Christian Responses to Spiritual Incursions into the 21st Century Church and Society


Book Description

This volume provides an account of the surprising ‘in-breaking’ of spiritual life that persists in our culture, despite the best efforts of atheist spokespersons and secular theorists. Spirituality in its varying forms is irrepressible, resisting our attempts to exclude it by continuing to seep through the cracks and leak through the gaps. When it is allowed to manifest itself through the Christian faith-tradition, it has the power to surprise, transform and renew everything it touches. This volume contains a series of case studies, each of which describes the inner-functionings and out-workings of the spiritual life as a transformative point of contact between God, world, society and self. Each chapter contains high-level inquiry, drawing on best-practice scholarship that is deeply aware of the needs and opportunities that confront 21st-century society.




African Pentecostal Theology


Book Description

African Pentecostal Theology: Modality, Disciplinarity, and Decoloniality explores research methodology, theological disciplines, and contextualization as important aspects in the process of studying Pentecostal theology in an African context. Mookgo Solomon Kgatle outlines different data collection and data analysis methods, including the skills of interpreting and presenting research findings in a responsible manner. This book illustrates that Pentecostal theology, given its pneumatological approach, goes beyond conventional theological disciplines in transdisciplinary research. The development of knowledge in African Pentecostal Theology should recognize African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS), African oral and traditional cultures, and African indigenous languages to be relevant to Africans. Pentecostal theologians from different theological disciplines in Africa and globally will find this book a worthwhile read.




Conversations at the Well


Book Description

Are religious women in the United States disappearing and finally dying out? Or is there any new way of religious life emerging? Conversations at the Well tries to respond to this question. In the twenty-first century of the global world, newly emerging religious life would be rooted with the Jesus Movement and develop in the spirit of collaboration, networking, and intercultural living. As the liminal space, religious life is located at the margins, subverting the existing social order and creating a new vision for the world. This book explores an alternative meaning of religious life within the context of the apostolic mission. In this new religious life, the concept of community is not limited to living as a community in the convent, but extended into collaborating friendship. Primarily, the apostolic religious life is deeply related to social justice, delinking the global capitalism in which many people suffer from human trafficking, immigration, and exile. The new leader of religious women would require skill in handling uncertainty, amplifying resources, and opening to the new reality. In this new religious life, spirituality would be articulated as freedom and liberation to let go of the old frame, as well as letting the new life become reality. In this way, as radical disciples, religious women in the twenty-first century embody the Jesus Movement, building bridges between different cultures and people.




Spiritual Defiance


Book Description

During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry. Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.




Toxic Spirituality


Book Description

Eric Gritsch, a renowned historian, a pastor, and a theologian for half a century, offers Christianity a reality check, exposing four historical movements that have weakened, and abused the core of the Christian tradition. These movements represent wayward views on the relationships between Christians and Jews; Between the authority of Scripture and tradition; Between the church and worldly power, and between faith and morals.




Exiles


Book Description

This book is for exiles: Christians who find themselves caught in that dangerous wilderness between contemporary secular Western culture and an old-fashioned church culture of respectability and conservatism. Frost presents a plea for such Christians to embrace a dynamic, life-affirming, robust Christian faith that can be lived confidently in a world that no longer values such a faith. Book jacket.




Christianity After Religion


Book Description

Diana Butler Bass, one of contemporary Christianity’s leading trend-spotters, exposes how the failings of the church today are giving rise to a new “spiritual but not religious” movement. Using evidence from the latest national polls and from her own cutting-edge research, Bass, the visionary author of A People’s History of Christianity, continues the conversation began in books like Brian D. McLaren’s A New Kind of Christianity and Harvey Cox’s The Future of Faith, examining the connections—and the divisions—between theology, practice, and community that Christians experience today. Bass’s clearly worded, powerful, and probing Christianity After Religion is required reading for anyone invested in the future of Christianity.




Toward Spiritual Sovereignty


Book Description

Toward Spiritual Sovereignty diagnoses societal samodaya (Buddhist terminology for emotional craving). The author uses extensive knowledge and wisdom from masters of ages past and present to refocus the spirit of man (spiritus mundi) on a wholesome re-creation of the world community. Every soul has the divine right to determine his or her sacred path to their unique destiny upon the horizons of learned choice. Political aggression, (governmental power), religious aggression (proselytizing), and financial aggression (voracious capitalism) provide conflict and work against the realization of happiness and wellbeing. These works are an attempt to advocate for the abolition of hindrance toward those ends, to advocate, without fetter, for spiritual sovereignty of every soul.Each person, Homo Divinitas (man of Divinity) should be able to experience life without threat. Threat can manifest in the form of hunger, poverty, illiteracy, illness, or physical/emotional/spiritual aggression. The 21st century provides an atmosphere of escalating violence, and terror, amidst the Middle East in particular, and the world in general. Such as the Roman Forum prior to the turn of the first millennia after Christ, mankind seems unable or unwilling to cease participation in the spiritual morphine of violence whether real, virtual, or vicarious. Mr. Casperson's authorship proposes effective measures for self-enlightenment and effective ways to cope with violence and political and religious terrorism. Comments and e-dialog are encouraged at the johncasperson.com website blog/site.




Woke Religion: Unmasking the False Gospel of Social Justice


Book Description

In today’s society, many, including Christians, want to be “woke.” But has woke become simply another religion, another ploy of Satan’s to shred the fabric of Christianity? As woke critical theory seeps through the teachings of the Church, many Christians are being misled by their own spiritual leaders to take part in the newest attempt for their souls. In Woke Religion: Unmasking the False Gospel of Social Justice, Wes Carpenter unashamedly addresses these heretical teachings, calling on those in spiritual authority to deny woke philosophies and cling to the teachings of Scripture. Follow Wes as he takes the reader from the stirrings of woke critical theory in Church history to the teachings that are pervading the Church today.




The Space Between


Book Description

Should your faith and your spirituality be a matter of simply private concern, or should they connect to social action? This book explores the disconnect between social and religious progressivism. The author maintains that both social and religious notes are essential for those who want to further a progressive agenda that creates equity and compassion, restores the dignity of all people, and ensures the full participation of all in common life, common wealth, and the common good. The Space Between builds bridges across the space between these elements, both between social and religious belief, but also between contemplative action and active contemplation. This book is an vigorous and unashamed call for social action, but specifically a social action that grows from contemplation, but also for the balance and strength that comes from resting and waiting.