LITMIR.BIZ

"We tend to use words like miracle and mystery in the context of serendipity. In this frank and eloquent account of life transformed by cancer, Deanna Thompson explores these articles of faith as they are also wont to appear–on the hard edges of hope and the dark side of joy." –Krista Tippett, from the Foreword
Hoping for More is a story of a young religion professor with a stage IV cancer diagnosis and a lousy prognosis for the future. Amid the grief and the grace of her fractured life, this theologian–who is also a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend–searches for words adequate to express her faltering faith. More Anne Lamott meets Harold Kushner than the teller of a pious, God-saved-me-from-cancer tale, Thompson unpacks the messy realities that arise when faith and suffering collide. Told in shimmering prose, Hoping for More takes readers on an unsentimental journey through the valley of the shadow of cancer–beyond the predictable parameters of prayer, the church, even belief in life after death. What emerges is a novel approach to talking faith and accepting grace when hope is all you've got.

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Drawing from the fields of evolutionary neuroscience, psychology, and theology, Sandra Levy-Achtemeier considers what it might mean for humans, as embodied and spiritual selves, to flourish now, and how such flourishing can contribute to our final flourishing in the time to come. She shows how such holistic flourishing and growth-filled transformation can occur even–and perhaps especially–in times of darkness and struggle. In this engaging work, she makes complex ideas accessible to all who hunger for deeper spiritual growth over the course of their lives. This book is not only highly readable, but it is also a practical guide to the flourishing life, providing resources for embodied practices–from prayer to dance to storytelling–which can enhance our human flourishing now. In short, she lays out a complete picture of human flourishing, from our evolutionary roots to kingdom living in the life to come.

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We live in an era when the Bible appears to be less and less relevant to mainstream cultures. Those who do care about the Scriptures tend to derive their interpretations secondhand, from the preacher's pulpit or from generalized study guides written by complete strangers. These approaches overlook the communal and conversational nature of the Bible itself. If we hope to recover the transformative power of these ancient texts, and invite our world to reconsider their significance, we will need to engage whole communities together in the bottom-up task of interpretation. People of the Book was written to offer an organic-holistic approach to communal interpretation, an approach that can work for your community and appeal to your wider culture. Halcomb and McNinch envision the Bible as a conversation we are privileged to enter: listening, questioning, wrestling, reasoning, and responding together as authentic people of the Book.

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Although one often hears of the need to preach «the whole counsel of God,» few resources have seriously and specifically attempted to assist the preacher and planner of worship to do just that–until now. Year D makes the case for the need and promise of supplementing the Revised Common Lectionary with a fourth year of lections and arranges many previously excluded biblical texts in an orderly, one-year preaching plan. It fills a need widely voiced by preachers that the lectionary effectively limits and censors the functional canon of Scripture. Destined to serve as a staple source of significant revitalization in mainline preaching and worship, Year D banks on the agency of Word and Spirit to renew the church as few practical proposals have done in the last twenty years, lending new focus and impetus for exploring the Bible's forgotten riches. A timely and urgently needed «return to the sources,» Year D represents a fresh appropriation of neglected and marginalized texts for preaching, worship, education, and devotion, and thus constitutes a substantive, scriptural attempt to address what Walter Brueggemann has called «the current preaching emergency.»

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Subversive Wisdom makes the case that in the Gospel of John, Jesus walks and talks like Lady Wisdom of the Hebrew Scriptures. In John, Jesus is Wisdom incarnate, speaking and demonstrating the subversive wisdom of the way of the cross; he is a sort of trickster, confusing and frustrating his enemies, acting in ways counter to convention, and driving out the «ruler of this world» through the upside-down logic that comes «from above.»
Subversive Wisdom explores literary themes in the Gospel of John such as Jesus as Torah, the «heavenly» perspective of the narrator and Jesus, political terminology used throughout the Gospel, and the New Exodus.

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In his book Faithonomics, K. Brad Stamm brings together the Scriptures, basic economic principles, and popular culture in an entertaining way, appealing to the informed and the uninformed about economics and Christian worldview. If you want to learn about a topic more talked about than the weather, or if you want to reflect on your spiritual life from a new perspective, Faithonomics is a book that will encourage, enrich, and bring new insight.

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The Old Testament is an ancient collection of theological reflections of life with God that the church has claimed as authoritative Scripture. Whereas most introductory books march from Genesis to Malachi, this book engages four important leadership roles across the breadth of the Old Testament canon: king, prophet, priest, and sage. Despite the obvious differences between the societies of ancient Israel and modern America, lessons can be learned from our ancestors in the faith. This engaging volume is intended for people who want to know more about the Old Testament, whether in personal study, church groups, college classrooms, or seminary courses. The book may be used profitably in concert with Theological Themes of the Old Testament: Creation, Covenant, Cultus, and Character (Cascade Books, 2010).

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In a cinematic culture where multiple visions of reality «play» at the same time, it is critical that Christian believers know how to confidently identify and «discern,» among other stories, the Jesus-story that defines their most important commitment in life. Using the optical metaphor of the «eye of faith,» the author identifies the spiritual life as a «visual life.» Through themes such as «looking through Jesus' eyes,» the bible as a «visionary text,» and the church as a «wide-eyed people,» he builds a connecting bridge between the seeing-soul in Christian spirituality, and the twenty-first century as the «age of the eye.» The key words for this exploration are spirituality, discipleship, insight, luminescence, and optical «therapy.» The author proposes the need for a «catechism of the eye» that will lead to the renewal of Christian ministry, spirituality, discipleship, and identity.

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The question of God's relationship to evil is a long-running one in the history of Christianity, and the term often deployed for this task has been theodicy. The way theodicy has historically been pursued, however, has been problematic on a number of counts. Most significantly, these efforts have generally been insufficiently theological. This work hopes to subvert and reconfigure the theodical task in a way that can be accessible to nonspecialists. Overall, the book hopes to cast the «god» of theodicy as the triune God of Christian confession, a move that shapes and alters distinctly all that follows in what has traditionally been considered a philosophical matter.

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Sometimes theological ideas are good topics for ongoing debate. Other times, the community of faith needs to come to a decision: yes or no. Christian Reconstructionism offers the Christian church a basic approach to faith different from mainstream historic Christianity. Is their approach warranted? Or is it a fundamental distortion of the gospel? The present volume seeks to set out the case that Christian Reconstructionism is not a legitimate variation of Christian doctrine, but rather a serious misunderstanding of the gospel attested in Holy Scripture. First, an attempt is made to look at the basic ideas of Christian Reconstructionism. Rather than focusing on names and dates, the focus is on the set of ideas that characterize this view of Christianity. Second, a response is given to each of the main ideas. The response makes use of traditional Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox doctrine; but it is based primarily on careful exegesis of Scripture. The ultimate question is if Christian Reconstructionism is grounded in the Bible, or in a political ideology foreign to Scripture. An epilogue briefly points to a different way of seeing Christian involvement in contemporary, global society.

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