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Is it time to get rid of religion? Not so fast, says Ryan Ahlgrim. It's time for us to define and demand healthy faith. Despite the dysfunction and divisiveness seen too often in religion, we continue to need a community of love, and we yearn for a transcendent encounter that can heal us. So instead of abandoning religion, Ahlgrim outlines twelve characteristics of a healthy religious community, and describes what a healthy Christian community of faith believes and practices. Along the way he reveals the power of story, the genius of Jesus, and the path to wholeness. In the end we are faced with the most daring and fulfilling choice of all: to embrace a community of love that trusts in God.

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What if you were to look at human suffering, pain, and loss with another lens? Not as something that you merely make it through but as something that you move around within. In this fresh, creative, and provocative new book, Jeffrey Tucker explores suffering in new ways, challenging our existing beliefs and theologies while offering a healthier and more helpful approach to viewing ourselves, our faith, and others in the face of suffering. Tucker addresses specific and practical questions that we often ask ourselves when we suffer–attempting to locate our suffering, our identity, the persons of the Divine, our support, and our hope in the process. He also engages us along the way by wrapping wisdom within the framework of a story of an old man on an island who is seeking answers to his pain and loss. The journey takes unexpected turns as the old man learns new ways to walk and to live in the midst of his pain. As we join the old man in his walk, we learn new ways as well. This highly readable and accessible book offers thought-provoking and transforming ideas for persons of every walk of life and faith.

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What do you think the Bible says? How does the way the Bible is written affect its meaning? Here is a concise introduction that invites you to interact with the primary text. Interspersed with brief explanations of biblical background and writing techniques are thought-provoking questions about specific readings with space provided for response. This user-engaging approach is enhanced by its sensitivity to readers across the spectrum of belief, from atheist to devout believer. So whether you come to the subject to satisfy historical interest or to appreciate the artistry of Scripture, Approaching the Bible as Literature will deepen your understanding.

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This book shows readers the formation of Q by exploring how the texts were subjected to redaction four times. As author Yoseop Ra demonstrates, the first redaction of Q conveys the words and deeds of the historical Jesus and then the rest of redactors imposed their own theological interpretation to the words and deeds of Jesus. His argument will provide readers with a fresh look on how the earliest «Jesus movement» was formed in the thirties of the first century CE. Q is a hypothetical document extracted from the common source between Matthew and Luke. Thus, it is not easy to distinguish the different layers of redaction embedded in Q. However, form critical, redaction critical, composition critical, and socio-historical approaches to it makes readers separate the four layers of redaction from Q. Each layer will show how the disciples of Jesus moved from the countryside to Jerusalem via some rural cities expanding their boundary.

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In the broad context of Christianity as it developed over two millennia, and with special reference to the last three centuries, this discussion finds that Evangelicalism has repeatedly offered a reduced and distorted understanding of the faith. The evangelical outlook is much less scriptural than evangelicals generally assume. When it comes to appreciating the order of creation, our calling to develop integral Christian thinking and living, the religious significance of culture, and the coming of the kingdom, reductionist Evangelicalism struggles with its only rarely acknowledged deficiencies. As a result, we have all too often ended up with a Christianity shorn of its cosmic scope and wide cultural implications, and restricted to institutional church life and the cultivation of private spiritual experience. The consequences are frequently enervating and corrosive. Without disregarding what is important in the past, evangelicals are here challenged to take the Bible much more seriously, and thereby transcend the limitations of their habitual reductionism. Evangelicals are encouraged to embrace an integral and full-orbed understanding of Christian discipleship that will equip the faithful to address the deep and complex challenges of the twenty-first century.

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As strange as it might seem to moderns, God is present, Jesus did walk amongst us, and miracles still occur. If you have ever wondered what it was like to live at the time of Jesus, prepare yourself, you are about to live it through the eyes of someone who was there.
On a hot California afternoon, Ronald Way was struck by a blinding light. In that light, Jesus appeared and asked if he would give up everything and move away to write a story about a memory that would be awakened from within. That journey sent him halfway around the world to the Holy City of Jerusalem and then to the banks of the Nile. There he was confronted by a vision that sent him tumbling back 2,000 years to the time of Jesus of Galilee. Then, in the body of the old man named Asher ben Ammi, he was to sit on the roof of his home looking down on the Temple to pen the first gospel ever written about the man he considered to be his friend and the Messiah, Jeshua ben Joseph – Jesus.
For two thousand years the contents of that manuscript have remained hidden–until now. Here then is the story of Asher ben Ammi–The Disciple.
Join the author on a journey back in time as he shares his remembrances of a life long gone, but never forgotten.

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Building the Human City is a first overview of the award-winning yet quite diverse works of Jesuit philosopher William F. Lynch. Writing from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, Lynch was among the first to warn against the fierce polarizations prevalent in our culture wars and political life. He called for a transformation of artistic and intellectual sensibilities and imaginations through the healing discernments and critical ironies of an Ignatian (and Socratic) spirituality. Yet the breadth of his concerns (from cinema and literature to mental health and hope to secularization and faith) as well as the depth of his thought (philosophical as much as theological) led to little initial awareness of the overall vision uniting his writings. This book, while exploring that vision, also argues that the spirituality Lynch proposes is more needed today than when he first wrote.

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The influence of Hans Frei (1922-1988) is wide and deep in contemporary theology, even though he published little in his own lifetime. These two volumes collect a wide range of his letters, lectures, book reviews, and other items, many of them not previously available in print. Together, they display the range and richness of Frei's thinking, and provide new insights into the nature and implications of his work. They are an invaluable resource for all those interested in Frei's work, and for any interested in his central themes: the development of modern biblical hermeneutics, the interpretation of biblical narrative, and the figural interpretation of all reality in relation to the narrated identity of Jesus Christ.

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The Sacred Foodways of Film explores the ways by which the portrayal of food in film offers creative spaces for theological insight. From the Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg produced title The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014) to the Oscar Best Foreign Language Film winner from Japan Departures (2008), eleven diverse films invite us to taste and see the mutually enriching blend of food and faith depicted onscreen. Smithsonian magazine describes the last two decades as «The Era of Crazed Oral Gratification.» The explosion of interest in food culture, what is touted as the «foodie revolution,» is evident across media platforms in the United States as well as in many other parts of the world. Curiously, there has not been a book specifically dedicated to the confluence of theology/religion and food films. The Sacred Foodways of Film is a timely contribution to this fascinating area of interest that has long been simmering on the stovetop of scholarship.

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Utilizing the techniques of narratology and literary analysis, this study examines the foundational biblical text of Genesis to develop the theology of ordinary human work that emerges from it. The study offers a history of Christian theologies of human work as well as a unique approach to both the topic of work and the literary structure of Genesis. The emerging concept of blessing rather than achievement provides a refreshing and yet practical approach to human work. This is a valuable complement to the current interest in this topic, and one that, although challenging some current concepts, is encouraging.

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