LITMIR.BIZ

The ministry is difficult. So much is asked of you, and expectations are high. It's hard to please everyone, and hurt can fester and grow, especially when matters stay unresolved. In The Learner, young pastor Christopher Ek confronts the challenges of leading his church, while trying to become a better golfer.
Golf–when taken seriously–is hard. Some say it's a metaphor for life: just when players think they have discovered its secrets, the game turns on them. Nothing works. But a gorgeous shot on the last hole of a disappointing day will bring them back for more, and suggest that there is hope. And there is, for a while, but the Sisyphean cycle continues, no matter the skill of the player. Like life and church, golf is a game full of hope and frustration.
Grappling with these matters, Pastor Ek confronts the forcefulness of the youth of his church, who are learning about homelessness in their midst. Before long, they develop big ideas and seem to be taking over the congregation. Out in the pews members are asking: «What are our children up to? Are we a place of G-o-d or g-o-l-f?» and «who is this foxy new liturgist?»

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Buddhism and Taoism remain vibrant and prominent in Singapore's religious landscape. Yet, little is known of why Chinese Singaporeans chose and remain in these ancient religions. Analyzing over thirty face-to-face interviews with Buddhists and Taoists in Singapore, this book provides a glimpse into their fascinating narratives consisting of encounters and experiences with the presence and power of spiritual realities. A renewed understanding of Buddhism and Taoism will, hopefully, encourage readers of other religious traditions to create space for each other's religious identity. Only then can we continue to live and share a multi-religious environment within the small nation-state.

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Biblical and progressive. Mainline and charismatic. Faithful and questioning. This book is not what you think it is.
The story of the Exodus is told in parallel with testimonies, sermons, and personal reflections from a congregation in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, challenging the reader to a journey of faith. Along the way, it becomes clear that open and affirming ministry transcends LGBTQIA+ inclusion. It is also about race relations, poverty, generational change, divorce, immigration, and any other human-created barrier to loving God and neighbor.
Tools for the journey. Finding a new voice amid profound social change is a difficult and vitally important task. Many congregations and entire denominations are in the process of figuring out how to express a new voice of faith, particularly in our understanding of sexuality and gender. Christians are experiencing nothing less than a holy disruption caused by the Spirit among us. The book concludes with a discussion of challenges to community and ministry. Helpful appendices provide congregational resources and discussion questions for group study.
The stories in this book include experiences of and with persons in many denominational settings: Roman Catholic, Unitarian-Universalist, Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, Metropolitan Community Church, United Church of Christ, United Brethren, Church of the Brethren, Society of Friends (Quakers), and United Methodist. This is truly an ecumenical journey.

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Our sacred texts have the potential to become texts of torture or texts of liberation. History through Trauma explores the symbolic function of religious, political, and national symbols that aid in the construction of historical narratives, and the psychological effects of trauma on their creation and dissolution. The Deuteronomic Covenant, paramount in the construction of a biblical history of Israel, is analyzed with regard to Israel's history of exile. What is proffered is the book of Job as a symbolic history of Israel that stands as a counter-history beside the dominant history constructed in the canon's historical books–a counter-history whose function works to re-enliven the symbol of covenant. History through Trauma brings consciousness to the effects of exile on the dominant historical narratives in the Hebrew canon and to the eradicated affective experiences of trauma that surface in counter-texts such as the book of Job. This work offers a valuable new understanding of the impact of trauma on history-making in general–an understanding that brings light to biblical studies, practical theology, pastoral psychology, and psychoanalysis.

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This work is dedicated to David Alan Black, a New Testament scholar who has contributed to the love of the Koine Greek language as it pertains to New Testament studies in numerous ways–as a professor, author, missionary, and editor. The goal of this book is to demonstrate for students the value of continued research in the Greek New Testament. The essays demonstrate how research is currently being done, utilizing such tools as grammatical studies, discourse analysis, textual criticism, verbal aspect, and other linguistic analyses. The chapters include studies on exegesis, verbal aspect, prepositional compounds, relevance theory, and scripture memorization. This book demonstrates the explanatory power of an in-depth usage of New Testament Greek. It is recommended for those who have had at least one year of Greek.

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Rev. Vigo Auguste Demant (1893-1983) was a significant theologian and social commentator of the first half of the twentieth century. This book contains his up-until-now unpublished Gifford Lectures, in which Demant provides cultural analysis as he attempts to address why humanity struggles so much with modernity and living in the contemporary world. The lectures have additional notes and commentary to make them comprehensible, since not all of them are complete. The first chapters set Demant in his context and the final section provides assessment of both his ideas and his impact. Although Demant died in 1983, his ideas continue to prove influential to thinkers and theologians today.

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Many refer to 1 Peter as an exegetical stepchild within the New Testament; that is, it does not receive the same attention as the Pauline writings, the Gospels, or the Johannine literature. Yet Martin Luther held the First Letter of Peter to be essential to one's own salvation. In keeping with the tradition of Reformation-inspired New Testament theology, and building on the work of John H. Elliott, Elritia Le Roux highlights an affinity between the theology of Mark and the theology of 1 Peter. Ethics in 1 Peter elaborates particularly the similar ways that Mark and 1 Peter handle Christology and the ethics that flows from it. Le Roux argues that both the Gospel of Mark and the First Letter of Peter Christology (specifically Christ's passion) lay a foundation for an ethics of suffering.

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Worship, Tradition, and Engagement is designed to honor the life, scholarship, and influence of Timothy George, the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School. Timothy George is one of the premier evangelical scholars and leading statesmen of this generation. This volume reflects on the many themes of Dean George's life and ministry, including theology, church history, gospel, church, worship, tradition, and engagement. The book, edited by David S. Dockery, James Earl Massey, and Robert Smith, Jr., includes essays by some of the most notable scholars and leaders of our day, including Kevin Vanhoozer, Robert P. George, Albert Mohler, Graham Cole, Gerald Bray, Elizabeth Newman, Richard Mouw, Thomas Guarino, Will Willimon, and several others. Each author makes a distinctive and significant contribution to this important project, bringing depth and breadth to this thematic volume designed to honor scholar and Christian leader, Timothy George.

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In God's Image: Recognizing the Profoundly Impaired as Persons is a bold Catholic argument in defense of the profoundly impaired. While a range of theological voices can now be heard speaking up on behalf of those who live their lives at the extremes of the human condition, few voices have been explicitly Catholic. Comensoli draws on the irreplaceable contribution of St. Thomas Aquinas to forge an engagement with one of the leading thinkers in the theology of the disabled, Professor Hans Reinders. While recognizing the crucial contribution that Reinders has made, Comensoli situates our perception of the cognitively impaired within the horizon of God's own image, refusing a reduction of the substantialist position the Catholic tradition has always valued. This is linked to the fresh and countercultural community life pioneered by Jean Vanier, founder of the L'Arche communities. For Comensoli, the profoundly impaired are persons whose personhood cannot be recognized outside of the condition of their impairment, and through which God's Image is perceived in all its paradoxical implications.

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This project explores the relationship between worship, discipleship, and evangelism within the missional church movement. Engaging contributions from liturgical theology, Christian ethics, and post-Christendom evangelism, the book proposes a missional approach to worship that, when integrated with a praxis-oriented discipleship, cultivates Jesus' character among God's people.
Along the way, the project attends to the Holy Spirit's transformative presence, the liturgical rhythms of remembering and anticipating, and the practices of hospitality and compassion. In the end, Cultivating an Evangelistic Character contends that the Spirit works through the integration of worship and discipleship to form God's people. In other words, God's people become evangelistic, or as Newbigin said, «the hermeneutic of the gospel.»

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