In the first century, the Thessalonian church grieved deaths in their community, endured harsh persecution, and struggled with questions about the future. Paul offered them the comforts and reassurances of hope in the Messiah Jesus. But he offered far more than wishful thinking or pie-in-the-sky comfort. Paul's emphasis on hope in the Messiah Jesus involved capturing a vision of God's redeemed and just future in order to see and live f ...
Jesus did not die to save us from God. He died because the Romans did not tolerate charismatic teachers who attracted a lively following. Jesus attracted that following through his personal compassion, his confrontational inclusivity, and his skill in using laughter as a nonviolent weapon of mass disruption. The Gospel authors picked up Jesus' witty techniques. They adeptly parodied the literary conventions of heroic biography, lay ...
Are humans just complex biochemical machines, mere physical parts of a causally closed materialist universe? Are we approaching the so-called «Singularity» when human consciousness can (and will) be downloaded into computers? Or is there more to the human person–something that might be known as soul or spirit? As this book makes clear, the answers to these questions have profound implications to topics such as heroism, creativity, ecology, and t ...
"Bless me Father, for I have sinned," says the penitent to open the dialogue in Catholic confessionals across the globe and throughout the ages. Along with the priest's words, «For your penance . . .» this encounter is an icon of Catholic life. But does the script, and the practices it signifies, have any relevance beyond the confessional? In The Politics of Penance, Michael Griffin responds yes. He explores great figures of the Chris ...
A recent journal article stated, «There is something missing in the way the churches do Communion.» Why is it that this central act of Christian worship is often so dull, dreary, and formal? Indeed at times it can be as somber as a funeral with people silently queuing cafeteria style in lines to receive a morsel of bread or a rice paper emblem of bread and then joining the wine queue for a tiny sip of wine. Strangely the churches call the Euchar ...
This book offers two things in particular: first, these are papers that have been commented on and re-worked in the context of a set of lively sessions from (International) SBL conferences from 2012 to 2014 (Amsterdam, St. Andrews, Vienna). Second, they offer an insight into the origins of the discipline as one which became conscious of itself in the early modern era and the turn to history and the analysis of texts, to offer something exegetica ...
This collection of essays and sermons by Rodney Kennedy and Kyle Childress is focused on honoring the memory of Will Campbell–the prophet from the South who made a vocation of destroying sacred cows. The essays and sermons attempt to be true to the spirit of Will Campbell's devotion to the gospel above all else. It should not be surprising that the essays and sermons are about the business of deconstructing more sacred cows while lifting up ...
Throughout history Christians have prayed for the dead–both for continual growth of the faithful and for their advancement from purgatory, though not for the deliverance of the unsaved from hell. This book defends all three kinds of prayer. It challenges Protestants, who seldom pray for the dead, to begin doing so–and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, who pray only for the Christian dead, to include the unsaved as well. James Gould address ...
Since six months after landfall, Ellen Blue has taught «The Church's Response to Katrina.» It sidesteps disaster response, where clearly the church should be involved. What was unclear was how leaders in a connectional denomination like United Methodism should decide which churches to merge or decommission after floods destroyed seventy churches and displaced ninety pastors, and no one knew how many members would return. Katrina gave th ...
