1 Corinthians 15:15) and leads us to break the first and second commandments (Exodus 20:3–4). If we worship a God that we’ve made up in our own minds, it is no different than worshiping a God that we’ve made out of wood with our own hands. Neither is real. Neither can save us, for we are merely worshiping a God of our own invention, not the God of the Bible.

On Guard

John tells us to watch out for those who lie about who Jesus is because there is nothing less at stake than our very souls (2 John 8). The risk is so great that John calls us to not even give the opportunity for the watching world to think that we’re on the same team as such a person (2 John 10). To do so would be to take part in wickedness itself (2 John 11).

Over the course of our early friendship, my heart was heavy to make sure that James understood this grave reality, with all of its weighty implications. I knew after the first two minutes of our first conversation that he rightly understood the importance of love. That one’s a no brainer. After all, the one who fails to love has not God (1 John 4:8). For this very reason, many who love doctrine more than our brothers and sisters would do well to reread 1 John. Nevertheless, I couldn’t let James continue without reminding him of 2 John 9: “Everyone who goes on ahead and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, does not have God.”

Are love and truth in competition? Absolutely not! To love is to tell the truth about Jesus, and to talk about God with humility-driven precision is to love him and our neighbors well. Brothers, watch yourselves (2 John 8), abide in Christ’s teachings (verse 9), obey his commands (verse 6), and reject anything or anyone that says anything different (verses 10–11) so that your joy may be complete in receiving your full reward (verse 8).

Article by Sean DeMars

Beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. (Jude 20–21)

 How remarkable that we are charged to keep ourselves in the love of God.

Of all God’s perfections, why highlight his love? When encouraging fellow Christians to persevere in the faith, why not pinpoint his justice or his patience, or even his mercy?

We dare not ignore Jude’s charge or minimize the Father’s love. As Charles Spurgeon put it, “When the love of God is shed abroad in the heart, the idols will soon depart and the love of sin will take its flight.” Holiness is about new affection, not mere avoidance. We are to keep ourselves in God’s love in order that we might expel the idols of our hearts with the light of his affection.

But what exactly do we mean when we say “the love of God”?

The Beam of God’s Love

We learn from 1 John that if we do not love, we do not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:8), and the full revelation of his love has come in Jesus Christ. “By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16).

Jesus Christ, and all that he accomplished, is the climactic expression of God’s love. And what exactly has Jesus accomplished? Reconciliation: the restoration of relationship. God has overcome the disunion in which we once lived — by reconciling us to himself through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son. Jesus leads us to the very fountain of eternal love. John Owen beautifully paints the picture:

Though there be no light for us but in the beams, yet we may by beams see the sun, which is the fountain of it. Though all refreshment actually lie in the streams, yet by them we are led up to the fountain. Jesus, in respect to the love of the Father, is the beam, the stream; wherein though actually all our light and refreshment lies, yet by him we are led to the fountain, the sun of eternal love itself. (Communion with the Triune God, 112)
Those of us whose lips are parched from sucking on the sands of idolatry, whose souls are shriveled from being hidden under the shadows of lesser loves, whose hearts long to drink full from his cup and be flooded with an inextinguishable light, we need only turn to Jesus.

In Jesus, we experience the love that the Father has for us.

See and Receive God’s Love

Keeping ourselves in God’s love begins with vision. It begins by asking the Spirit to help us see the Father rightly. And not only see, but also then believe that the Father’s heart toward us — no matter our circumstances — is for our ultimate good.

In order to kill the idols in our hearts and keep ourselves in God’s love, we need to recognize his heart toward us is one of love, not criticism. It begins here — seeing the Father’s heart as kind, tender, loving, and pleased with us in Jesus Christ. We plead with the Spirit, who pours the love of God into our hearts (Romans 5:5), to help us see and believe the Father’s love, rather than our own natural notions of what God must be like toward a sinner like me.

Many of us are weary in our communion with God because we’ve passed over this step — we haven’t received his love — and as a result, our hearts are restless. Our souls are on a 24/7 mission to find their rest. We are restless because we struggle to simply see him as loving.

Again, Owen helpfully notes that “every discovery of God without [seeing him as loving] will but make the soul fly from him.” Why will every other discovery of God result in our flying from him if we don’t see and believe his love for us? Because if God’s sovereignty and authority were at work against us, rather than for us, we would all rush to hide from him. We would buckle under the weight of living to gain his approval versus living as approved sons and daughters.

So we begin our communion with God resting in the forgiveness found in Jesus Christ and our adoption into the Father’s family by seeing and believing the Father’s unchanging love. And we don’t just begin here. We continue.

We expend effort to keep ourselves in his love.

Feed the Flame of Godly Affection

Very practically, our communion with God should incorporate asking the Spirit to help us see and believe who the Father is toward us in Jesus. We linger over his promises in Scripture and ponder our debts to God that are absolutely overwhelming, and in so doing we let our affections rise with the Father’s love and see our hearts enflamed to delight in him because he first loved us. As C.S. Lewis observed in his famous sermon “The Weight of Glory,”

To please God . . . to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness . . . to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.

Seeing the Father’s heart towards us as loving will feed the flame of our godly affection. And as we see and believe the love of God, we will delight in God and learn what it is to walk in joy, by faith, even when our circumstances in this life seem anything but joyful.

Article by Joseph Tenney

I believe that you're great, that there's something magnificent about you. Regardless of what has happened to you in your life. Regardless of how young or old you think you might be.
The moment you begin to "think properly," this something that's within you, this power within you that's greater than the world, it will begin to emerge. It will take over your life. It will feed you. It will clothe you. It will guide you, protect you, direct you, sustain your very existance. If you let it. Now that is what I know, for sure. ( Rev. Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith )

Buddhism and slavery

Slavery would seem to be incompatible with a fundamental idea of Buddhism; that of freeing oneself of attachments:
Thus the ideal community of the selfless arahants form an ideal, or a standard on which ethical and moral judgement of lay societies are based.
Thus such violations of human rights as slavery, torture, etc. could only be a movement in the opposite direction to the ideal, for these violations all result from strong attachment to the self of the violators of human rights.
Wayne R. Husted, Damien V. Keown, Charles S. Prebish, Buddhism and Human Rights, 1998

Buddhist teachings don't explicitly forbid slavery, but the eightfold path says that engaging in trade in living beings is not a right form of livelihood. This appears to ban Buddhists from engaging in the slave trade.

Christianity and slavery

Like most holy books, the Bible can be used to support particular viewpoints, and slavery is no exception. There are numerous references to slavery in the Bible which can be interpreted to condemn or condone this practice, and even those verses which appear unambiguous, are far from clear when scrutinised.
For instance, scriptural passages from the Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy which appear to denounce slavery actually condemn enslavement in certain circumstances rather than slavery in general. On the other hand, although St Paul's New Testament epistles fail to condemn slavery, they argue that slaves must be treated fairly as 'brethren'.
Historical records show that Islam and Christianity played an important role in enslavement in Africa. The Arab-controlled Trans-Saharan slave trade helped to institutionalise slave trading on the continent. And during the 'age of expedition', European Christians witnessed caravans loaded with Africans en-route to the Middle East. Others arriving much later in West Africa observed slavery in African societies, leading them to assume that African enslavement was intrinsic to the continent.
For many of these early European explorers, the Bible was not only regarded as infallible, it was also their primary reference tool and those looking for answers to explain differences in ethnicity, culture, and slavery, found them in Genesis 9: 24-27, which appeared to suggest that it was all a result of 'sin'.
In the Genesis passage, Africans were said to be the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, who was cursed by his father after looking at his naked form. Moreover, in Genesis 10, the 'Table of Nations' describes the origins of the different 'races' and reveals that one of the descendants of Ham is 'Cush' - Cush and the 'Cushites' were people associated with the Nile region of North Africa.

Slavery in Islam

Slaves were owned in all Islamic societies, both sedentary and nomadic, ranging from Arabia in the centre to North Africa in the west and to what is now Pakistan and Indonesia in the east. Some Islamic states, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Crimean Khanate, and the Sokoto caliphate [Nigeria], must be termed slave societies because slaves there were very important numerically as well as a focus of the polities' energies.Encyclopaedia Britannica - Slavery
Many societies throughout history have practised slavery, and Muslim societies were no exception.
It's thought that as many people were enslaved in the Eastern slave trade as in the Atlantic slave trade.
It's ironic that when the Atlantic slave trade was abolished the Eastern trade expanded, suggesting that for some Africans the abolition of the Atlantic trade didn't lead to freedom, but merely changed their slave destination.
It's misleading to use phrases such as 'Islamic slavery' and 'Muslim slave trade', even though slavery existed in many Muslim cultures at various times, since the Atlantic slave trade is not called the Christian slave trade, even though most of those responsible for it were Christians.

Judaism and slavery

And as for thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, whom thou mayest have: of the nations that are round about you, of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids.
Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them may ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they have begotten in your land; and they may be your possession.
And ye may make them an inheritance for your children after you, to hold for a possession: of them may ye take your bondmen for ever; but over your brethren the children of Israel ye shall not rule, one over another, with rigour.Leviticus 25:44-46
The Torah does not promote slavery, but neither does it condemn it. For the Jewish people, the Torah laid down laws that regulated the practice so it became, in theory, more humane.
Who could be enslaved?
In the Torah, both Jews and non Jews could be kept as slaves. Jewish slaves were to be treated more like servants than possessions, and were indentured for a fixed period rather than forever.
Jewish slaves
The Hebrew servant, Scripture says, must not be treated with vigor. This was held to mean no needless work must be imposed on his for the purpose of keeping him under discipline... Nor must he be put to bondsman's work i.e any humiliating task, such as only slaves perform... The master of a Hebrew bondman (or a bondmaid) must place him on an equality with himself in meat and drink, in lodging and in bed clothes, and must act towards him in a brotherly manner; for the Scripture always speaks of him as "thy brother". Hence it is said: "Whoever buys a Hebrew servant buys a master for himself."JewishEncyclopedia.com.