"This accursed heat! This scorching wind and sand!" moaned the young warrior Hanani ben Amran as he stood atop the wall of the great King Solomon's fortress at Tamar. «Why is it my lot to spend three years in this infernal desert? There is nothing here worth defending . . . There is no adventure, no war, no anything here!» So went Hanani's daily complaint. Ah, but there was adventure, and plenty of it! There was intrigue. There w ...
The Apostle Paul's dramatic and much-discussed conversion on the road to Damascus radically changed the course of his life–as well as the Christian religion. Can a new narrative, and a new perspective, be brought to this two-thousand-year-old story and centuries of critical thought and study? Writer and filmmaker Robert Orlando believes it can. Apostle Paul: A Polite Bribe is a dramatic and challenging book, inspired by his controversial f ...
This is a guide for spiritual mountain climbers. In the Scriptures, connecting with Abba often leads to a mountain. Modern spiritual writers have long recognized this scriptural metaphor and explored the nature of this journey of ascent. Drawing on the text of the Bible, works of literature, and the writings of mystics both old and new, Climbing the Spiritual Mountain speaks of the desires and intentions, discipline, and effort involved in devel ...
Each generation asks in its own way, «What does it mean to be human?» In True Myth, James Menzies addresses this question by exploring myth and religion in the thinking of mythologist Joseph Campbell and Oxford don C. S. Lewis. Joseph Campbell understood Christianity as comprised of mythical themes similar to those in other religious and secular myths. Admitting that certain portions of the biblical record are historical, he taught the t ...
The Old Testament has two great themes: creation and covenant. They embrace subthemes: wisdom in the case of creation; Israel's religion and the Davidic covenant under the general umbrella of covenant; and internationalism, which mostly develops the theme of covenant and partly the theme of creation. These topics cluster around a common center: Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. This God is portrayed in different roles, which hav ...
Why a journey from Zen to Methodism? Two friends embark on a dual path of discovery while driving from Portland to Denver. The miles take them through the beautiful scenery of the Pacific Northwest as their souls traverse the spiritual landscapes of a lifetime. The journey begins in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s with the nascent American Zen movement led by Shunryu Suzuki. From there it winds through the years, passing through Christia ...
The Revelation builds conviction, inspires worship, and encourages patient endurance. This is a prison epistle like no other: a disciple-making tract, a manifesto, an extraordinary treatise on Christ and culture, and a canonical climax. We come expecting to learn the ABCs of the end times, and the Apostle John gives us the fullness and fury of his Spirit-inspired praying imagination. Meaning is not found in cleverly devised interpretations, but ...
In this book Paul O. Ingram adds his voice to a long list of writers seeking to relate Christian tradition to the hard realities of this post-Christian age of religious and secular pluralism. As a Lutheran, Ingram thinks grace flows over this universe like a waterfall. So he brings Christian mystical theology into a discussion of the meaning of grace. Alfred North Whitehead's philosophical vision provides a language that serves as a ...
Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own «from the inside out,» silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD–fraug ...
