This book focuses on worship in the letters of Paul in an effort to shed some light upon this key theme and bring the various dimensions of its significance into the foreground of Pauline studies. Each of the thirteen New Testament letters attributed to Paul are treated exclusively from the aspect of worship, as understood in its most comprehensive sense in the biblical tradition, with the liturgical and the ethical facets of worship held in dyn ...
Doing Justice: Knowing God represents a fundamentally new departure in ethical theory. Drawing on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, John Milbank, and Franklin Gamwell, it argues that that modern and postmodern moral theory is fundamentally inadequate, and that the current crisis of values can be resolved only on the basis of a substantive vision of the Good. But it goes beyond these thinkers to argue that such a vision must be grounded metaphysica ...
Here is a vivid, poetic, and evocative story of the painter Vincent van Gogh's struggle to become his true self. The author listens in on Vincent's most intimate, frequently startling thoughts on a host of topics, drawn from three volumes of his correspondence and his 900 extant paintings. What emerges is the portrait of an artist whose spiritual vision was borne of an agonizingly prolonged experience of the «dark night of the soul» th ...
If radical postmodernism offers nothing more than arbitrary fictions and modernism is coldly but meaninglessly objective, where is reality? Apologizing for God argues that reality rests in the lives we live in history. In other words, it argues that living as understood on the basis of the incarnational nature of Christianity is an appropriate response to our current cultural situation. Partly philosophical, partly theological, and deeply Christ ...
Christians get confused about exactly what to do with the commands in the Bible. Do we need to give up pork and shellfish? Is it a sin to eat roadkill or to eat blood sausage? Is it a sin to wear mixed fabric? Is cross-dressing a crime? What about tattoos? What do we do with that command not to boil a kid in its mother's milk? And if none of these commands are for Christians today, then which Bible commands are for today? This book is desi ...
The Nonconformists of England and Wales, the Protestants outside the Church of England, were particularly numerous in the Victorian years. From being a small minority in the eighteenth century, they had increased to represent nearly half the worshipping nation by the middle years of the nineteenth century. These Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, and others helped shape society and made their mark in politics. This bo ...
Very few in the history of the church have not struggled with the dogma of the Trinity. Those who have not dismissed it as incomprehensible gibberish have found it a battlefield for division and misunderstanding. Even Christians, who adhere to the faith of the Creeds, have often found such dogma difficult to grasp. Richard of Saint Victor, a twelfth-century Scottish monk and Prior in the Abbey of Saint Victor, is emblematic in this struggle: «I ...
Divine healing is commonly practiced today throughout Christendom and plays a significant part in the advance of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such wide acceptance of the doctrine within Protestantism did not come without hesitation or controversy. The prevailing view saw suffering as a divine chastening designed for growth in personal holiness, and something to be faced with submission and endurance. It was not until the nine ...
The Light in the Mirror focuses on Richard Hawkins, raised by his Uncle Mac, following the death of his family. A car accident plunges Richard into a coma, and into a dream world where he is reborn in to the family he never knew; he grows up in the turbulent 60s and 70s. Awakening in the hospital, he tells his uncle and girlfriend, Melissa, how real his life in the coma seemed. The experience gives him a new understanding of how the 60s and 70s ...