As the world watched the biggest global epidemic in history evolve, many anticipated that Christians would embrace those who were affected just as Jesus during his time embraced those who were sick and dying. Mostly, the Christian church stood back and observed. Sometimes Christians responded with stigma and discrimination. Many who sought refuge in the churches–churches where they had served the sick and the poor–were turned away as they now so ...
Through the available patristic writings Caesar and the Lamb focuses on the attitudes of the earliest Christians on war and military service. Kalantzis not only provides the reader with many new translations of pre-Constantinian texts, he also tells the story of the struggle of the earliest Church, the communities of Christ at the margins of power and society, to bear witness to the nations that enveloped them as they transformed the dominant na ...
Not a reference tool, this unique work is a teaching-learning guide to studying the earliest Gospel. The focus is on showing how rather than on telling what. «Maps» followed by leading questions and statements help both faculty and students to see how the Evangelist adopted and adapted his sacred texts (as well as Jewish and Greco-Roman resources) in light of his convictions about and experience of Jesus. Noticing the dominance of words and them ...
What is truth? Philosophical explorations have merely presupposed truth, rather than define it. The inscrutable nature of truth is a recognition of human finitude, which is both Socratic (the recognition that one does not know) and non-Socratic (the recognition that truth has to be given from without). This opens the way to locating truth outside the individual, which can be appropriated only when the condition to recognize it is given. For Kier ...
Christians are called to minister to people in prison. But most know next to nothing about prisons, the needs of the people in them, or the biblical basis for addressing those needs. Love in a Cauldron of Misery fills that void. This book provides a brief historical perspective that orients the reader and a discussion, mainly in the words of people with real experience, of what prisons and prisoners are really like and why the need for ministry ...
The sacred Scriptures, stylized in poetry After thorough readings through the Bible and study of biblical languages, The Haiku Bible started as an effort to make better sense of the complex and nuanced anthology. While rich in content and layered with meaning, the overarching themes of Scripture can be easily lost in the chasm of time and context that separate us from the original authors. Reflecting the styles and genres of the ...
This is a book about Christianity in one particular region in Kenya. It walks into churches, listens to sermons, dances to music, and interviews the people sitting in the pews, all with the aim of understanding how spiritual power enables these churches to function as agents within their contemporary society. Ecclesiastical communities in Africa draw upon divine power in order to engage in modernity-related topics. Humans are not unrespo ...
Utilizing resources from Martin Luther and the Lutheran tradition, this study offers an understanding of the gospel as promise as key to addressing the challenge of relating the missio Dei to a generous, constructive approach toward the religious other. In its construction of a Lutheran missiology, it retrieves and reappropriates four resources from the Lutheran tradition: the gospel as promise, the law/gospel distinction, a theology of grace as ...
At once a lament-psalm and a love song, Grief's Liturgy records Gerald Postema's work and worship of grief upon the loss of his wife, a year's work aided by the companions–poetry and prayers, icons and images, music and silence–that sat patiently with him. Structured around the liturgy of the Divine Office, reflections in each «hour» take on a distinctive expressive and emotional tone and fall into a jagged, broken rhythm over the ...