To Bless Our Callings: Prayers, Poems, and Hymns to Celebrate Vocation is an ecumenical collection that supports the callings of everyone within the Christian community. This valuable resource of over two hundred prayers, blessings, poems, and sacred songs from diverse Christian traditions speaks to the heart of vocation's richness. –Part I (Ages and Stages) gathers prayers for children, teens, young adults, and adults in mid-life, later, ...
In the fields of pastoral care and pastoral theology, there are times when a book signals a paradigm shift. This is one such book. LaMothe develops a political pastoral theology that is used to examine critically political, economic, and societal structures and practices. In the first part of the book, LaMothe argues that care and pastoral care are political concepts, which, along with the notion of justice, can be used as a hermeneutical framew ...
As preachers who come to the pulpit, before God and before God's people, each and every week, how do we make sense of the text as we live a new moment of its ongoing story? Most options available to the preacher necessitate a hermeneutical step that requires us to preach outside of time in timeless truths, experiences, or realities. But the gospel is the drama of God appearing to and working with and loving God's people in time. Preach ...
This book re-imagines the universe (and the scientific study of it) through the lens of a triune Creator, three persons of irreducible identity in a perichoretic or coinherent communion. It modestly proposes that Trinitarian theology, and especially the coinherent natures of the Son in the incarnation, provides the metaphysic or «theory of everything» that manifests itself in the subject matter of science. The presence of the image of the triune ...
In Psalm 49 and the Path to Redemption, Janet Smith revisits her PhD dissertation, Dust or Dew: Immortality in the Ancient Near East and in Psalm 49, reconfiguring the book for a general audience and expanding it to focus on a theme of biblical redemption. The new work takes the reader through the development of Israel's belief in an afterlife, both the positive hope but also the negative fate of those who are spiritually impoverished. Beyo ...
At the heart of Christianity and at the center of the New Testament lies the epistle to the Romans, the most groundbreaking letter ever written. The author is Paul, an early convert from Judaism and the greatest early figure in the development and spread of Christianity. Romans contains his most cogent and compelling presentation of Christian faith and practice. The author takes logic and argument, poetry and imagination, scripture and prayer, h ...
After the civil rights and anti-apartheid struggles, are we truly living in post-racial, post-apartheid societies where the word struggle is now out of place? Do we now truly realize that, as President Obama said, the situation for the Palestinian people is «intolerable»? This book argues that this is not so, and asks, «What has Soweto to do with Ferguson, New York with Cape Town, Baltimore with Ramallah?» With South Africa, the United S ...
This new edition of Patterns of Ministry Among the First Christians tells the story of how the first Christian leaders emerged and, with the passing of time, developed. The book includes sections on Jesus and Paul and their understanding of Christian leadership, on bishops, deacons, elders, apostles, prophets, and teachers, and on ordination. The focus is primarily on the first century but historical development is noted. The author also discuse ...
Where the Water Goes Around is a biblical and political reading of Detroit over the course of three decades by an activist pastor. Detroit is a place where one can take the temperature of the world. Think on the rise of Fordism and auto-love, the Arsenal of Democracy, the practice of the sit-down strike, or the invention of the expressway and suburban mall. Consider more recently the rebellion of 1967, the deindustrialization of a union ...
