Should women be priests? Should women submit to their husbands? Is premarital sex okay? Inflammatory questions such as these have splintered Christianity and polarized the church. In Sex, Gender, and Christianity, a cadre of seasoned college professors offers the modest proposal that honest, fruitful conversations about these questions will take place only if we develop the ability to deal with sex, gender, and the Christian faith with ...
What does Christianity have to say about the salvation of the African tribesman who died before the missionaries arrived, and the «great sorrow» of the Messianic Jew who grieves for family and friends who did not or will not acknowledge his Jesus as their Messiah? C. S. Lewis said these outsiders represent the «scandal of exclusivity.» Jim Geiger is a Christian insider and fully committed to the exclusivity of Christ's atonement. However, h ...
The Christ Letter is a conversation partner for pastors and students of the Bible who want to wrestle with the meaning of the biblical text for Christian living today. Scholarly commentaries perform an essential task, but they often leave today's believers on their own when it comes to making Paul's letter come alive. Doug Webster weaves together deep biblical insights, penetrating cultural perspectives, and stories of transformation i ...
This book is about a Black man's reading of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time while in graduate school. The story captures his emotional experience with Twain's use of the racial epithet «nigger» more than 211 times throughout the book. The visceral response to hearing the word verbalized by whites with Twain's permission, regardless of irony or satire, is a central theme of this personal history/ ...
Joseph A. Sittler (1904-1987) was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century, distinguished for his pioneering work in ecology and for his preeminence as a preacher. He gave both the Beecher Lectures at Yale and the Noble Lectures at Harvard. As the «preacher's theologian,» Sittler approached the interpretation of Scripture with a clear understanding of current critical scholarship, but also in the freedom of the gospe ...
In The Disciple, Lucy Peppiatt addresses the question of what it means to «become like Jesus» in the context of our everyday lives. Through the gifts of the Word and the Spirit, our communities, and our circumstances in life, God forms us into the likeness of his Son and leads us into a life of freedom, in relationship with the Father, where we experience what it means to become truly and fully human. The Disciple brings together theological dep ...
Our busy exterior may be a cover-up for an undernourished interior soul. Modern life is so packed with things to do that we have not learned to be truly human. It is difficult to nurture the spiritual life in a media-saturated world filled with relentless information, ongoing activities, material wants, worrisome uncertainties, and seductive addictions. Being Truly Human challenges readers to give space in their busy life for God to do the work ...
The Gospels of the Marginalized provides an exciting new study of three of the most maligned figures in the New Testament story of Jesus: Thomas, usually considered the quintessential doubter among the disciples; Mary Magdalene, characterized as a repentant prostitute during much of the history of the church; and Judas Iscariot, presented as the despicable disciple of Jesus who betrayed his master for money. In this book Marvin Meyer, one of the ...
As part of the growing literature on theology and the arts, God's Mind in that Music explores the substantial theological insight expressed in the music of jazz legend John Coltrane. Focusing on eight of Coltrane's pieces, themes under consideration include lament («Alabama»), improvisation («My Favorite Things» and «Ascension»), grace («A Love Supreme»), and the Trinity («The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost»). By attending to th ...
