LITMIR.BIZ

Once upon a time, it was not so difficult to believe. Believing in God was like breathing. It was a second sense of which people were hardly aware. But in an age when our faith is mainly in science and technology, is it possible to believe anymore?
Michael P. Jensen takes a searching look at what makes us believe–or not believe–in God in this contemporary world. He converses with troubled souls, cranks, crackpots, and conspiracy theorists, and even with the devil himself.
This entertaining and stimulating journey through the underworld of our beliefs will have you wondering whether things are always what they seem.

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Taking its cue from Mark Nation's regret that John Howard Yoder refrained from a fuller engagement with the Western philosophical tradition, this book is an effort to explore the possibilities inherent in that conversation. It develops a dialogue between Yoder and the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. The placement of Yoder's work alongside of Levinas' conception of otherness cashes out the embedded hope in Nation's remarks by demonstrating the continuing relevancy of Yoder's thought for current Christian sociopolitical discourse. This book is especially aimed at those who seek to continue exploring the themes and ideas of John Howard Yoder.

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The overall problem raised in this book is that the Western culture of modern rationality, power, and economics departs from a rather narrow, secular and ego-centric worldview. Therefore, it does not recognize the identity of traditional cultures and religions nor social, economic, or ecological justice in relation to the rest of the world.
Western religion has, over history, often played a legitimating role for political power, and the expansion of institutional structures and has therefore lost much of its prophetic identity to be signs of peace, justice, and unity. The ecumenical and integrative model of stewardship as an «economy of grace,» with a deeper ecological philosophy, does, however, offer new visions for a multicultural and multireligious economy.
This book is intended for leaders, students, and scholars interested in interdisciplinary studies of politics, religion, economics, and ecology. This will also be of interest to students and researchers in peace studies or conflict management, as well as to leaders who are engaged in the building of peace and justice.

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In Building a Community of Interpreters Walter Dickhaut argues that the practice of reading (and, by extension, listening) is no less creative than the practice of writing (and speaking); readers and hearers, just as much as writers and speakers, are producers of meaning. Hence, the work of biblical interpretation is the work–the calling–of a community. Focused on the experience of the reader (or hearer) of biblical texts, he explores such questions as:
–What happens when the author disappears? –What happens when a reader opens a book to meet the author? –What happens when a book is read? –What happens when the reader changes spectacles?
Into discussion of such issues as the reader's angle of vision, when texts open and close, the reader's expectations, the reader's meeting up with the text, and the functions of filters and lenses in the practice of reading and hearing, the author introduces mystery, surprise, and expectation as hermeneutical lenses that can enlarge what may be seen in biblical texts. In addition to some homiletical samples, the author concludes with a suggested teaching plan for building a community of interpreters.

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This book prepares the way for the practice of kenarchy: a humanity-loving, world-embracing, inclusive approach to life and politics. It does so by identifying two conflicting streams in Christianity: the love stream that the stories of Jesus portray and many of us desire to follow, and the sovereignty system that much of theology, church, and mission represents. Explaining how the two streams arose in early Western history, The Fall of the Church demonstrates that far from being complementary expressions of Christianity, the sovereignty stream embodies the very system that the Jesus of the gospels opposed. The fall of the church is described in terms of its embrace of the sovereignty system and the subsequent history of the West is explained as the story of the resulting partnership. If transcendence is truly like Jesus, then, rather than abandoning the empire system, God has remained within the church and empire in order to empty it out from the inside. Mitchell argues that this divine strategy has continued throughout the history of the West and is coming to a head, right now, in our contemporary Western world, and that the time is ripe for an incarnational politics of love.

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How are we to see the Old Testament's characters–typically a tangle of both virtue and vice–as models for our own ethical living? It is clear that Scripture intends for us to embody some qualities while eschewing others, and at times these are immediately obvious: David's wholehearted pursuit of God is admirable, while his adultery with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah are deplorable. But more often than not we are left with shades of gray, not really knowing whether the narrator approves, disapproves, or is indifferent to the behavior of these characters.
The present work seeks to address this issue, situating itself at the fault line of the problem: character portrayal. It argues that often what we take to be the narrator's silence about a character is not silence at all; rather, the narrator is simply speaking in ways that we are not attuned to. By becoming attuned to the voice of biblical narrative and by understanding its role in ethics, therefore, we are better able to understand the characters as resources for our own ethics. This work develops its ideas by leveraging pertinent literary and ethical models, which are then trained upon a particular case in point: the Gideon account in Judges 6-8.

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Most Christians worship on a regular basis on the Lord's Day. They have done so from the beginning, and their worship has centered on the Eucharist, following Jesus's words, «Do this in remembrance of me.» Over the two millennia of the Christian tradition there have been shifts of emphasis and understanding about the Eucharist. This book attempts to point out, by providing accessible accounts of both liturgies and liturgists across the centuries and traditions, just how much different Christians have in common and how they can benefit from attending to one another's worship. The author's ultimate hope is that in its small way, the book will contribute to Christians worshiping together.

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Delio DelRio offers a fresh perspective on the contemporary quest for Paul by doing the hard work to uncover the milieu few have attempted to integrate into our understanding of Paul–the Jewish synagogue. By all accounts, Paul was centered in the synagogue. Paul himself in his own letters indicates his synagogue priority in preaching the gospel, and the narrative of Acts corroborates this emphasis. We have a window into that synagogue world, says DelRio, in the literature of the Targums. DelRio uses a study of Jewish interpretive traditions in the Isaiah Targum to uncover an internal debate in the synagogue over the role of the Gentiles in the coming messianic kingdom. When Paul coined the phrase «obedience of faith» in Rom 1:5, a phrase found only in Romans in all of ancient literature, little did we realize, DelRio shows, that with this coined phrase at a crucial rhetorical juncture in Romans, Paul was plunging headlong into this synagogue debate with his own solution to this synagogue conundrum in his hermeneutic of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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What makes us religious? What is religion? This book presents relevant research and theoretical proposals for evolutionary theories of religion and socially and ecologically adaptive theories of religion. Most attempts to study religious behaviors through evolutionary biology and related disciplines are still very fragmentary. Mladen Turk brings those theoretical approaches in dialogue with religious studies and theology through interpretation and critique that centers on revealing hidden theological assumptions and interpreting theoretical leaps of those approaches to religion. In Being Religious Turk expounds understanding of religion as a complex interplay of various capacities arising from and influencing our biological and cultural makeup. Our religious behaviors can influence our relationship towards each other and towards our environment in significant ways. He shows how some aspects of complex religious behaviors can be understood better in light of human cognition and evolutionary biology. At the same time he interprets this knowledge as being preliminary and at times inadequate in its claims of completeness and exhaustiveness because religious behaviors are niched within other religious behaviors and dependent on factors that various mono-causal theoretical approaches cannot fully conceptualize.

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This study takes the singular approach of reading two sides of a parable. The close reading will locate the message of the text within the world of both Jesus and Matthew. The homiletic suggestions and reflection questions use the ancient text to address some of the issues of the modern faith community.

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