This book is a very personal reflection on the life of Belinda (BJ) Allder, a young missionary whose life was cut short through cancer. Her father, Bruce, a Christian pastor and educator, explores the influences that shaped BJ into an effective missionary who impacted many people around the world. BJ's own reflections of her journey of life and faith through the battle with cancer are shared through excerpts from her own daily journal. Whil ...
Understanding the Hebrew Bible has never been easy. Even great scholars have had to be content with understanding only bits and pieces of it. The main reason was the lack of hard evidence about Israel's history. Without such evidence, one could only guess about why and when a text was written, and if one couldn't really explain even one text, how could one explain the whole collection? Thanks to recent archaeology, however, it is now p ...
Gundamentalism and Where It Is Taking America is the work of James Atwood, a retired Presbyterian pastor and an avid deer hunter for half a century who has also been in the forefront of the faith community's fight for two constitutional rights: the right to keep and bear arms and the right to live in domestic tranquility, free of gun violence. He explains why guns mystically control so many Americans and exposes the fallacies of the gun ind ...
In the first century of the Common Era, the Romans could boast of being the most pious society in the known world. They possessed a highly structured societal organization with a well-defined hierarchy where everyone knew their place and the personal and interpersonal duties associated therewith. It was understood that their success was due in large part to maintaining a relationship with the gods. Yet at the same time, social inequality and lac ...
The moment the pager rings, all hell breaks loose. Across the pager appears the words, «Code Yellow ER: Gun Shot Wound.» A chaplain at a Level I trauma center can dread these words. These words mean it's gonna' be a long night. These words mean somebody is probably fighting for their life right now. How does a hospital chaplain provide pastoral care to gang member patients? What are the systemic factors that contribute to gang violence ...
The Old Testament prophets are a neglected treasury of biblical examples for pastoral preaching. Too often the prophets are misunderstood as focusing on future or social justice issues. This book shows that the prophets are essentially preachers–very good ones–whom we must learn from. By comparing recent rhetorical analysis of the prophets to some of the best of current preaching literature, this book shows that the prophets preached the way tha ...
This collection of essays by British Baptists honors the work of Christopher Ellis amongst the Baptist community, recognizing in particular the contribution he has made to the practice and theology of Free Church worship. The book takes a selection of his hymns as a starting point for reflection on areas of worship, discipleship, the sacraments, and theology. ...
Allegory in the parables of Jesus has never been addressed properly. By studying the allegorical features in parables and evaluating some former parable theories, current study hopes to bring insight to the hermeneutics of allegory in the parables of Jesus. ...
Jesus' life should turn our world upside-down. His first observers, according to Luke, were routinely seized with amazement, both at the bending of physics–making the blind see and lame walk–and at the ridiculous things he did and taught. A careful look at the Jesus of the Gospels sketches a man completely out of touch with conventional thinking; a man radically devoted to living a shocking life for the sake of the broken and forgotten. In ...
