Theology Culture

From the worldwide phenomenon of The Da Vinci Code to the national bestseller Misquoting Jesus, popular culture is being bombarded with radical skepticism about the uniqueness of Christ and the reliability of the New Testament. Reinventing Jesus cuts through the rhetoric of extreme doubt expressed by these and several other contemporary voices to reveal the profound credibility of historic Christianity.

After her brother died unexpectedly and her mother moved into a dementia-care facility, spiritual travel writer and Episcopal deacon Lori Erickson felt called to a new quest: to face death head-on, with the eye of a tourist and the heart of a pastor. Blending memoir, spirituality, and travel, Near the Exit examines how cultures confront and have confronted death by investigating Egypt's Valley of the Kings, Mayan temples, Colorado cremation pyres, Day of the Dead celebrations, Maori settlements, and tourist-destination graveyards.

Divided Nation: Cultures in Chaos & A Conflicted Church provides families and their churches biblical mandates to awaken and arise as influencers in today’s turbulent times. As Christian persecution increases, the Body of Christ needs to prepare to take a bold stand. Ken Ham, CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis-US, the highly acclaimed Creation Museum, and the world-renowned Ark Encounter, sounds the call for Reformation bringing God’s people back to the authority of the Word of God beginning in Genesis.

Who was Jesus? Historical sources portray a person who was complex, multi-layered, and often contradictory to the tidy portrait that much of modern Christianity paints him as. Even the gospel accounts render him as both judge and healer, teacher and temple, servant and savior. A Doubter's Guide to Jesus is a persuasive and often challenging investigation into the historical figure found in the earliest sources. These sources, which include references both direct and indirect - from Roman, Jewish, and Christian accounts - offer us more than simple evidence that Jesus existed.

Rabbi Curt Landry helps Christians discover their roots in Judaism, empowering them to walk in the revelation of who they really are and who they are born to be. Reclaiming Our Forgotten Heritage reveals the mysteries of the church, letting Christians grasp the power that comes from connecting with their true identity.

This Very Short Introduction audiobook offers a clear, accessible, and concise account of the apocryphal gospels - exploring their origins, their discovery, and discussing how the various texts have been interpreted both by the Church and beyond.

The Bible teaches us the real story of Christmas. The problem is people have taken this story and added onto it. Cultures have added on to it. It’s passed through countries, and they’ve tacked on their little spin. We have thousands of years of a Christmas that is built around legends and myths. The Christmas we know is, in places, more a fairy-tale. It’s an inspiring one for sure. But a fairy-tale, nonetheless. This book helps us slow down and unpack the layers so we can see just how beautiful this gift really is.

If Jesus is God, then God is a grunt—the humble, hardy folk placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy who are relied on to accomplish the dirtiest, most difficult (and most thankless) work. This is good news for millions of Christian soldiers and veterans in the U.S. because they have had to make an impossible choice, with no perceivable middle ground, between patriot and pacifist. Author Logan Isaac offers an opportunity for GIs, veterans, and those close to them to read Christian traditions as a soldier would—by and through the lived experiences of military service.

Is Christianity the White Man's Religion? affirms that ethnic diversity has played a powerful role in the formation of the Old and New Testaments and that the Bible is a book of justice, promoting equality for all people. Contrary to popular Eurocentric conceptions, biblical Christianity is not just for White Westerners. It's good news for all of us.

California wildfires and mudslides, a false ballistic-missile alert, record-shattering hurricanes hammer the East Coast, vehicles plow into crowds, mass shootings, the opiate drug crisis, over 60 million babies aborted, the fatherlessness epidemic, the sexual-identity crisis. The list of alarming headlines goes on and on. The hour is late. Darkness is blatant. The American norm has changed. Lisa Bickle Stribling's audiobook is an urgent call to know the hour we live in. To understand the signs of Jesus' majestic return.

Religious traditions in the United States are characterized by ongoing tension between assimilation to the broader culture and defiant rejection of cultural incursions. However, legal theorist and Catholic theologian Cathleen Kaveny contends there is a third possibility - a culture of engagement - that accommodates and respects tradition. It also recognizes the need to interact with culture to remain relevant and to offer critiques of social, political, legal, and economic practices.

Join Andy Stanley for Twisting the Truth, a six-session small-group bible study developed to help you and your group understand how truth can get twisted and distorted, and how that impacts your life. Throughout the study, Stanley exposes four destructive and all-too-prevalent lies about authority, pain, sex, and sin. They’re deceptions powerful enough to ruin our relationships, our lives, even our eternities - but only if we let them.

Sir Oliver Mowat served as a Christian lawyer, politician, premier of Ontario, and was one of the Fathers of Canadian Confederation. He was known by all his contemporaries as being a godly man who sought to do what was right in the sight of God, and who believed passionately in the proclamation and defense of the gospel, and the administration of its graces. Near the end of his life, he published two works on Christianity and its evidences and Christianity and its influence as his contributions to the development of a holistic Christian apologetic.

Using the Bible as the foundational source and guide, while also bringing contemporary sociological data to the conversation, seven biblical scholars and theologians construct a powerful dialogue about gun violence in America, concluding that guns are incompatible with the God of Christian Scripture.

The viral upswing of the "spiritual but not religious" trend has cast religion as going rapidly out of style. Yet even in his own desert of deconstruction, Zach couldn't shake his desire for a spiritual home. His search ultimately led him to look behind the statistics, where Zach found an astonishing undercurrent subversively at work.

In Holy Disunity: How What Separates Us Can Save Us, Layton E. Williams proposes that our primary calling as humans is not to create unity but rather to seek authentic relationship with God, ourselves, one another, and the world around us. And that means actively engaging those with whom we disagree. Our religious, political, social, and cultural differences can create doubt and tension, but disunity also provides surprising gifts of perspective and grace.

There's got to be more to church than this. People around the world are seeking a community that focuses more on others than on themselves. Yet most don't know where to start. Drawing from his own journey, Brandon Hatmaker reminds us that serving the least is not a trendy act of benevolence but a lifestyle of authentic community and spiritual transformation. In Barefoot Church, Brandon offers practical ideas for creating service-based, missional communities and explains how the organizational structure of a church can be created or restructured for mission in any context.

With the pervasiveness of vitriol and dishonesty today, language needs to be revived and restored. In Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, Marilyn McEntyre exposes the commercial and political forces that affect public discourse in American culture and counters with 12 constructive “strategies of stewardship”.

What can zombies teach us about the gospel? The hit show The Walking Dead is set in a post-apocalyptic world inhabited by mindless zombies. The characters have one goal: survive at all costs. At first glance there doesn't seem to be much the show can teach us about God or ourselves. Or is there? Author and speaker Danielle Strickland didn't expect to be drawn to a show about zombies, but she was surprised by the spiritual themes the show considers.

Unlike many celebrities, Winfrey's is an overwhelmingly positive public persona. Here, religion reporter Marcia Nelson explores the spiritual dimensions that are prevalent in all aspects of the Oprah Winfrey media empire. Though Oprah is rarely explicitly religious on her television show or magazine, Nelson points out that there are several major Christian themes that weave through these aspects of her life and work: confession, redemption, healing, mission, forgiveness, and salvation.