Sometimes we want to walk outside of ourselves. We want to stretch our imaginations by strolling in someone else's shoes for a few minutes. Of Man and Animals is a book for looking through other people's eyes. In these twenty fictional short stories, the reader is invited to laugh, cry, ponder, fear, love, and hate with a series of different characters. These stories emphasize the interconnected essence of our lives and how each particular moment carries an array of interesting...
Pastor Payne Donovan was weary to the bone. He often wondered if he made any difference in people's lives or if his church had any impact on the world around him. In the midst of Payne's despair, George Carlson, head of a genetic laboratory called SarkiSystems, offers hope to revive and embolden Payne's ministry by a merging of faith and technology. Dazzled by George's charisma, Payne agrees to go to a meeting and soon finds himself deeply entangled in a plan to revive the...
In News from the Kingdom of God, minister and poet David Breeden introduces readers to a Jesus hidden for fifteen hundred years. This new translation of The Gospel of Thomas not only reveals the incisive spiritual vision of Jesus, but also the poetry of his thinking. These meditations include wisdom from diverse religious traditions to delineate a spiritual practice at once mystical and profoundly grounded in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. Jesus lives in these pages, a profound...
Karl Barth's lectures on the first chapter of the Gospel of John, delivered at Muenster in 1925-26 and at Bonn in 1933, came at an important time in his life, when he was turning his attention more fully to dogmatics. Theological interpretation was thus his primary concern, especially the relation between revelation and the witness to revelation, which helped to shape his formulation of the role of the written (and spoken) word vis-a-vis the incarnate Word. The text is divided into three...
The prophets exhort us to defend the poor; but we lionize the rich. They assure us that chariots and missiles cannot save us; yet we seek refuge under their cold shadow. They urge us to forgo idolatry; but we compulsively fetishize the work of our hands. Above all, the prophetic Word warns us that the way to liberation in a world locked down by the spiral of violence, the way to redemption in a world of enslaving addictions, the way to genuine transformation in a world of deadened conscience and...
This collection of poetic reflections is a rich resource for a faithful imagination. Michael Coffey's poems explore the deep questions and joyful affirmations of Christian faith. Never settling for easy answers or straight-forward interpretations, Coffey's writing invites the reader into new spiritual territory where the strange and unexpected, the beautiful and painful, become an encounter with the holy. Anyone preparing to preach or teach on biblical texts will find here words...
Mulled Psalms is a book of poetry. Using the metaphor of mulled cider or wine, it is a collection of carefully brewed, distilled, and spiced beverages. The basic ingredient in each of these 150 poems is the biblical psalm of the corresponding number. Thus, the length, subject, tone, and other aspects of a specific poem resemble that of the original psalm. Because each psalm was mulled individually, at varying times and temperatures of Spirit-fire, each comes alive as a new entity. Many are...
What, pray tell, does a faithful urban ministry require if not a triadic relationship of prayer, justice, and hope? Could such a theologically conjunctive relationship of prayer, justice, and hope fortify urban ministry and challenge students and practitioners to ponder and practice beyond the box? Frequently, justice is collapsed to charity, hope into wishful thinking or temporarily arrested despair, and prayer a grasp at quick-fix interventions. An urban ministry's steadfast public and...
In Christians and Jews Together, Stuart Dauermann challenges Christians and Jews to discover new ways to partner together in serving what God is up to in the world. He imaginatively connects the thinking of Paul the Apostle with the Prophet Ezekiel, forming a previously unexplored bridge between Jews and Christians. This is an excellent resource for Christians seeking new ways to understand and share their faith within the context of deep respect for their Jewish neighbors, relatives, and...
The Book of Unknowing meditates on John's confrontation with the incandescent Jesus, a figure of our desire for immortality. Guiding us through the Gospel's coming to grips with Jesus, the poet David Sten Herrstrom prefers sparking the imagination to arguing a thesis, as he explores John's own obsessions, such as image (light), symbol (water), sign (water to wine), shapeliness (symmetry), loves (Peter, Mary's), and above all, words (the Word, the body of Jesus). The result...