LITMIR.BIZ

In an age of moral relativity, is there a place for rules? They govern acceptable behavior on the sports field, but do they have a position in general life and relationships? 3,500 years ago, a new nation emerged as Moses led the Israelites on a journey toward the land God had promised them. They needed boundaries that would govern their worship, interpersonal relationships, and property, and God wrote them down. We refer to them as the Ten Commandments. Over the centuries, they have formed the basis for rule of law in most countries of the world, defining boundaries of fairness and interaction, within which we live and have our being. But are they still relevant in and for the twenty-first century? Some regard them as anachronistic and outdated, superseded by more enlightened thinking. For others, they are timeless. Clearly, Jesus regarded them as pertinent for all who follow him, although in many instances he clarified their intent and application. This book takes a fresh look at the boundaries God gave his emerging special race and how they apply in our current age–a resource for pastors, individual Christ-followers, and a discussion-starter for small groups.

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The iconic landscape of the American Southwest reveals the luminescent Mitten rock formations, looming rock arches, and vast sagebrush oceans made vivid and memorable by writer Tony Hillerman, artist Georgia O'Keefe, and director John Ford. Professor Brad Karelius, drawing on forty years of college teaching, will guide you into hidden mysteries of the sacred as revealed by the Zuni, Navajo/Dine, Hopi, Hispanos, and desert mystics as you seek spiritual encounters in these desert spirit places.

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The earth is the Lord's, says Psalm 24. God owns it, in other words. Is it time to take this seriously, as God's word does? If so, it means that «secular» is an illusion, and our traditional division of the world into «sacred» and «secular» is false. This work looks at the major consequences for Christians when we see the earth as sacred and realize the stewardship that follows. We are called as Christians to take a prophetic role in forming a worldview which understands that we live as sacred beings in the Lord's sacred space.

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Follow the author's odyssey of the mind in his endless search for God and meaning in life, as well as his plea for moral action in the uncertainty, discord, and chaos of a world that appears callous and cruel and is prone to political exploitation of vulnerable people, cultures, and countries of our shared planet. Although the manuscript views organized religion, religious hypocrisy, and social injustice through a microscope, this book is spiritual and life-affirming while recognizing the inherent impermanence of the universe and humanity's collective and individual imprint. You can read short stories with a nontraditional take on John the Baptist and Jesus; shorter poems dealing with Tourette syndrome, aging, and suicide; religious conformity and hypocrisy in the context of finding a moral compass that guides humans down a path of right actions, responsibility, and compassion in a philosophical essay; and a substantial poem that unfolds a panoramic social and political critic of the American experiment through the dialogue of a dreaming man in successive encounters with Crowfoot, Black Elk, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Malala Yousafzai, Christ, and the Buddha.

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The face of African Christianity is becoming Pentecostal. African Pentecostalism is a diverse movement, but its collective interest in baptism in the Spirit and the result of Pentecost in daily living binds it together. Pentecostals read the Bible with the expectation that the Spirit who inspired the authors will again inspire them to hear it as God's word. They emphasize the experiential, at times at the cost of proper doctrine and practice. This book sketches an African hermeneutic that provides guidance to a diverse movement with many faces, and serves as corrective for doctrine and practice in the face of some excesses and abuses (especially in some parts of the neo-Pentecostal movement). African Pentecostalism's contribution to the hermeneutical debate is described before three points are discussed that define it: the centrality of the Holy Spirit in reading the Bible, the eschatological lens that Pentecostals use when they read the Bible, and the faith community as normative for the interpretation of the Bible.

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Much has been written on apologetics of the Old Testament canon and historicity, investigating the Old Testament as an object of apologetics. However, this study is the first comprehensive investigation focusing on apologetics within the Old Testament–i.e., the Old Testament theological foundations of the discipline of Christian apologetics– investigating apologetics as an object of the Old Testament. Taking seriously the biblical texts at its outset, the study presents a biblically based scheme of five types of apologetic strategy: narrative apologetics, prophetic apologetics, wisdom apologetics, «citatory» apologetics as antithetic proclamation, and exemplary apologetics. It focuses on the many explicit confrontations in dialogues, disputes, quotes, and responses, in both prose and poetical form, which are accompanied by an indirect dispute, taking substantial space within the historical parts of the Hebrew Bible. These theological themes are derived from the Old Testament itself, not adapted from the New Testament. This book serves to fill the gap of a proper biblical-theological foundation of the academic field of apologetics. It is a new challenge for all apologists who wish to take seriously the biblical theological foundation of their discipline. With its sole focus on the Hebrew Bible, this study speaks to Jewish scholars as well. It enriches the current discussion on Jewish apologetics, its beginnings and first developments.

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By grasping how the church of a particular time period reads the Scriptures, we can understand much of the Christianity of that age. This volume examines how the Gospel accounts at the heart of the Christian faith, the passion and resurrection of Christ, were interpreted by four key authors from late antiquity. In analyzing the readings and methods of Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, this work advocates for a reshaping of the categories commonly used to understand Latin patristic exegesis. It also prompts reflection upon habits of biblical interpretation and the pastoral application of Scripture in our own time.

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In The Boiler Room Boys: An Underground Story of Science, Religion, and the Faith that Fuels Both, Tim Smith describes how from too-young an age he followed two seemingly alternate paths, religion and science, only to find that they are not alternate at all. His so-called «yellow brick road» began with a group of boys meeting independently in his grade school's boiler room. Conflicting teaching by religious and scientific fundamentalists led him toward a PhD in biomathematics and toward atheism.
His attraction to theology and philosophy and the events of his life drew his path back toward the connection between science and his childhood Christianity. However, it wasn't the intellectual pursuits that showed him the nature of God. Rather, it was life's experiences that allowed him to hear God's voice and to sense God's spirit.
In The Boiler Room Boys, Smith reconciles his faith in religion and science, describing how science and theology support one another. In doing so, he also identifies where he sees that both theology and science have taken bad turns that get in the way of people young and old understanding and experiencing the world as it really is.
There are many questions that couldn't be addressed in The Boiler Room Boys, questions that Smith continues to write about from his own boiler room (www.theboilerroomboys.com).

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An initial play, Oedipus in Jerusalem, related the narrative of Nathan, the biblical prophet, encountering the blinded Oedipus wandering alone outside of Thebes. Nathan brings him to Jerusalem to be tried at the Jewish Sanhedrin. The Greek playwright Sophocles is the prosecutor, and Nathan serves as the defense attorney. Oedipus is acquitted, but he refuses to accept his acquittal, shouting, «I am guilty! I am guilty of patricide and incest.»Oedipus Redeemed focuses on Nathan and Sophocles combining forces to present Oedipus with two dialogues of historical/biblical characters within the play. The first contrasts the suicide of the Greek Zeno the Stoic after a minor mishap with the life affirmation expressed by the biblical Job after monumental losses. This is designed to uncover the possibility that Oedipus is experiencing shame rather than guilt (after all, he did not commit suicide until after he blinded himself). Nathan and Sophocles focus on the secondary psychological benefit Oedipus has received from insisting on his guilt, and on his coming to terms with the fact that he had blinded himself needlessly if he was innocent. The second dialogue between the biblical prophetess Judith and the blind Greek seer Teiresias focuses on the biblical story of Samson being betrayed by «following his eyes.» Insight is contrasted with sight. Oedipus's surviving daughter Ismene reunites with Oedipus, telling him she loves and needs him. The play ends with Oedipus's return to the Sanhedrin, tentatively and tearfully accepting his acquittal.

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Jesus was murdered by the Jewish religious leaders whose power base was the temple of Jerusalem. Saul of Tarsus–later the Paul of Christianity–was one of these, and his brand of faith theology mirrored their theology of covenantal entitlement. Thus, Christianity's basic theological principles derive from those who killed Jesus.
This is just one of many challenging propositions backed with strong evidence that appear in this book. Jesus, like most Jews, was attuned to faithfulness rather than pure faith, to ethical behavior based on human empathy rather than metaphysical beliefs and rituals.
The central focus of Jesus was hesed, the heart of the Jewish covenant with God which linked God's mercy to human compassion and forgiveness, making both mutually interactive. This hesed forgiveness was anathema to the temple's faux forgiveness and threatened its very existence.
Therefore, Jesus came not to save us, but to show us how to save ourselves. Reinterpreting a key parable of Jesus in this light, the Parable of the Tares, Jesus can be most plausibly understood as an incarnation of Adam, the original prototype human who God, in Genesis, appointed to oversee his creation and guide our spiritual evolution. His mission was not about any sacrificial death, but about establishing the spiritual humanism of Judaic hesed as the central purpose of human existence.

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