In ministry as in life, we get knocked down. Sometimes, due to our folly or despair or fatigue or external opposition, we stumble and fall. How do we get back up–again and again and again? Resiliency, the ability to bounce back, is a gift of God. Leaders are able to get up and follow the crucified and risen Lord when they are drawn, when they are enchanted by the awesome mystery of the triune God. Discipleship has never been easy. The way, stayi ...
After five centuries of oppressions committed in the name of Jesus, many hearts have hardened toward the name of Christ on the part of many of those native or original to the lands we now call America and Canada. The imposition of residential schools, removal policies, and forced adoptions left many angry about white man's religion, confused about a savior who would promote such violent ripping apart of families, deceitful taking away of la ...
Colonialism and imperialism continue to impact the personal and social identities of North American preachers and listeners. In Decolonizing Preaching, Sarah Travis argues that sermons have a role in shaping the identity and ethics of listeners by helping them formulate responses to empire and colonization. Travis employs postcolonial theories to provide important insights for the practice of preaching today. She also turns to the social doctrin ...
Beauty engages fourth-century bishop Gregory of Nyssa to address beauty's place in theology and the broader world. With the recent resurgence of attention to beauty among theologians, questions still remain about what exactly beauty is, how it is perceived, and whether we should celebrate its return. If beauty fell out of favor because it was seen to distract from the weightier concerns of poverty and suffering–because it can even be a tool ...
Will the love of God save us all? In this book Thomas Talbott seeks to expose the extent to which the Western theological tradition has managed to twist the New Testament message of love, forgiveness, and hope into a message of fear and guilt. According to the New Testament proclamation, he argues, God's love is both unconditional in its nature and unlimited in its scope; hence, no one need fear, for example, that God's love mi ...
This little book resulted from the conviction that we need to contemplate what it is to be the church in the contemporary world. We are aware that we are living in a time of crisis, with rapid social and cultural changes that challenge the way we have been a church: challenges that come not only from outside the institution–from the society where it acts–but from the inside as well. In this book we face old and new questions: What is the ...
The Hermeneutics of Tradition presents the latest scholarship on tradition as a concept and reality in the development of Christian cultures. One aim is to show that traditions are upheld, communicated, and developed within a recognizable set of interpretive guidelines (or rules) and that analysis of these sets both requires and reveals a «hermeneutics of tradition.» The work of the authors included here presents the precarious integrity of trad ...
Spectacles designed to capture our attention surround us. Marketing, movies, shopping malls, concerts, and virtual realities capture our imaginations and cultivate our desires. We live in a «society of the spectacle.» However, is the power and prevalence of spectacle unique to the modern era? In the pages of Gifts Glittering and Poisoned, early Christian voices echo across the centuries to show that the society of the spectacle is not ne ...
These essays emerge from different crucial and complex conflicts: from the memory of a bishop, Bartolome de las Casas, urging the pope of his time to cleanse the church of complicity with violence, oppression, and slavery; from the lament and defiance of so many Middle Eastern women, victims of male domination and too many wars; from the voices bursting out from the colonial margins that dare to question and transgress the norms and laws imposed ...
