LITMIR.BIZ

When Lesslie Newbigin returned to Britain in 1974 after years of missionary service, he observed that his homeland was as much a mission field as India, where he had spent the majority of his missionary career. He concluded that the Western world needed a missionary confrontation. Instead of the traditional approach to missions, however, Newbigin realized that the Western world needed to be confronted theologically.
From his earliest days at Cambridge University, Newbigin developed certain theological convictions that shaped his understanding of the Christian faith. Newbigin utilizes these theological convictions as criteria for evaluating the belief system of Western culture and for providing an answer to Western culture's dilemma.
It is Newbigin's contention that the West is suffering from a loss of purpose because at the time of the Enlightenment, it rejected a belief system that gave it purpose. This was also a belief system that made it uniquely different from the rest of the world, particularly Asia.
The Enlightenment reintroduced humanism and dualism into Western culture, which resulted in the loss of purpose and the rise of skepticism. Modern science and the scientific method, in the form of scientism, added to the problem, making human reason the measure of truth, and limiting facts to only that which could be verified through controlled experiment. Newbigin's solution is to reintroduce the Christian belief system into Western culture in order to restore purpose and truth to Westerners and to put them into contact with true reality through Jesus Christ. He desires to do this in the context of both modernism and post-modernism.
This book will discuss Newbigin's theological convictions and how they factored into both his critique of and his solution for Western culture's spiritual and worldview problems.

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How did a petite redhead from the slums of Dundee become a role model for a hundred years? How did she come to wield influence in the land known to her compatriots as «the white man's grave»? Why are there statues of her holding twins in Nigeria? How did she develop her missionary fervor combined with down-to-earth common sense? How did she overcome difficult situations throughout her life in ways that set her apart from many Victorians?
Her «eccentricities» are often cited: She climbed trees, marched barefoot and bareheaded through the forest, declined to filter her water, and shed her Victorian petticoats. On the other hand, because of her understanding of and rapport with the Africans among whom she lived, the British government appointed her their first woman magistrate anywhere in the world and later awarded her the highest honor then bestowed on a woman commoner.
Mary Slessor–Everybody's Mother examines the era and influence of this extraordinary woman, who spent thirty-eight years serving as a Presbyterian missionary in Calabar. The work answers questions about the public Mary Slessor. It also looks at her private life. The author makes use of materials not found elsewhere, including Slessor's own writings and those of others of her era, reminiscences of her adopted Nigerian son, and assessments from contemporary sources.
Slessor's audacity in remote areas of Nigeria contrasted with her timidity in public meetings in Scotland. She shunned the limelight and wondered why anyone would want to know about her. Her fame continues, especially in Nigeria and Scotland. She was certain God called her to serve in Calabar, the home she claimed as her own, where she became eka kpukpru owo–everybody's mother.

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This book offers a comprehensive reflection on what it means that Christians claim that «Jesus is Lord» by engaging in a defense of Christian apocalyptic as the criterion for evaluating the «truth» of history and of history's relation to the transcendent political reality that theology calls «the Kingdom of God.» The heart of this work comprises an original genealogical analysis of twentieth-century theological encounters with the modern historicist problematic through a series of critical engagements with the work of Ernst Troeltsch, Karl Barth, Stanley Hauerwas, and John Howard Yoder. Bringing these thinkers into conversation at key points with the work of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, John Milbank, and Michel de Certeau, among others, this genealogy analyzes and exposes the ideologically «Constantinian» assumptions shared by both modern «liberal» and contemporary «post-liberal» accounts of Christian «politics» and «mission.» On the basis of a rereading of John Howard Yoder's place within this genealogy, the author outlines an alternative «apocalyptic historicism,» which conceives the work of Christian politics as a mode of subversive, missionary encounter between church and world. The result is a profoundly original vision of history that at once calls for and is empowered by a Christian apocalyptic politics, in which the ideologically reductionist concerns for political effectiveness and productivity are surpassed by way of a missionary praxis of subversion and liberation rooted in liturgy and doxology.

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In the aftermath of World War II, seven American Mennonite graduate students spent eleven days together in Amsterdam discussing their concerns around the state of North American Mennonite churches. Out of this historic gathering came a publication project known as Concern: A Pamphlet Series for Questions of Christian Renewal. While the series extended from 1952 to the early 1970s, the first four volumes, now printed in this single volume, comprise the roots, that is, the foundations that preceded the many articles that were written thereafter.
Throughout The Roots of Concern, the discussion revolves around the recovery of an Anabaptist view of church life and discipleship. Here we find the seeds of a theme that would gain much attention in later years: the primary identity of the church as alternative community as opposed to its positive identification with the world. The fourteen articles in this volume cover a variety of issues such as form and spirit in the church, preaching, fellowship, discipleship, dissent, and property. An article coauthored by Yoder reveals his seminal thoughts around Mennonite church organization in relation to both biblical and contemporary denominational structures.

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This cutting-edge volume has been brought together in honor of Thomas Boomershine, author, scholar, storyteller, innovator. The particular occasion inviting this recognition of his work is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Society of Biblical Literature's section on The Bible in Ancient and Modern Media (BAMM), which Tom was instrumental in founding. For two and half decades this program unit has provided scholars with opportunities to explore and experience biblical material in media other than silent print, including both oral and multimedia electronic performances. This book explores many, though by no means all, of the issues lifted up in those sessions over the years.
Contributors A. K. M. Adam Adam Gilbert Bartholomew Arthur J. Dewey Dennis Dewey Joanna Dewey Robert M. Fowler Holly E. Hearon David Rhoads Philip Ruge-Jones Whitney T. Shiner Marti J. Steussy Richard W. Swanson

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Salt and Light presents the life stories of outstanding Chinese Christians who, as early modernizers, promoted China's nation building and moral progress in the early twentieth century. Lively anecdotes and photographs highlight the strong character of ten pioneers in the modern professions of education, medicine, journalism, and diplomacy. These professionals were motivated by faith to introduce practical social reforms and build up China's civil society. They modeled and promoted virtues essential to social progress during the «golden age» of Chinese Protestantism. Their stories touch on themes important in today's global era: patterns of cooperation between foreign and Chinese partners, the contributions to China of Western-educated professionals, Christianity's role in furthering East-West understanding and exchanges, and the transnational nature of modern Chinese Christianity. The editors and authors articulate the importance of recovering China's Christian heritage as part of world Christianity.

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This book examines how repertoires of speech and action that are often considered to be mutually exclusive–those of church and state–clash or unite during the postdisaster period as local communities and cities struggle to establish a stable collective identity. Based on an analysis of forty in-depth interviews with disaster-response participants and over 325 print-media sources, this study explores, first, the extent to which ministers and citizens challenge statist narratives in order to publicly relay theological views; second, the cultural processes by which local places are nationalized and theologized; and third, the ecclesiological convictions necessary to peaceably advance the work of Christ's body after disasters.

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Dorothee Soelle once wrote, «Dietrich Bonhoeffer is the one German theologian who will lead us into the third millennium.» As we near the end of the first decade of this third millennium, Bonhoeffer continues to inspire new generations as a spiritual guide for their actions on behalf of peace and social justice. This book by Geffrey Kelly provides a critical analysis and reading guide to two of the spiritual classics that are now available in new translations through Fortress Press. Reading Bonhoeffer offers a running commentary of each segment of these popular texts along with discussion questions suitable for the university and seminary classroom as well as parish adult education programs. In a final section of the book, Kelly excerpts and analyzes three significant texts by Bonhoeffer on the need for world peace against the rising militarism and continued glorification of war in Germany and other European nations.

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The Gospel of Matthew recounts several interactions between Jesus and «marginal» women. The urban, relatively wealthy community to which Matthew writes faces issues relating to a number of internal problems including whether or how it will keep Jesus's inclusive vision to honor rural Israelite and non-Israelite outcast women in its midst. Will the Matthean community be faithful to the social vision of Jesus's unconventional kin group? Or will it give way to the crystallized gender social stratification so characteristic of Greco-Roman society as a whole? Employing social-scientific models and careful use of comparative data, Love examines structural marginality, social role marginality, ideological marginality, and cultural marginality relative to these interactions with Jesus. He also employs models of gender analysis, social stratification, healing, rites of passage, patronage, and prostitution.

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It is well known that Henri de Lubac's groundbreaking and highly controversial work on nature and grace had important implications for the Church's relationship to culture and was intended to remove a philosophical obstacle hindering Catholicism's faithful engagement with the secular world. This book addresses a too-often neglected dimension of de Lubac's theological renewal by examining the centrality and indispensability of spiritual exegesis in his oeuvre and making explicit its social and political significance for the Church's worship and witness. In addition to exploring the historical and ecclesial context within which he worked, the current work brings de Lubac into a critical engagement with the more recent theological movements of postliberalism and radical orthodoxy in order to demonstrate the enduring significance of his theological vision.

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