LITMIR.BIZ

"This accursed heat! This scorching wind and sand!" moaned the young warrior Hanani ben Amran as he stood atop the wall of the great King Solomon's fortress at Tamar. «Why is it my lot to spend three years in this infernal desert? There is nothing here worth defending . . . There is no adventure, no war, no anything here!» So went Hanani's daily complaint. Ah, but there was adventure, and plenty of it! There was intrigue. There was war. And, to complicate matters, there was also romance. Caught up in these events, Hanani would find himself captured twice, and would need to draw on all his wits–and the help of others–to escape. If you like all of these ingredients in a historical novel, you will enjoy Tamar: A Story of Adventure, Intrigue, and Romance in Ancient Israel.

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This is a guide for spiritual mountain climbers. In the Scriptures, connecting with Abba often leads to a mountain. Modern spiritual writers have long recognized this scriptural metaphor and explored the nature of this journey of ascent. Drawing on the text of the Bible, works of literature, and the writings of mystics both old and new, Climbing the Spiritual Mountain speaks of the desires and intentions, discipline, and effort involved in developing our intimacy with Christ. In Jesus' dealings with people in the Gospels, he draws them up the spiritual mountain through dialogue and questions. Like Socrates of old, his teaching method probes our thinking, knowledge, and motives. In the process, he stimulates our longing and desire to reach the summit. There are challenges, hurdles, and difficult choices to make as we climb the spiritual mountain. But the reward–approaching the beautiful One who is our Abba–far outshines any sacrifice we may make on the climb.

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Each generation asks in its own way, «What does it mean to be human?» In True Myth, James Menzies addresses this question by exploring myth and religion in the thinking of mythologist Joseph Campbell and Oxford don C. S. Lewis.
Joseph Campbell understood Christianity as comprised of mythical themes similar to those in other religious and secular myths. Admitting that certain portions of the biblical record are historical, he taught the theological and miraculous aspects as symbolic, as stories in which the reader discovers what it means to be human today.
C. S. Lewis defined Christianity, and being truly human, as a relationship between the personal Creator and his creation mediated through faith in his son, Jesus Christ. In contrast to Campbell, Lewis took the theological and miraculous literally. Although Lewis understood how one could see symbolism and lessons for life in miraculous events, he believed they were more than symbolic and indeed took place in human history.
Not only does Menzies consider the ways Campbell and Lewis utilize myth in answering the question for their generation, but he also probes the influence and presence of myth in philosophy, media, ethics, history, literature, art, music, and religion in a contemporary context, thus helping readers consider answers for their own age.

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"Schizophrenia" is by many accounts the most devastating illness of our time. In this book, Elahe Hessamfar uses her personal encounter with her daughter's illness to bring the reader to experience the pain and anguish of those who suffer so intensely. She candidly discusses the gripping and dark realities her family has faced in the midst of this journey and exposes that the ride isn't easy, but it can be fruitful and purposeful, and it can be a journey of joy and peace if understood from the intended perspective.
This is a fascinating and deeply theological portrayal of madness under the mighty hand of God. It challenges and awakens the reader to a heightened awareness about self, community, pain, brokenness, sin, grace, and redemption. This is the first truly biblically based, theological interpretation of madness in conversation with psychiatry and social sciences. Hessamfar passionately discusses the shortcomings of our current medical model of mental illness and directs the reader's attention to the mistreatment of those the medical community labels with «schizophrenia.» She argues that not only is «schizophrenia» not pathological but it touches on the most fundamental fragilities of the human soul, and hence, it is a critical pastoral issue. Hessamfar offers tangible, inspiring, and life-changing solutions for those dealing with this most elusive and mysterious phenomenon–solutions that would bring hope and healing to the hopeless people chained in the abyss of madness.

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Many people in Christian ministry are tired of simplistic certainties; what they need is permission to live with uncertainty, with mystery, ambiguity, and paradox. Because we live in a world that is far removed from the modernist version of reality, with its rational, clinical, and superficial presentation of life, we need the courage and wisdom to embrace the presence of uncertainties in the midst of certainty. In this book, the author offers snapshots of a number of central Christian topics–God, the gospel, the church, salvation, ministry–inviting us to treat them as features of a landscape to explore rather than a set of propositional statements to sign up to. Each chapter–short enough to provoke interest and curiosity–will be a catalyst for deeper reflection and enquiry, inviting us to discover a new freedom in ministry as we embrace a more generous «both-and» perspective in place of a more narrow «either-or» interpretation of the Christian faith. In the process, we may find ourselves rediscovering «the Life we have lost in living» as we imaginatively participate in the life, ministry, and mystery of the triune God of grace in our midst.

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The Old Testament has two great themes: creation and covenant. They embrace subthemes: wisdom in the case of creation; Israel's religion and the Davidic covenant under the general umbrella of covenant; and internationalism, which mostly develops the theme of covenant and partly the theme of creation.
These topics cluster around a common center: Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament. This God is portrayed in different roles, which have attached to them role expectations for both Yahweh and those with whom he assumes relationship. Through contextual exegesis of key texts, we come to understand these roles and associated themes.
While the Old Testament has its own distinctive contributions to make to divine revelation, much of its material is reused in the New Testament to explain and validate the New Testament message. By concentrating on the Old Testament, we learn to appreciate the enormous debt the New Testament owes to the Old in clarifying New Testament theological and moral perspectives.

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The Eucharist has become the central act of Christian life and worship. Unresolved disagreements about it, however, remain as obstacles to religious unity, and to developing a eucharistic spirituality adapted to the unpredictable standards of a deconstructed, critically driven, postmodern age. Beginning with a reassessment of medieval «realist» doctrines of the Eucharist, Beyond the Body argues that the real meaning of the Words of Institution is their use in fulfilling the Last Supper command of Jesus to be remembered. Where traditional doctrines of the Eucharist and their corresponding forms of piety dead-end in intellectual conundrum or disembodied symbolism, that command evokes a world of transformative events with the historical Jesus of the Last Supper as real and constant partner. As an «antitheology» the task of this book is to sketch the intellectual footprint of a nonmetaphysical eucharistic faith. Setting aside traditional approaches, however, will have been worth it only if this enables a eucharistic belief that meets the needs of and is fruitful for religious life in general. Its ultimate goal is to refocus eucharistic piety on the liturgical act itself as a transformative event united in time with the person of Jesus in both remembrance and thanksgiving.

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Damaged by an attempted abortion, preyed upon by the violence of his parents' marriage, abused from the age of seven, and shut away in a mental hospital at thirteen, Paul Broadley never ceases to love the landscape he grows up in, which acts as a precursor to his salvation. But there is a serpent in that garden bent on willfully corrupting people–and yet redemption is strewn widely for those able to respond. Longman's Charity is a novel and theological parable about landscape and childhood, sanity and abuse, truth and redemption. Stigmatized and avoided by his peers, Paul suffers deep psychological trauma as he represses memories of abuse, yet there is a passionate joy in his love of the natural world: the hills, the vale, the glorious fecundity of God's creation. When he climbs out of that vale onto Bredon Hill for the first time, he is struck by the realization of the beauty and the joy of God's creation, but also of the evil that infects it. Longman's Charity is an illustration of the Book of the Psalms and the existence portrayed by the psalm writers: as he grows up, redemption comes through realizing the Truth in Christ

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The Revelation builds conviction, inspires worship, and encourages patient endurance. This is a prison epistle like no other: a disciple-making tract, a manifesto, an extraordinary treatise on Christ and culture, and a canonical climax. We come expecting to learn the ABCs of the end times, and the Apostle John gives us the fullness and fury of his Spirit-inspired praying imagination. Meaning is not found in cleverly devised interpretations, but in God's redemptive story. The apostle's purpose was to strengthen the people of God against cultural assimilation and spiritual idolatry, not to stimulate end times speculation. The Revelation is a sustained attack against diluted discipleship with an unrelenting focus on the immediacy of God's presence in the totality of life. Nothing escapes the gaze of Christ.

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Armies know all about killing. It is what they do, and ours does it more effectively than most. We are painfully coming to realize, however, that we are also especially good at killing our own «from the inside out,» silently, invisibly. In every major war since Korea, more of our veterans have taken their lives than have lost them in combat. The latest research, rooted in veteran testimony, reveals that the most severe and intractable PTSD–fraught with shame, despair, and suicide–stems from «moral injury.»
But how can there be rampant moral injury in what our military, our government, our churches, and most everyone else call just wars? At the root of our incomprehension lies just war theory–developed, expanded, and updated across the centuries to accommodate the evolution of warfare, its weaponry, its scale, and its victims.
Any serious critique of war, as well any true attempt to understand the profound, invisible wounds it inflicts, will be undermined from the outset by the unthinking and all-but-universal acceptance of just war doctrine. Killing from the Inside Out radically questions that theory, examines its legacy, and challenges us to look beyond it, beyond just war.

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