Social Theology

InThe Jesus of Suburbia, Mike Erre reveals that we've created a Jesus in our own image. In a fresh, startling manner, Erre helps us understand that the real Jesus is calling us to live, act, and think in ways that overturn the status quo.

America is on the brink of collapse. What will you do to save your country? America has suffered some big losses - eroding morals, a Godless culture, and a declining national spirit. These losses have corrupted the very fabric of our once-stalwart nation, coalescing into social and political overthrow with anarchy raging in the streets. Many wonder, Is this the end of America?

Teaching to Live: Black Religion, Activist-Educators, and Radical Social Change interrogates the stories of African American activist-educators whose faith convictions inspired them to educate in radical and transformative ways. Almeda M. Wright explores the connections between religion, education, and struggles for freedom within twentieth-century African American communities by telling the stories of key African American teachers.

Female habit carries with it a twofold idea - dress and ornament. By “dress” we mean what they call “womanly gracing”; by “ornament”, what it is suitable should be called “womanly disgracing”. The former is accounted (to consist) in gold, and silver, and gems, and garments; the latter in care of the hair, and of the skin, and of those parts of the body which attract the eye.

This book offers a close reading of Romans that treats Paul as a radical political thinker by showing the relationship between Paul's perspective and that of secular political theorists. Turning to both ancient political philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero) and contemporary post-Marxists (Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, and Žižek),

Mark Karris offers a first-of-a-kind audiobook that explores petitionary prayer alongside theodicy, social justice, and personal moral responsibility. Divine Echoes journeys through the investigation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of petitionary prayer. Karris also reveals a revolutionary model of petitionary prayer that he refers to as "conspiring prayer". Filled with real-life examples, this audiobook will inform and equip both individuals and churches to pray transformative and subversive prayers that will increase God's love, healing, and beauty in the world.

Financial crisis, political crisis, environmental crisis - the list goes on. We’re confronted with calamity every time we read the headlines. But behind each of these lurks another kind of crisis, one we find harder to define: a moral crisis. In this wise and practical audiobook, Pastor Jonathan Dodson takes us back to the Beatitudes, the centerpiece of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount. Dodson examines each of the Beatitudes in the context of the new morality that buffets our society today, presenting a compelling portrait of the truly good life, both personal and social.

Der große Theologe, Arzt und Musiker Albert Schweitzer veröffentlichte seine "Gespräche über das Neue Testament" in den Jahren 1901 bis 1904, als er Privatdozent in Straßburg war, in der kleinen Zeitung Evangelisch-protestantischer Kirchenbote für Elsass-Lothringen. Gemeinsames Ziel der 33 kurzen, predigtähnlichen Texte ist es, eine Anleitung zu geben, "wie ein erwachsener Christ selbständig für sich die Bibel lesen soll".

Advances in technology offer couples wanting to have children more options than ever before - fertility treatment methods; prefertilization genetic screening; and embryo adoption. With all of these options available, plus the blessing of adoption, it can be difficult for Christian couples to determine which to consider when the Bible doesn’t give explicit direction.

So Help Me God relates the compelling story of Chief Justice Roy Moore, including his controversial Ten Commandments displays, his refusal to obey an unlawful order of a federal court, and why the critical legal and political question of our time is, 'Can the state acknowledge God?'

What if Jesus was serious about loving our enemies? For too long, those who carry the name "Christian" have ignored the Christlike path of enemy-love and creative nonviolence. For many of us, the Second Amendment has become more important than the Sermon on the Mount. It's time we begin to walk the path of peace marked out for us by the Prince of Peace and learn to study war no more.

Restored to Earth provides the first comprehensive examination of the religious and ethical dimensions and significance of contemporary restoration practice, an ethical framework that advances the field of environmental ethics in a more positive, action-oriented, experience-based direction. Van Wieren brings together insights and examples from restoration ecology, environmental ethics, religious studies, and conservation and Christian thought....

When sin is disguised as virtue, the path to cultivating righteousness becomes impossible. Such is the challenge Christians face in the modern age. Not long ago, most people would agree that the seven deadly sins are in fact deadly. But ask them today, and you’ll hear a different answer. Today, “anger” is often considered an admirable emotion, “lust” the only expression of love, and “greed” the unassailable right to “get what’s yours”. The world can rebrand sin all it wants and declare the death of truth, but it has no power against the truth of the Scripture.

Many people today talk about justice, but are they living justly? They want to change the world, but are they being changed themselves? Eugene Cho has a confession: "I like to talk about changing the world but I don't really like to do what it takes." If this is true of the man who founded the One Day's Wages global antipoverty movement, then what must it take to act on one's ideals? Cho does not doubt the sincerity of those who want to change the world.

Not long ago, most White American Christians believed that Jesus blessed slavery. God wasn't bothered by Jim Crow. Baby Jesus had white skin. Meet Plantation Jesus: a god who is comfortable with bigotry and an idol that distorts the message of the real Savior. That false image of God is dead, right? Wrong, argue the authors of Plantation Jesus, an authoritative new book on one of the most urgent issues of our day.

In this powerful classic, the eminent Swiss philosopher Max Picard argues that though the “flight from God” is not a phenomenon unique to this age, man has nevertheless put himself and society in an extremely dangerous situation with the progressive secularization of Western culture. In the age of faith, Picard says, a man had to make a conscious decision to separate himself from the world of faith. Today, the world, not just the individual, is in flight, and men must extricate themselves from modernity and make a deliberate decision to find and affirm faith.

In our increasingly secular world, many claim that Christianity is oppressive and toxic. Christians are accused of standing on the wrong side of history, failing to accept human dignity, freedom, and progress. Are these accusations valid? Is Christianity actually causing more harm than good in the world? In this concise booklet, author Sharon James shows that through history and across the globe, true followers of Christ have challenged injustice and abuse, and provided care for the needy.

This book touches on certain dynamics regarding the theoretical and cultural basis of the model Fethullah Gülen has developed based on dialogue, tolerance, and concurrence among groups that come from different religions, cultures, and civilizations. Gülen's model focuses on human beings, those who surround all their world with thought and action, and who are directed toward love for God and for creation.

A gospel of hope, inclusion, and defiance. If God gets everything God wants, and if what God wants is you, can anything stand in God’s way? Too many Christians have been taught that core aspects of who they are - their gender, their sexual orientation, their politics, their skepticism - prevent God from loving them fully. For these individuals, church has been a painful experience of exclusion, despite the reality that Jesus was the embodiment of God’s radical inclusion.

We’re not good at living with tension. It’s uncomfortable. It feels unsafe. The moment a friend, spouse, business, or political movement disagrees with us, we flee to the safety of like-minded thinkers, and dehumanize and attack anyone who thinks differently. No one wins. And if someone dares question our particular stance, we demonize them. This is killing us - families, friendships, civility, and discourse. It kills our chance to hear and be heard. We must step out of our bunkers and step into no-man’s-land....