Speaking Christian

Speaking Christian PDF Author: Marcus Borg
Publisher: SPCK
ISBN: 0281066876
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
As with French, German or Spanish, learning the basic vocabulary of Christianity is a vital first step in understanding what it means and how it works. We think of words like 'faith', 'forgiveness', 'salvation', 'sin' and 'heaven'. But how can we be sure that we understand them correctly? Over the centuries all sorts of different meanings have grown up around these words, and sometimes those meanings can obscure or distort the way the words were originally used in the Bible. In Speaking Christian, Marcus Borg takes some of the key words in the Christian dictionary and exposes the negative and unhelpful connotations they still carry today. At the same time, he goes back to the Bible and unpacks their meaning in a way that is both more faithful to the teaching of Jesus and more relevant to his followers today.

Speaking Christian

Speaking Christian PDF Author: Marcus Borg
Publisher: SPCK
ISBN: 0281066876
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Get Book

Book Description
As with French, German or Spanish, learning the basic vocabulary of Christianity is a vital first step in understanding what it means and how it works. We think of words like 'faith', 'forgiveness', 'salvation', 'sin' and 'heaven'. But how can we be sure that we understand them correctly? Over the centuries all sorts of different meanings have grown up around these words, and sometimes those meanings can obscure or distort the way the words were originally used in the Bible. In Speaking Christian, Marcus Borg takes some of the key words in the Christian dictionary and exposes the negative and unhelpful connotations they still carry today. At the same time, he goes back to the Bible and unpacks their meaning in a way that is both more faithful to the teaching of Jesus and more relevant to his followers today.

Making Sense of God

Making Sense of God PDF Author: Timothy Keller
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525954155
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Get Book

Book Description
We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

Dominion

Dominion PDF Author: Tom Holland
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465093523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 624

Get Book

Book Description
A "marvelous" (Economist) account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination. Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the modern world.

Confronting Christianity

Confronting Christianity PDF Author: Rebecca McLaughlin
Publisher: Crossway
ISBN: 1433564262
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Get Book

Book Description
Although many people suggest that Christianity is declining, research indicates that it continues to be the world's most popular worldview. But even so, the Christian faith includes many controversial beliefs that non-Christians find hard to accept. This book explores 12 issues that might cause someone to dismiss orthodox Christianity—issues such as the existence of suffering, the Bible's teaching on gender and sexuality, the reality of heaven and hell, the authority of the Bible, and more. Showing how the best research from sociology, science, and psychology doesn't disagree with but actually aligns with claims found in the Bible, these chapters help skeptics understand why these issues are signposts, rather than roadblocks, to faith in Christ.

Speaking of Christianity

Speaking of Christianity PDF Author: Robert McAfee Brown
Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
ISBN: 9780664257422
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book

Book Description
Renowned theologian Robert McAfee Brown believes that Christianity cannot be fenced off or separated from the world, but is always in relation to something else. Here he puts his belief to the test, writing on Christianity and a multitude of topics: puzzles, earthquakes, worship, martyrdom, beauty, sex, God, politics, joy, anti-Semitism, and the environment.

Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot

Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot PDF Author: Seth Andrews
Publisher: Outskirts Press
ISBN: 9781977250827
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book

Book Description
Seth Andrews wasn't an idiot during his thirty years as an evangelical Christian. He wasn't unintelligent, nor did his IQ shift when he ultimately left religion entirely. He considered himself thoughtful, moral, reasonable, and at least as smart as the average person. In other words, he wasn't an idiot. Yet strangely, he often sounded like one. In any other context, Christians would likely smirk, scoff, or recoil at many of their "normal" beliefs and practices: reenacted Easter crucifixions, eating monthly communion "flesh," singing hymns about being washed in blood, and the embrace of a Bible containing scripture verses about golden hemorrhoids, apocalypse dragons, and human sacrifice, So what gives? Are these notions embraced only because they're familiar? Do they make any sense? And do they cause otherwise reasonable people to sound like idiots? Seth Andrews admits that, for himself, the answer was a definite yes. For everyone else? Read the book and decide.

Christians Against Christianity

Christians Against Christianity PDF Author: Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807057401
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
A timely and galvanizing work that examines how right-wing evangelical Christians have veered from an admirable faith to a pernicious, destructive ideology. Today’s right-wing Evangelical Christianity stands as the very antithesis of the message of Jesus Christ. In his new book, Christians Against Christianity, best-selling author and religious scholar Obery M. Hendricks Jr. challenges right-wing evangelicals on the terrain of their own religious claims, exposing the falsehoods, contradictions, and misuses of the Bible that are embedded in their rabid homophobia, their poorly veiled racism and demonizing of immigrants and Muslims, and their ungodly alliance with big business against the interests of American workers. He scathingly indicts the religious leaders who helped facilitate the rise of the notoriously unchristian Donald Trump, likening them to the “court jesters” and hypocritical priestly sycophants of bygone eras who unquestioningly supported their sovereigns’ every act, no matter how hateful or destructive to those they were supposed to serve. In the wake of the deadly insurrectionist attack on the US Capitol, Christians Against Christianity is a clarion call to stand up to the hypocrisy of the evangelical Right, as well as a guide for Christians to return their faith to the life-affirming message that Jesus brought and died for. What Hendricks offers is a provocative diagnosis, an urgent warning that right-wing evangelicals’ aspirations for Christian nationalist supremacy are a looming threat, not only to Christian decency but to democracy itself. What they offer to America is anything but good news.

The Universal Christ

The Universal Christ PDF Author: Richard Rohr
Publisher: Convergent Books
ISBN: 1524762105
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one of the world’s most influential spiritual thinkers, a long-awaited book exploring what it means that Jesus was called “Christ,” and how this forgotten truth can restore hope and meaning to our lives. “Anyone who strives to put their faith into action will find encouragement and inspiration in the pages of this book.”—Melinda Gates In his decades as a globally recognized teacher, Richard Rohr has helped millions realize what is at stake in matters of faith and spirituality. Yet Rohr has never written on the most perennially talked about topic in Christianity: Jesus. Most know who Jesus was, but who was Christ? Is the word simply Jesus’s last name? Too often, Rohr writes, our understandings have been limited by culture, religious debate, and the human tendency to put ourselves at the center. Drawing on scripture, history, and spiritual practice, Rohr articulates a transformative view of Jesus Christ as a portrait of God’s constant, unfolding work in the world. “God loves things by becoming them,” he writes, and Jesus’s life was meant to declare that humanity has never been separate from God—except by its own negative choice. When we recover this fundamental truth, faith becomes less about proving Jesus was God, and more about learning to recognize the Creator’s presence all around us, and in everyone we meet. Thought-provoking, practical, and full of deep hope and vision, The Universal Christ is a landmark book from one of our most beloved spiritual writers, and an invitation to contemplate how God liberates and loves all that is.

When God Talks Back

When God Talks Back PDF Author: T.M. Luhrmann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307277275
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Get Book

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise.

Speaking the Christian God

Speaking the Christian God PDF Author: Alvin F. Kimel
Publisher: Gracewing Publishing
ISBN: 9780802806123
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Get Book

Book Description
A collection of essays written by a wide diversity of scholars--including Thomas F. Torrance, Geoffrey Wainwright, Elizabeth Achtemeier, Colin Gunton, and Robert W. Jenson--that discuss and critically analyze the crucial theological issues at stake in the feminist theological agenda. The first volume of its kind to offer an orthodox, critical response to the proposals of contemporary feminist theology.