In this wide-ranging collection of essays Ronald E. Osborn explores the politically subversive and nonviolent anarchist dimensions of Christian discipleship in response to dilemmas of power, suffering, and war. Essays engage texts and thinkers from Homer's Iliad, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament to portraits of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Noam Chomsky, and Elie Wiesel. This book also analyzes the Allied bombing of civilians in World War II, ...
Grief is universal, permeating all avenues of life on planet earth; no one can escape it. Pain and sorrow come in all different shapes and sizes. An Ordinary Story of Extraordinary Hope accepts that life is hard. It explores the full scope of grief issues to proclaim that grace and hope are stronger than the hardness of life; grace and hope are saturated with redemptive power. The book illustrates how those times of heartache result in growth t ...
In A Pacifist Way of Knowing: John Howard Yoder's Nonviolent Epistemology, editors Christian Early and Ted Grimsrud gather the scattered writings of Yoder on the theme of the relationship between gospel, peace, and human ways of knowing. In them, they find the beginnings of a pacifist theology of knowledge that rejects strategies of empire while at the same time avoids a self-defeating relativism. ...
At a time when the Western church is having to come to terms–painfully and often reluctantly–with its diminished social and intellectual status in the world following the collapse of Christendom, we find ourselves, as interpreters of Paul, increasingly impressed by the need to relocate his writings in their historical context. That is not a coincidence. The Future of the People of God is an attempt to make sense of Paul's letter to the Roma ...
Consistently Pro-Life is a book about killing. Specifically, it takes up the question of when and under what circumstances is it morally justifiable for a Christian to take human life. The murder of abortionist Dr. George Tiller on Pentecost Sunday 2009 reignited the national debate over abortion by focusing attention on the seeming hypocrisy of those who would kill to defend life. But many times, those who would condemn the killing of Dr. Tille ...
When a boy cries, his father trains him in the way of the ancients. He is taught to «man up,» and rejects anything feminine in his life. Thus he begins the process of becoming a man in the image of his culture. This transformation comes at the expense of his own calling to reflect the image of God. Men and women, however, were both created in this divine image and were meant to live in harmony rather than enmity. Recently, influential Christian ...
The Old Testament is an ancient collection of theological reflections on life with God that the church has claimed as authoritative Scripture. Whereas most introductory books march from Genesis to Malachi, this book engages four prominent themes across the breadth of the Old Testament canon: creation, covenant, cultus, and character. By taking this approach, Stevens is articulates key issues that impact the reading of the entire Old Testament. T ...
Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus represent two of the most influential figures of history because of the expansion of later Christianity. But Christianity's historical development includes a checkered and troubling past of abusive power that also impugns both Jesus and Paul. European colonialism carried the «gospel» to the world, claiming Jesus and Paul as architects of its oppressive empire building. Modern churches in America quote Je ...
Who doesn't want a liberated life? Jesus offers us liberation as we grow in a Christian spiritual life. But first we need to liberate our concept of Christian Spirituality from ideas that relegate it to Church on Sunday, new age self help, devotional or ascetical practices, or fundamentalist aggression. Traditionally, Christian spirituality liberates Jesus' disciples from personal sin and helps them to challenge sin's social conse ...