Securing Life represents a novel yet timely approach to reading and understanding the Bible. While reverence for the Bible and respect for its authority remain high in our society, biblical illiteracy, misinterpretation, and selective reading place us at risk. The Bible seems to have a conserving effect on conservative readers, a moderating effect on moderate readers, and a liberating effect on liberal readers. Do biblical texts contain conservi ...
Every Christian must not be ashamed to affirm that Jesus is the only Savior of the world. Here are the difficulties: How we can say that, when we do not even know how many other existing religions there are? And besides, isn't God all-loving? Isn't love all that matters in salvation? What hinders God from saving as many people through as many ways as possible? We will find the answers in Romans 1:16-17, when we are exploring w ...
Scattering Ashes is a resource for Christian families confronting the reality of their loved one's gay lifestyle. Joyce Smith Helyer takes the reader on a journey that changed her life when her brother began their midnight Christmas Eve conversation with these words, «Joyce, I have something to tell you.» As I waited expectantly for what he was going to say next, he paused, but then shifted the conversation. He tried again, but the same thi ...
We are all familiar with the stories of what happened at the first Christmas and Easter–or are we? The Crib, the Cross and the Crown strips away the wrapping-paper of tradition and folk-lore from the stories of the birth and death of Jesus Christ, and takes a fresh look at what the Gospels themselves say. It describes the real Jesus of the New Testament, and reflects on the ways in which the recurring themes in his story can shape our own lives ...
For centuries, Christians sought to rescue people from this world. Today, we're trying to fix it. While this shift is helpful in some ways, in other ways it can be quite dangerous. Endangered Gospel flips the script on this conversation by stressing the core gospel truth that rather than ushering in a new world through social activism, God's people already are the new world in Christ. It's not our job to make this world a better ...
The twenty-first-century church is increasingly placing recently trained seminary or locally trained clergy in smaller churches where they must stand alone without the training under a senior pastor. Since leadership in a church and academic preparation in seminary are two very different things, the church historically developed a history of offering «curacies,» or training assistantships, to help blend the two disciplines and merge classroom kn ...
December 8, 2011. The dissident Vietnamese priest Nguyen Van Ly (age sixty-four) is deported from a rest home in the Archdiocese Hue to the concentration camp Nam Ha in the north of the country. Van Ly, who is half paralyzed after having suffered four strokes, still faces five years in prison for his peaceable struggle against the totalitarian communist regime–a peaceable struggle he has waged for nearly forty years. We follow Father Ly, ...
Relationships between people are frequently compromised as a result of religious viewpoints, but appropriate spiritual care requires bridges to understanding that will allow for trust and justice to become visible. The pattern for this book is shaped on the recognition that, while religious expressions differ markedly in their presentation, we can discern at the core of all religious expressions a supposition of sacred presence. It is therefore ...
Seed Falling on Good Soil is a unique book that combines a historically informed approach to Lucan parables with a critical understanding of social justice issues of our own age. The author proposes that the stories told by Jesus were narratives of resistance challenging audiences to participate in the personal and social transformation of God's kingdom. The author's experience in international community development provides a perspect ...
