Religion Theory

The delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention blocked the establishment of Christianity as a national religion. But they could not keep religion out of American politics. From the election of 1800, when clergyman charged that deist Thomas Jefferson was unfit to lead a "Christian nation," to today, when some Democrats want to embrace the so-called Religious Left in order to compete with the Republicans and the Religious Right, religion has always been a part of American politics.

Gay marriage, transgender rights, birth control - sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christian consensus regarding gender roles and sexual morality began to crumble, as liberal Protestants sparred with fundamentalists and Catholics over questions of obscenity, sex education, and abortion.

Dr. Ashley Denton's book on Christian outdoor leadership is the first of its kind. It is a foundation resource for students of outdoor leadership, wilderness ministry, and outdoor education. According to many listeners, it is an audiobook that is ideal for youth workers, pastors, outdoor enthusiasts, and those who desire to grow in their relationship with Jesus Christ through solitude or adventure in the outdoors.

A Brief History of Everything is an altogether friendly and accessible account of men and women's place in a universe of sex, soul, and spirit, by Ken Wilber. Wilber examines the course of evolution as the unfolding manifestation of Spirit, from matter to life to mind, including the higher stages of spiritual development where Spirit becomes conscious of itself. In each of these domains, there are recurring patterns, and by looking at them, we can learn much about the predicament of our world - and the direction we must take if "global transformation" is to become a reality.

Grace is the church's great distinctive. It's the one thing the world cannot duplicate, and the one thing it craves above all else - for only grace can bring hope and transformation to a jaded world. In What's So Amazing About Grace?, award-winning author Philip Yancey explores grace at street level. If grace is God's love for the undeserving, he asks, then what does it look like in action? And if Christians are its sole dispensers, then how are we doing at lavishing grace on a world that knows far more of cruelty and unforgiveness than it does of mercy?

Never feel helpless again! A loved one is sick, your friend was just in an accident, a family member is facing an emotional crisis... Have you ever desperately longed to reach out your hand and bring healing to these needs? At times, our hearts ache with the desire to help, but either we don’t know how or we are afraid and stop short. The truth is, the Holy Spirit within you is ready to heal the sick! Charles and Frances Hunter present solid, biblically based methods of healing that can bring not only physical health but also spiritual health and abundant life.

Scott Hahn crafts a powerful message that extols the virtue of confession. According to Hahn, the sacrament of reconciliation is the key to spiritual growth. Through each act of forgiveness, we are able to more closely resemble the divine life.

Although Christian believers agreed with one another that the Bible was authoritative and that it should be interpreted through commonsense principles, there was rampant disagreement about what Scripture taught about slavery. Furthermore, most Americans continued to believe that God ruled over the affairs of people and nations, but they were radically divided in their interpretations of what God was doing in and through the war.

When Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Thuan met at an academic conference in the summer of 1997, they began discussing the many remarkable connections between the teachings of Buddhism and the findings of recent science. That conversation grew into an astonishing correspondence exploring a series of fascinating questions. Did the universe have a beginning? Might our perception of time in fact be an illusion, a phenomenon created in our brains that has no ultimate reality? What is consciousness and how did it evolve?

What does the Bible teach about God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit? What do angels, Satan and demons have to do with reality? What place should the Bible or church have in my life? Perhaps you think you know what others are telling you to believe, but deep down inside you do wonder, "What is really important to my own faith?" If so, you need to know....a Christian's faith must be grounded in truth!

Many books on Purgatory reflect upon what you can do to help the Holy Souls suffering there. But this informative and reassuring book offers practical tips on what you can do to avoid the pains of Purgatory yourself. And the good news is, you don’t have to endure martyrdom; you just have to grow in virtue. Father Martin Jugie clarifies the truth about the Church’s teaching on Purgatory and explains why it isn’t enough simply to strive to avoid Hell. You must expiate for your sins now—and Fr. Jugie spells out how.

In this award-winning book, Leanne Payne reveals how to overcome the three great barriers that keep us from becoming whole persons: The inability to receive God's forgiveness, the inability to forgive others, and the inability to accept ourselves.

From the outset, the implications of this book are terrifying. In this thorough, and sometimes disquieting, investigation of the biblical predictions, the Great Apostasy emerges, not as a foreboding future event, but as the very essence of today's postmodern Church. Like tares in the wheat field, false adherents are presently growing up alongside true believers. But how will we know them? This is where Steve Gallagher is at his best. He exposes the prevailing self-centeredness, widespread sensuality, and rebellion to authority that epitomizes this false part of the Body.

From mourning to discernment, from invitation to intimacy, and from community to the charge to go forth and witness, this work seeks a fuller understanding of the Eucharist through the story of the disciples on their way to Emmaus and calls us to experience the entire journey, to know that what we celebrate and what we are called to live are one and the same.

This 1754 work by Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) is subtitled An Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of the Freedom of the Will Which Is Supposed to Be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. Edwards was a Christian reformer, theologian, and author in the Calvinist tradition, and in this work he explores the necessity of divine grace for the redeeming of the damaged will of humanity. He contends that free will is an extension of, and connected to, the grace of God.

In his first book since 2002's acclaimed The Hidden Face of God, popular scientist Gerald Schroeder combines decades of scientific research and biblical study to present a groundbreaking new paradigm of how to understand God. Fans of Jack Miles' God: A Biography, Francis Collins' The Language of God, and Richard Friedman's Who Wrote the Bible will find much to contemplate in God According to God.

Grace is more story than doctrine. It's more than forgiveness or compassion. It's undeserved by definition, essential to salvation. And it turns out that God's grace—though it's the only thing we stand on and the only thing we should stand for—is the very thing that we consistently distort and hesitate to extend to others. Why is that? To understand the story of grace—what it means and how it's misunderstood, why we need it and how it was given to us—we have to begin at the beginning.

In the throes of a long illness and confronting the possibility of death, 17th-century theologian Richard Baxter found comfort in the reality of heaven that awaits believers of Christ. During his recovery, Baxter wrote about the afterlife in what would become his best-selling book. The Saints' Everlasting Rest meditates on what Scripture reveals about heaven, helping believers live an abundant, God-honoring life in anticipation of eternal rest. Baxter encourages listeners not to become distracted or discouraged by the temporal as he refocuses their minds on the eternal.

Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that we have called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all.

Many Christians are unaware that Universal Reconciliation was the dominant view of the church for the first 500 years, with Annihilation and Eternal Torment as minority positions. Jesus Undefeated is an eye-opening examination of all three views of the afterlife and a God who is even more loving than we dare imagine. Discover the Gospel that is not merely "Good News", but fantastically "Great News."