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Preaching is a challenging, privileged, and awesome responsibility. As important as mining the text for its meaning and message and making connections to our twenty-first-century world is the responsibility to engage the imaginations of the people in the pews (or chairs). In this book, Ray Friesen–life-long preacher and retired pastor–has provided twenty examples of how to be creative and engage those imaginations. Most were written under the pressures of bi-vocational ministry (preaching forty...
| Автор | Ray R. Friesen |
Jesus was the descendant of sexually exploited women, narrowly survived a child homicide, and grew up to be the world's most prominent defender of children. Jesus reserved his harshest words for those who abused or neglected children and went so far as to say our treatment of children says everything about our view of God. Although the early church took this message to heart and distinguished itself by its treatment of children, this message has been distorted or ignored by many modern...
| Автор | Victor I. Vieth |
How can we find our way through the complexities of life in the twenty-first century? Many Christians are familiar with the pointed directives of the Ten Commandments, and many will regularly read Proverbs for bite-sized pieces of God's wisdom. When we study Proverbs within the framework of the Ten Commandments, we hear both parts of God's Word speaking in ways that are refreshingly practical and eminently memorable. Wise shows how these ancient words relate to such diverse areas of...
| Автор | Reuben Bredenhof |
The church's witness to the world falters in an age of doctrinal uncertainty, emerging experiments of life forms and behavior norms, and consequent cultural pressures. Against the disturbing influences that result, two questions demand response as the church's relation to conflicting intellectual fashions is brought under scrutiny. First, on the level of belief foundations, what is to be understood as the deposit of truth that has been entrusted to the church in the gospel it has...
| Автор | Douglas Vickers |
The church doesn't need to be more spiritual. It needs to become more human. Since God decided becoming human was right, so must the church. Jesus' language was consistently understood by nonreligious people. Elitist in-house church language may never reach the growing number of Americans without a religious background who have given up on God. This book views the church as a unique people-group and the reader as an anthropologist. Employing basic ethnographic methods, the reader...
| Автор | Paul O. Bischoff |
This book offers a challenging spirituality for a world filled with uncertainty and emotional struggle. Drawing from the work of ancient and contemporary thinkers, the author constructs a path to understanding oneself and understanding God in new and profound ways. This end is pursued by the use of spiritual exercises, mental practices which make changing one's way of life a real possibility. Further, by engaging directly with nothingness, meaninglessness, and the sheer lack of certain...
| Автор | Matthew C. Kruger |
Who's Minding the Story? examines the trajectory of the United Church of Canada since its heyday in the mid-1960s. Jeff Seaton argues that the denomination accepted the criticisms leveled at it by proponents of secular theology in the 1960s and made sweeping changes to its practices, its presentation of the Christian story, and its engagement with the world. Seaton argues that these «adjustments,» which continue to exert strong influence in the denomination today–as witnessed in the...
| Автор | Jeff Seaton |
Not so long ago it was taken for granted that God exists. Today, there is a blindness to him even though he makes his presence known to all. The book begins by showing how better to recognize his presence and understand how he reveals himself to us. The next three chapters discuss how we move from an awareness of his presence to beginning to know him, and through a knowledge of him, begin to know what his purpose is for us and how our lives are shaped by that knowledge. Having seen how he...
| Автор | M. Brett Callaway |
In a day when rules are being rewritten, guilt has come up with a bad rap. Many parents rush to emancipate their children from such troubling apprehensions–and the results are telling. This coming-of-age memoir traces the challenges of a fatherless boy growing up amidst the folly of his peers and the ever-present predators who cannot be wished away. Faced with the reality of evil, the theological concept of Original Sin looms large. This book is an observation that trouble often springs from...
| Автор | Trevor Toop |
Dao De Jing is an ancient wisdom book, purportedly written by Laozi, who flourished in the sixth century BCE according to the Chinese tradition. It is comprised of eighty-one short poems of which the source is diverse, ranging from personal life to communal and political life. It uses abundant metaphors taken from nature such as water, dust, river, wood, and valley. Laozi reminds his readers to rethink their worldview and purpose of life. Parables of Jesus also are stories about life, ranging...
| Автор | Yung Suk Kim |
The extraordinary will come through the regular practice of the ordinary. This holds true for so many things in life–including the work of gospel-ministry. The world will know the risen and exalted Lord when his people commit anew to the seemingly ordinary work of making peace. This devotional is an extended reflection on Paul's Letter to Philemon. Readers will be both moved and instructed in their call to serve as God's peacemakers. There is perhaps no greater need today among those...
| Автор | Paul S. Jeon |
This work is the first to address the living conditions of the mentally ill from the standpoint of social justice. It is the first for religion to partner with the psychiatric field from a spiritual vantage point to improve the lives of those afflicted with medical, social, and spiritual maladies. It is written by someone who has lived with the challenges of a marginalized human being, someone who has insights that no one in the mainstream has experienced. Professionals often write from the...
| Автор | Marcia A. Murphy |
The role of Evangelical Christianity in American public life is controversial. The mythology of America as a «Christian nation» and the promissory note of secularism have proved inadequate to cope with the increasing pluralism, the resilience of spirituality, and the wariness toward formal religion that mark our post-secular age. Christianity and democracy have a complex history together, but is there a future where these two great traditions draw the best out of one another? What does that...
| Автор | Ron Scott Sanders |
The hope of this book is that it awakens desire to know more intimately the God who breaks through our compartmentalization and naming. While most in the West have heard God's name as almost exclusively masculine, a child growing up in Israel would have experienced the Spirit of God, and Lady Wisdom, as female. This ruach, the breath of God, brooded over the face of the deep in the creation story like a hovering mother bird. The God of the Bible and the early church has been described with...
| Автор | Irene Alexander |
Christian natural theology is founded on the proper coordination of Scripture and the created world, what was once called «The Two Books» of God. Carrying forward the work he began in The World in the Shadow of God, Radner here reflects on the way that Scripture's creative relationship with temporal experience–ordering history rather than being ordered by history–opens up the natural world to its essential Scriptural meaning. Like the earlier volume, poetic description is offered as a...
| Автор | Ephraim Radner |
At Pentecost there was no fire. The divided tongues like fire came down to each one of the disciples and they spoke different languages so that all the people there could understand what they said without translators. In the OT times, God appointed his prophets by touching their mouths and putting his word into their mouths so that they might declare it to his people. Therefore, a prophet was the spokesman of God, and is usually called «the mouth of the Lord.» Jesus, called the Word as well as...
| Автор | Seock-Tae Sohn |
Suicide, for years, has been a public health crisis in the Western world. Yet more and more states and countries are allowing physician assisted suicide or euthanasia. Have you wondered whether it is actually wrong to end your life if you are mortally ill? Susan Windley-Daoust engages in an extended discussion with a game dialogue partner who thinks that there are five good reasons to employ physician-assisted suicide–and proves those common reasons (or «tricks of the heart») may be...
| Автор | Susan Windley-Daoust |
A motion picture chronicling the last adventures of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), Public Enemies was met with much bafflement upon its 2009 release. Director Michael Mann's terse storytelling and unorthodox use of high-definition digital cameras challenged viewers' familiarity with Hollywood's historical gangland elegance while highlighting Public Enemies' own place in a medium–and culture–undergoing sweeping technological change. In Off the Map, Niles Schwartz...
| Автор | Niles Schwartz |
Veterans who experience the overwhelming trauma of war are often still stuck in the far country. In the aftermath, many feel abandoned by God. Adam D. Tietje suggests that Holy Saturday, Christ's descent into hell, is the place where God fully identifies with our God-abandonment. In light of the resurrection, it can be seen that the complete hiddenness of God on Holy Saturday is in fact the fullness of revelation. God has chosen to be revealed precisely through the cross and the grave. The...
| Автор | Adam D. Tietje |
How do we love people who we are afraid of? The political climate of the US in recent years has revealed significant divisions in our nation and our neighborhoods, divisions often fueled by fear. For those who follow a call and commitment to love our neighbors, how do we love in the midst of this fear? In this book, Cassie Trentaz looks that question in the eyes and asks her friends and neighbors in four communities currently facing pressure and often viewed with suspicion–immigrants,...
| Автор | Cassie J. E. H. Trentaz |
What does it mean to inhabit the land of Palestine and Israel justly? How should Christians understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict? Alain Epp Weaver examines answers to these questions, paying particular attention to the theologies of sumud, or steadfastness, advanced by Palestinian Christian theologians, while also presenting other Christian, Jewish, and Muslim responses. Contextualizing these theologies within Palestinian and Israeli Jewish histories, Epp Weaver introduces readers to the...
| Автор | Alain Epp Weaver |
Deolito Vistar brings a new perspective to the interpretation of the temple incident–a key event in Jesus' life–by approaching the subject not from the «historical Jesus» point of view but from that of the authors of the Gospels. Using composition criticism as a method, Vistar sensitively analyzes the four Gospels' accounts of the incident and shows areas of commonalities and crucial areas where the four evangelists have their own distinctive understanding of what Jesus meant by his...
| Автор | Deolito V. Vistar Jr. |
How does a missional mindset or perspective impact the way we read Scripture? How does the Bible speak to and through a missional disciple? And seriously, what kind of God is God? A missional reading of Scripture is pivotal to helping the church find its way back to its true vocation and to helping newly forming missional communities follow the triune God revealed in Jesus. To the extent that the church is absorbed with itself and its own comfort and agendas, it has forsaken the God revealed...
| Автор | Bret Wells |
The congruence of the theology of Paul and Luke is a matter of debate. In particular, according to many scholars, the soteriologies of Paul and Luke are divergent. This volume argues that the usage of καλέω language by both Paul and Luke suggests that it may be a common element in their soteriologies. The author demonstrates that καλέω language is an important concept in the soteriologies of Luke and Paul and that although there are contrasts, there are a number of points of comparison. Crucial...
| Автор | Ian Hussey |