Church Politics

In this insightful, nonpartisan roadmap toward faithful political engagement and ultimate allegiance to Jesus, pastor Joshua Ryan Butler diagnoses the roots of political conflict tearing apart the church and prescribes a practical and prophetic way forward.

With 2.5 million viewers at any given moment, the streaming platform Twitch is in the lead and often well beyond mainstream networks like CNN and Fox during primetime. On Twitch, the Amazon-owned tech behemoth, the biggest personalities, like Kai Cenat, Félix “xQc” Lengyel, and Hasan “HasanAbi” Piker, can earn millions per year by firing up their internet connection and going live.

When political division shows up not only on the campaign trail but also at our dinner tables, we wonder: Can we be part of a better way? The Spirit of Our Politics says "yes," offering a distinctly Christian approach to politics that results in healing rather than division, kindness rather than hatred, and hope rather than despair.

Emmett Till offers the first truly comprehensive account of the 1955 murder and its aftermath. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. His death and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement.

Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend's gripping story of the American Army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg, a compelling and thought-provoking tale that raises questions of faith, guilt, morality, vengeance, forgiveness, salvation, and the essence of humanity.

The Bharatiya Janata Party is an idea that was seeded into the minds of nationalist Jana Sangh leaders when they began to envision India after Independence. Much like the very core the freedom struggle was built on, they saw India as a demographically, culturally and historically cohesive and unified nation—as Bharat.

As a Black autistic pastor and disability scholar, Lamar Hardwick lives at the intersection of disability, race, and religion. Tied to this reality, he heeded the call to write How Ableism Fuels Racism to help Christian communities engage in critical conversations about race by addressing issues of ableism. Hardwick believes that ableism—the idea that certain bodies are better than others—and the disability discrimination fueled by this perspective are the root causes of racial bias and injustice in American culture and in the church.

Writing in response to our current “constitutional crisis”, New York Times best-selling author and Christian activist Jim Wallis urges America to return to the tenets of Jesus once again as the means to save us from the polarizing bitterness and anger of our tribal nation.

You hear about Israel in the news regularly, but beyond the many opinions and preconceptions, do you really know what to make of the conflicts and controversies in the Middle East? What Should We Think About Israel? exposes the main current issues and provides well-researched objective facts to help you learn the truth about Israel's past, present, and future. This compilation from experts including Walter Kaiser, Jr., David Brickner, Mitch Glaser, Michael Brown, Arnold Fructenbaum, and Steven Ger will help you answer the tough questions.

Dr. Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, reveals this integral unity of the Declaration and the Constitution. Together, they form the pillars upon which the liberties and rights of the American people stand. United, they have guided history's first self-governing nation, forming our government under certain universal and eternal principles. Unfortunately, the effort to redefine government to reflect "the changing and growing social order" has gone very far toward success.

The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy. In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal.

This collection is an attempt to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. Many of the concerns that drive the Indian Right are located in the country's nationalist culture. In trying to locate some of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that define the Indian Right, Awakening Bharat Mata also seeks to identify the nature of Indian conservatism and identify its similarities and differences with political thought in the West.

In Just Faith, progressive Christian activist and writer Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons explains how a strong religious left has accompanied every major progressive advance in our society, and he resurrects the long but forgotten history of progressive Christianity in the United States that can and must link arms with progressive Muslims and Jews to make the moral case for pluralism, human dignity, and the common good. Graves-Fitzsimmons provides a blueprint for this type of resurrection based on his advocacy work at the intersection of religion and American politics.

An examination of sex and the Bible by one of the leading biblical scholars in the United States. For several decades, Michael Coogan's introductory course on the Old Testament has been a perennial favorite among students at Harvard University. In God and Sex, Coogan examines one of the most controversial aspects of the Hebrew Scripture: What the Old Testament really says about sex, and how contemporary understanding of those writings is frequently misunderstood or misrepresented.

American Grace takes its findings from two of the largest, most comprehensive surveys ever conducted on religion and public life in America, plus in-depth studies of diverse congregations---among them a megachurch, a Mormon congregation, a Catholic parish, a reform Jewish synagogue, and an African American congregation.

Lenny Duncan is the unlikeliest of pastors. Formerly incarcerated, he is now a black preacher in the whitest denomination in the United States: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Shifting demographics and shrinking congregations make all the headlines, but Duncan sees something else at work - drawing a direct line between the church's lack of diversity and the church's lack of vitality. The problems the ELCA faces are theological, not sociological. But so are the answers.

For decades the accepted wisdom has been that America's mainline Protestant churches are in decline, eclipsed by evangelical mega-churches. Church and religion expert Diana Butler Bass wondered if this was true, and this book is the result of her extensive, three-year study of centrist and progressive churches across the country. Her surprising findings reveal just the opposite - that many of the churches are flourishing, and they are doing so without resorting to mimicking the mega-church, evangelical style. Christianity for the Rest of Us describes this phenomenon....

Politics are being transformed by religion, namely in China - within the next 30 years, one-third of this potential superpower could be Christian. If this religious transformation occurs, China would be one of the largest Christian nations in the world.

What is the RSS’ imagination for India? If India becomes a Hindu Rashtra, what will be the place of Muslims and other faiths in it? How big is the RSS project of history writing? Will Hindutva override caste politics? And what is the RSS view of social issues pertaining to the changing nature of family, the rights of people with different sexual orientations and the third gender? These contentious questions are just a few of the myriad political and social issues that Sunil Ambekar, a high-ranking pracharak, analyses in his book, The RSS: Roadmaps for the 21st Century.

For generations, the Black church has been a cornerstone of resilience, community, and empowerment, serving as a sanctuary for African Americans facing systemic oppression. Rooted in liberation theology and social activism, it has played a crucial role in social movements and cultural identity. However, while the Black church continues to be a source of strength, it also mirrors the complexities and contradictions of the communities it serves.