Have you ever puzzled over a strange word in the Bible, a hymn, or a prayer book, or wanted to explore a familiar term more fully? In either case, this book can serve you on your quest for deeper understanding. Here you will find essays on topics from «apocalypse» to «worship,» as well as narratives and insights by the author. Words matter for Christians, because they are the tools used in our journey with God. ...
As biblical hermeneutics moves increasingly toward the inclusion of vernacular approaches to the text–understandings of the Bible based on culture, context, and human experience–many communities of faith around the world are contributing their voices to the conversation of global Christianity. This volume explores reading methods and text interpretations of believers in South Africa, the Caribbean, Spain, the Netherlands, the United States, Indi ...
In light of Martin Heidegger's contextualized influence upon them, John Macquarrie, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner engage in theologies that, in their respective tasks and scopes, venture into existential theology, following Heideggerian pathmarks toward the primordiality of being on the way to unconcealment, or «aletheia.» By way of each pathmark, each existential theologian assumes a specific theological stance that utiliz ...
The famous theologian Karl Barth is known for his admonition that Christians should evaluate major news events in the light of the Bible rather than vice versa. This book reviews attempts at implementing Barth's principle in more than a hundred responses to newspaper editorial opinions over a decades-spanning period. In this exercise, five major theological themes frame the moral engagement of ten newsworthy subject categories. The analysis ...
God came to earth as an illegitimate child. Mary, his mother, was a human being, not a porcelain figure in a nativity scene with a halo. She was a young teenage Mediterranean woman who wanted to save herself for marriage. Then an angel told her she'd become pregnant by the Holy Spirit. This book intends to dismantle the fictitious Mary made in the image of religion. Rather, the human Mary of the Scriptures who gave God a body is the subject ...
Wildflowers and the Call to the Altar is a fascinating story of the history of the St. Francis Altar Society, embedded within the tri-cultural nexus of Santa Fe, New Mexico. For close to a hundred years, the society responded to the call that the church, established in 1610, required a formal Altar Society to care for the sanctuary needs, yet also to address the personal sanctification of the members. Since its inception, the society has served ...
Preachers at funerals differ in approach. Some see the purpose of the sermon to be eulogy, to heap so much praise that the deceased becomes unrecognizable to the mourners. Others regard praise of the departed as inappropriate, as it may detract from the praise of Almighty God, which they believe to be the sole purpose of all worship. Still others opt to say nothing at all, arguing that it is disingenuous for one person to be lying in the pulpit ...
In today's world the Christian is constantly being challenged with new teachings. Some of these are particularly dangerous because they are put forward by those with evangelical credentials. Tom Nicholas Wright is one of the leading proponents of the New Perspective on Paul. Wright sees himself as the new Luther, a discoverer of the true biblical understanding of key doctrines like that of justification by faith. According to him, the Refor ...
This book follows the journey of ten churches who underwent church consultancies, and explores in depth both the consultancy and its outcomes. Pre-consultancy and post-consultancy «snapshots,» four to five years apart, of vitality indicators and attendance figures (using National Church Life Survey and other data) are used to compare these with churches that have not undertaken church consultancies. Theologies of church consultancy, church healt ...
