The Inward Road and the Way Back


Book Description




The Great Open Dance


Book Description

The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary ideals: environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress—an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination. Faith demands change because Jesus of Nazareth started a movement, not a tradition. He preached about a new world, the Kingdom of God, and invited his followers to work toward the divine vision of universal flourishing. This vision includes all and excludes none. Since we have not yet achieved the world that Jesus describes, we must continue to progress. The energizing impulse of this progress is the Trinity: Abba, Jesus, and Sophia, three persons united by love into one perfect community. God is fundamentally relational, and humankind, made in the image of God, is relational as a result. We are inextricably entwined with one another, sharing a common purpose and a common destiny. In this vision, we find abundant life by practicing agape, the universal, unconditional love that Abba extends, Jesus reveals, and Sophia inspires.




Learning to Love


Book Description

In this new book, Martin Israel explores the question: How can we learn to obey the commandment to love our neighbor? Through powerful meditations on the nature and responsibilities of existence and love Israel shows to his readers some of paths for the "mystical walk" that ends in love. He writes:"One does not believe in God; one knows Him by experience, and that experience makes all life's vicissitudes worth while. For this end is glorious [and] as one grows so one's vision expands to include all humanity and ultimately all that lives."




The Spirit of Life


Book Description

Moltmann, "the foremost Protestant theologian in the world" (Church Times), brings his characteristic audacity to this traditional topic and cuts to the heart of the matter with a simple identification: What we experience every day as the spirit of life is the spirit of God. Such considerations give Moltmann's treatment of the different aspects of life in Spirit a verve and vitality that are concrete and existential. Veteran readers will find here a rich and subtle extension of Moltmann's trinitarian and christological works, even as he makes bold use of key insights from feminist and ecological theologies, from recent attention to embodiment, and from charismatic movements. Newcomers will find a fascinating entree into the heart of his work: the transformative potential of the future. Moltmann develops a theology of the Holy Spirit that links the Christian community's experience of the Spirit to the sanctification and liberation of life. He brilliantly displays the ecological and political significance of Christian belief in the Trinity.




Rhythms of Faithfulness


Book Description

This collection of essays by British Baptists honors the work of John Colwell amongst the Baptist community, recognizing in particular the contribution he has made to Christian doctrine and ethics and more recently his involvement in the formation of The Order for Baptist Ministry (OBM). The book explores what we are doing in morning prayer and what it is to allow the seasons and festivals of the Christian year to shape our lives.




The Westminster Collection of Christian Meditations


Book Description

Over 500 meditations from more than 250 authors, classic and contemporary, are arranged by themes that address individual needs and concerns, in this extensive anthology of Christian meditations.




An Actological Theology


Book Description

An actology—introduced by the first book in this series, Actology: Action, Change and Diversity in the Western Philosophical Tradition—understands reality as action in changing patterns. Actological Readings in Continental Philosophy reads a number of continental philosophers through this lens, and An Actology of the Given explores the concepts of the gift, givenness, and giving in the light of reality understood as action in changing patterns. Mark’s Gospel: An Actological Reading is what it says it is. An Actological Metaphysic is a more systematic treatment of cosmology and of such concepts as truth, knowledge, causality, time, space, life, and society, to see what happens when they are understood actologically—that is, with reality understood as action in changing patterns. An Actological Theology similarly asks what Christian theology might look like if God, the universe, ourselves, and everything else is understood as action in changing patterns.




Lifting the Taboo


Book Description

lluminated by a profound yet humorous vision, Lifting the Taboo explores the specific relationship women of many colors, cultures, ages, and sexual orientations have to their own deaths, their attitudes towards loss, and their disposition to their role as primary care-givers to the dying.Specifically, the book weighs the implications of breast cancer and examines in detail Alzheimer's Disease which, contrary to popular myth, can in several significant ways be perceived as a women's disease. Investigating mothers' responses to children's deaths, Sally Cline establishes that women's relationships to death are intricately connected to the experience of giving birth. They are, she argues, therefore psychologically and emotionally different from those of men. Cline goes on to examine women's roles and responses to AIDS and suicide, women's sexual relationships while dying, how society views widows as leftover lives, and women's radical work in hospices and death therapy, as well as their roles as female funeral directors.




A Broad Place


Book Description

Among the most acclaimed and accomplished theologians of the last 100 years, Jurgen Moltmann is also one of the most popular. This autobiography will certainly be widely read in the churches and the academy and will shed light on the intellectual development of this enormously influential theologian. He has marked the history of theology after the Second World War in Europe and North America like no other. He is the most widely read, quoted, and translated theologian of our time. Now, after Jurgen Moltmann has celebrated his eightieth birthday, he looks back on a life engaged in and forging a Christian response to the tumult and opportunities of our time. In his autobiography Jurgen Moltmann tells his life story, from the Hamburg youth in the "alternative" parental home up to the present moment, and he reflects on the journey of his own theological development and creativity. A wide-ranging document alert to the deeper currents of his time and ours, A Broad Place is an entertaining reconsideration of a life full of intense experience and new beginnings.




The Cambridge Companion to Christian Political Theology


Book Description

Interest in political theology has surged in recent years, and this accessible volume provides a focused overview of the field. Many are asking serious questions about religious faith in secular societies, the origin and function of democratic polities, worldwide economic challenges, the shift of Christianity's center of gravity to the global south, and anxieties related to bold and even violent assertions of theologically determined political ideas. In fourteen original essays, authors examine Christian political theology in order to clarify the contemporary discourse and some of its most important themes and issues. These include up-to-date, critical engagements with historical figures like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant; discussions of how the Bible functions theopolitically; and introductions to key movements such as liberation theology, Catholic social teaching, and radical orthodoxy. An invaluable resource for students and scholars in theology, the Companion will also be beneficial to those in history, philosophy, and politics.