LITMIR.BIZ

Your God is too somber if your posture before him lacks a spirit of joy and a commitment to rejoice as much as possible. While life has its sadness and tragedy, the good news of Jesus Christ is that God's kingdom has won; and the suffering we face for a time is shorter compared with the endless delight that God promises. So, «Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!» (Phil 4:4).
Your God is too somber if you embrace a theology of tears, rather than a theology of laughter. Of course, salvation and Christ's sacrifice are serious business, and we should engage in moments of penitential reflection, confession, and atonement. But all of this so we can shake off the shackles of our shortcomings and celebrate God fully and joyfully.
Your God is too somber if you fail to see the humor in the Bible: the calls to joy, paradox, irony, burlesque, play, and wordplay. God laughs, sometimes with us, sometimes at us, and Jesus's humor is evident in parables and sayings, with the goal of teaching us the truth.
Is your God too somber? This book aims to help you answer that question.

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What transpires when Classical Pentecostals pray for God to intervene within their suffering, but God does not? Traditionally, Classical Pentecostals center on encountering God as demonstrated through the relating of testimonies of their experiences with God. In seeking to contribute to a theology of suffering for Pentecostals, Pam Engelbert lifts up the stories of eight Classical Pentecostals to discover how they experienced God and others amidst their extended suffering even when God did not intervene as they had prayed. By valuing each story, this qualitative practical theology work embraces a Pentecostal hermeneutic of experience combined with Scripture, namely the Gospel of John. As a Pentecostal practical theological project it offers a praxis (theology of action) of suffering and healing during times when we experience the apparent absence of God. It invites the reader to enter into the space of the other's suffering by way of empathy, and thereby participate in God's act of ministry to humanity through God's expression of empathy in the very person of Jesus.

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Living a morally good life today is a challenge. But we become fully and authentically human precisely by the decisions we make every day–some of them relatively simple, others complex and difficult. Once a choice is made, we still must claim the moral resolve and strength of character to implement it. Virtues are precisely the sustained habits that help us maneuver life's many choices and to become the good people that we want to be. St. Thomas Aquinas offers the classic Christian presentation of the four principal virtues of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. But these are precisely cardinal or «hinge» virtues that provide the foundational framework for Aquinas's much broader presentation of a multitude of other virtues. Neglect of this larger array of moral attitudes for good living would miss the breadth of Aquinas's insights into a human life truly well-lived. Virtues Abounding explores, in contemporary language, the practical insights that Aquinas offers for the moral life today. Whether in university, seminary, or adult faith formation settings–whether for a deeper intellectual understanding of virtues or for personal reflection and growth–Virtues Abounding will provide new insight into a classic but too often overlooked storehouse of moral riches.

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The aim of this book, Courage Beyond Fear: Re-Formation in Theological Education, is to combat actual crises we have survived in theological institutions. We first document responses of resistance to authoritarian structures in student and faculty meditations and sermons. Then through them we identify dispositions in community crises: shock, witness, flight or fight, marginalization, power in community, and forgiveness. Behind these dispositions we identify strategies: opposition without rancor; shared authority; vulnerability and truth telling; hope without expectation; courage beyond fear; humility without humiliation. The book proposes that these strategies of formation and resistance can be deployed in other authoritarian and paternalistic contexts.
This book also describes actual realities behind public statements of institutional changes and catastrophes through process, not outcomes. It is the first description of actual crises in theological schools from student, faculty, and staff perspectives.

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This practical pastoral care handbook, written by two self-described queer people of faith, covers the basic skills that religious caregivers and ministry students need in order to be effective, enlightened, and supportive pastoral care providers to LGBTQ persons in congregational and other community settings.
Authors Schlager and Kundtz distinguish pastoral care from pastoral counseling: while the latter is reserved for those with special training in the practice of therapy, the former can be developed by ministers and lay people with sufficient education and practice.
This book requires of the reader no previous experience with LGBTQ communities and treats the following topics: the definition and functions of pastoral care; effective care in challenging times; coming out of the closet; creating communities of care; and caring for a wide variety of LGBTQ relationships. The authors provide case studies throughout the book to ground and illustrate their theology of pastoral care.

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Today Islam is often associated with violence, more so than other world religions. In the center of this reception of Islam is the concept of jihad, which has been distorted by many. On the one hand, there are some Muslims who take jihad as a reference point for their violent crimes against innocent people. On the other hand, the concept is intentionally used to promote fear against Islam and its adherents. This study challenges these presentations of jihad by exploring the late Muslim theologian Said Nursi's jihad of nonviolence. The book shows how Nursi's teaching concerning nonviolent struggle, reconciliation, and religious tolerance has much in common with Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.

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Various ministry approaches have been utilized in Muslim nations in the past in order to lead lost souls into God's Kingdom. One noticeable trend in recent years in the ministry is an increasing emphasis on contextualization. While the evangelical missiological community searches for more effective contextualization models, some ad hoc proposals have complicated the issue. One representative case is the Insider Movement among Muslims, whose advocates contend that Muslim followers of Isa (Jesus) can remain within their own Islamic socio-religious community while continuing in Islamic religious practices.
What is urgently needed in the contemporary discussion on contextualization is to develop a comprehensive analytical framework based on a sound biblical-theological foundation for evaluating any missiological model. After reviewing the historical development of Muslim evangelism models, this study provides such an analytical framework for developing a healthier contextualization model among Muslims and applies this framework to the Insider Movement by critically evaluating the biblical interpretations and missiological reasonings of the Insider Movement advocates. The writer calls for a healthier contextualization model among Muslims that is biblically authentic and culturally relevant.

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The Apostle Paul's vision of eternity is centered on the inheritance theme. Although Paul rarely unpacks this concept, he employs the inheritance in a manner that encompasses the hope of a renewed cosmos promised to Abraham and his descendants. Thus, the apostle does not redefine a theme grounded in the Old Testament and Second Temple literature–as if it now referred to heaven or some other spiritualized existence. He expects what every pious Jew expected–the tangible fulfillment of the promise, when at last God's people will dwell in a land where they will experience rest under the rule of Messiah. What Paul clarifies is that those who are «in Christ» are the beneficiaries of the inheritance. Although believers do not currently possess what has been promised to them, they have the hope that the Spirit will lead them on a new exodus through the wilderness of the present sinful age until they inherit the coming world.

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The symbolism of Revelation has puzzled readers for centuries. Every generation falls prey to extreme views of interpretation. Even worse, they minimize the importance of John's Apocalypse by not teaching or preaching from it. Yet Revelation is a profound work of New Testament theology and warrants a close study. John expects and prepares believers to follow the Lamb through suffering and possible martyrdom. The problem is centered on what the symbols mean. Are they literal? Are they symbolic? Do the images refer to events and people in the first century, or to the last days of planet earth? Moreover, how is the book structured? Is it one vision, four visions, or more? Are the visions linear or recapped? Lions, Locusts, and the Lamb: Interpreting Key Images in the Book of Revelation demonstrates a way to unlock John's structure and unravel his symbols. The key is to follow a logical step-by-step interpretive approach that accents the historical, cultural, intertextual, extratextual, and particularly intratextual allusions and connections. The result is a book that delivers the basic meaning of three hundred images and categorizes them into an accessible guide for teachers, preachers, and readers of Revelation.

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Portraying themselves as challenging blind religious dogma with evidence-led skepticism, the neo-atheist movement claims that the New Testament contains unreliable tales about a mythical figure who, far from being the resurrected Lord of life, may not even have lived. This comprehensive critique documents the falsehood of these neo-atheist claims, correcting their historical and philosophical mistakes to show how we can get at the truth about the historical Jesus.

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