LITMIR.BIZ

A car crashes, and Maggie Kast, at the peak of a modern dance career, loses a three-year-old daughter. Raised without religion and now mired in grief, she senses a persistent connection to the little girl, a love somehow more powerful than the brute fact of death. This awareness leads her, over three years, to the Catholic Church. After the accident, her marriage is greatly stressed by the entrance of religion into married life, and she and her husband each accuse the other of being too religious or too secular at various times. Despite conflict, dialogue keeps the marriage intimate and vital. Following study of liturgy at Catholic Theological Union, she teaches and tours sacred dance nationally and internationally, exploring the arts as a spiritual path. Moving forward and looking back at once, she discovers early hints of religious experience in childhood celebrations, encounters with art, and marriage. Her husband dies. Now a single parent of a ten-year-old and a developmentally disabled teenager, as well as college-aged sons, she continues her search.

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Evangelicals are supposed to be experts at telling their story. From an early age you are expected to have a «testimony,» a story of how God saved you from a life of sin and sadness and gave you a new life of joy and gladness. What happens if you don't have such a testimony? What if your story just doesn't fit the before-and-after mold? What are you supposed to do if your voice is not one usually heard?
In these offbeat, witty, and often bittersweet essays, up-and-coming writers tell the truth about growing up female and evangelical. Whether they stayed in the church or not, evangelicalism has shaped their spiritual lives.
Eschewing evangelical cliches, idyllic depictions of Christian upbringing, and pat formulas of sinner-to-saint transformation, these writers reflect frankly on childhoods filled with flannel board Jesuses, Christian «rap» music, and Bible memorization competitions. Along the way they find insight in the strangest places–the community swimming pool, Casey Kasem's American Top 40, and an Indian mosque.
Together this collection of essays provides a vivid and diverse portrait of life in the evangelical church, warts and all.
List of Contributors:
Jessica Belt Paula Carter Kirsten Cruzen Anne Dayton Kimberly B. George Carla-Elaine Johnson Megan Kirschner Anastasia McAteer Melanie Springer Mock Audrey Molina Victoria Moon Shauna Niequist Hannah Faith Notess Andrea Palpant Dilley Angie Romines Andrea Saylor Nicole Sheets Shari MacDonald Strong Stephanie Tombari Heather Baker Utley Jessie van Eerden Sara Zarr

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When Jesus spoke at his local synagogue he boldly proclaimed that he was the one sent to free those who were oppressed. He came to provide hope, peace, and safety to those suffering in the world. When he left this earth, his followers were left with the task of continuing this ministry.
Statistics suggest that in America one in four women has experienced physical violence in an intimate relationship. Dating violence, intimate-partner violence, and child abuse rank as some of our nation's largest problems. Men are also being abused by intimate partners, parents, or care providers at increasing rates. The statistic is even more alarming worldwide. Unfortunately, these statistics represent only reported incidents. The rates of verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse are even higher. In addition, countless women are encouraged by clergy to return to their abusive spouses. The faith community, while called by God to free the oppressed, has been slow to respond to this sin against humanity. Few seminaries offer quality domestic-violence-prevention training for clergy. However, clergy still continue to be sought for help from the community and as advocates for victims of domestic violence. A partnership between the church and community (locally and abroad) is necessary if we wish to transform humans caught in this form of oppression. In Setting the Captives Free Ron Clark proposed a theology of addressing domestic violence and its application for clergy. Freeing the Oppressed is a book that seeks to condense Clark's previous work into a readable form for those seeking spiritual answers concerning abuse and batterer intervention, and for helpers of those caught in the cycle of family violence. It is also designed as an outreach for those seeking help from the faith community.

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In this groundbreaking work, Bible translation is presented as an expression of contextualization that explores the neglected riches of the verbal arts in the New Testament. Going beyond a historical study of media in antiquity, this book explores a renewed interest in oral performance that informs methods and goals of Bible translation today. Such exploration is concretized in the New Testament translation work in central Africa among the Vute people of Cameroon. This study of contextualization appreciates the agency of local communities–particularly in Africa–who seek to express their Christian faith in response to anthropological pauperization. An extended analysis of African theologians demonstrates the ultimate goals of contextualization: liberation and identity. Oral performance exploits all the senses in experiencing communication while performer, text, and audience negotiate meaning. Performance not only expresses but also shapes identity as communities express their faith in varied contexts. This book contends that the New Testament compositions were initially performed and not restricted to individualized, silent reading. This understanding encourages a reexamination of how Bible translation can be done. Performance is not a product but a process that infuses biblical studies with new insights, methods, and expressions.

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Seek the Peace of the City provides a robust engagement with the theological foundations and practices of Christian social and political criticism. Richard Bourne identifies a theological realism found in the work of John Howard Yoder. This realism bases social and political criticism in the purposes of a nonviolent, patient, and reconciling God. Bourne develops this account and shows how it is consonant with aspects of the work of a range of contemporary theologians including Stanley Hauerwas, John Milbank, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In developing this theological realism, the book furnishes an account of Christian criticism capable of addressing key debates in contemporary theology and political theory.
Bourne begins by arguing for the public status of theological political claims. He demonstrates that only a vigorous theological realism, grounded in the universal lordship of Christ, is capable of providing a foundation for local, particular, and ad hoc practices of critique. The book concludes by developing an account of the impact such a theological realism and practice of critique might have on contemporary political theory–with explorations of the doxological nature of social change, the changing shape of the state, governmentality and political sovereignty, and the status and role of religious communities in civil society.

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What really happens to human consciousness at death?
How might love and immortality be related?
What is purgatory and do most religions teach the concept of purgatory?
What is spirituality?
Is the essence of the mystery we call «God» the same for the Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jew, and Muslim?
Is it more important what my religion teaches me to believe, or is it more important that my religion enables me to become more loving and compassionate?
How might one practice a reverence for life by our food choices?
How do we balance work and spirituality?
How do we balance spirituality and social-justice work?
In this collection of sermons and reflections, Floyd Vernon Chandler suggests that there are many valid spiritual paths to Enlightenment and Holiness. Understanding the mystery we call «God» is akin to the story of five blind men touching different parts of a huge elephant. Each man's description and understanding of the elephant will vary based upon the location of his touch. The importance of any religion is determined by how much our respective spiritual paths lead us to grow in love and compassion for one another and for all other forms of life on this planet. The sermon and reflections found in Beyond the Grave: Love and Immortality express a Universalist theology that all souls will eventually be reunited with the mystery we call «God.» Inherent in this collection of writings is the belief that there is truth in all religions and that there are many valid spiritual paths. No religious dogma or ideology has a monopoly on truth.

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Uncommon Friendships explores the often-overlooked dynamic of interreligious friendships, considering their significance for how we think about contemporary religious thought. By exploring the dynamics of three relationships between important religious thinkers–Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement–this study demonstrates the ways such friendships enable innovation and transformation within religious traditions. For each pair of thinkers, the sustained engagement and disagreement between them becomes central to their religious and philosophical development, helping them to respond effectively and creatively to issues and problems facing their communities and societies. Through a rereading of their work, Young shows how such friendships can help us rethink religion, aesthetics, education, and politics–as well as friendship itself.

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Best-selling author Thomas Friedman says that globalization has made the world flat and that we cannot stop the process. But while it is right to say that globalization tends to flatten our world, it is wrong to say that there are no alternatives to current patterns of economic, ecological, political, and cultural integration. This book argues that the Christian liturgical calendar provides a constructive alternative to the globalization of economics, ecologies, politics, and cultures. It does so by incorporating the church into the fullness of time in the gospel narrative, thereby helping us escape from the dead end of Friedman's flat world so that we can improvise healthier ways of being globally integrated.

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Evangelicals often give little thought to the morality of contraception, but when they do, serious studies of the subject are scarce if not non-existent. The Christian Case against Contraception seeks to fill this gap by evaluating the practice, not from personal preference or mere experience, but from the four major theological disciplines of Christianity: Historical, Biblical, Systematic, and Practical Theology and Ethics. The book begins with a contrastive analysis between secular and ecclesiastical culture and thought concerning the subject of contraception and the purpose of the sexual act. The claims of the Church, that contraception is morally unacceptable, is examined further as the book takes the reader on a journey through biblical, systematic, and practical arguments which establish the foundations of the Historic Church's claim. Opposing arguments are evaluated as to their strength and validity. In fact, Hodge stirs the debate with a challenge that he has yet to see Christians set forth a valid biblical argument in support of contraceptive practices. For the reader seeking to place procreative ethics under the lordship of Christ, The Christian Case against Contraception offers a bold and clear way forward.

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What does the Bible say about the American future? Does it contain an apocalyptic vision in which conflicts are to be resolved by war? Or does it contain a vision of coexistence under some system of conflict management? While both visions have biblical foundations, the apocalyptic alternative has dominated public discussion in the past generation. Most people are not even aware that another vision can be derived from the same Bible and that it transcends the usual definitions of liberal, conservative, or evangelical politics. The essays in this book, written by distinguished scholars from various sectors of the theological spectrum, throw surprising new light on these questions. They were presented as lectures at an extraordinary theological conference sponsored by a large Methodist church in Lincoln, Nebraska, in October 2009. In contrast to the usual shouting matches between partisans, this conference–and this book–featured liberal and conservative Protestant and Catholic scholars who calmly unearthed new insights about the Bible's relevance for the future of America and the world. Readers will be astonished to see these differing viewpoints on the pages of a single book, and even more amazed at the new common ground that is prepared by these fresh and profound furrows.

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