What We Talk about When We Talk about God


Rob Bell - 2012
    His new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, will continue down this path, helping us with the ultimate big-picture issue: how do we know God? Love Wins was a Sunday Times bestseller that created a media storm, launching Bell as a national religious voice who is reinvigorating what it means to be religious and a Christian today. He is one of the most influential voices in the Christian world, and now his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, is poised to blow open the doors on how we understand God. Bell believes we need to drop our primitive, tribal views of God and instead understand the God who wants us to become who we were designed to be, a God who created a universe of quarks and quantum string dynamics, but who also gives meaning to why new-born babies and stories of heroes and sacrifice inspire in us a deep reverence. What We Talk About When We Talk About God will reveal that God is not in need of repair to catch him up with today's world so much as we need to discover the God who goes before us and beckons us forward. A book full of mystery, controversy, and reverence, What We Talk About When We Talk About God has fans and critics alike anxiously awaiting, and promises not to disappoint.

Eyewitness to History


John Carey - 1987
    . . Witnessing the destruction of Pompeii. . . Accompanying Julius Caesar on his invasion of Britain. . . Flying with the crew of The Great Artiste en route to dropping the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. . . Civilization's most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries -- remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.

The European Reformation


Euan Cameron - 1991
    During this period western Christianity underwent the most dramatic changes in its entire history. From Iceland to Transylvania, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees, the Reformation divided churches and communities into 'Catholic' and 'Protestant', and created varying regional and national traditions. The new Protestant creed rejected traditional measures of piety--vows, penances, pardons, and masses--in favor of sermons and catechisms, and an everyday morality of diligence, neighborly charity, and prayer. In the process, it involved many of Europe's people for the first time in a political movement inspired by an ideology and nourished by mass communication. Using the most recent research, Cameron provides a thematic and narrative synthesis of the events and ideas of the Reformation. He examines its social and religious background, its teachers and their message, and explores its impact on contemporary society.

Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot


Elisabeth Elliot - 1958
    It is the best-selling account of the martyrdom of Jim Elliot and four other missionaries at the hands of the Huaorani Indians in Ecuador.Shadow of the Almighty has inspired Christians since its first publication in 1958. Elisabeth Elliot makes full use of Jim's revealing diaries to fill in the details of a life completely committed to God's service.This story was reintroduced to today's audiences in 2006 thanks to the release of the film, End of the Spear, which tells for the first time the killings from the perspective of the Huaorani.

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith


Peter Hitchens - 2009
    With unflinching openness and intellectual honesty, Hitchens describes the personal loss and philosophical curiosity that led him to burn his Bible at prep school and embrace atheism in its place. From there, he traces his experience as a journalist in Soviet Moscow, and the critical observations that left him with more questions than answers, and more despair than hope for how to live a meaningful life. With first-hand insight into the blurring of the line between politics and the Church, Hitchens reveals the reasons why an honest assessment of Atheism cannot sustain disbelief in God. In the process, he provides hope for all believers who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, may discover the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus


Gary R. Habermas - 2004
    It is interesting, engaging, and crucial material. --Norman Geisler This is an accessible, comprehensive, and persuasive resource providing detailed evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. It also demonstrates how to share the material clearly, honestly, and definitively. Included is an interactive CD which tests the reader's knowledge of the material by using an entertaining TV game show format.[The authors] have distinguished themselves as leading experts on the evidence for this all important event. --D. James KennedyWritten by the leading evangelical apologist on the resurrection and an up-and-comerIncludes an interactive CD to cement the information from the bookWritten for lay people but includes extensive footnotes that scholars will find valuableIncludes charts, diagrams, and a detailed outline for quick reference

Apologia Pro Vita Sua (A Defense of One's Life)


John Henry Newman - 1864
    Mary's, Oxford, to join the Roman Catholic church. Perhaps no one took greater offense than Protestant clergyman Charles Kingsley, whose scathing attacks against Newman's faith and honor inspired this brilliant response. Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Newman's spiritual autobiography, explores the depths and nature of Christianity with flowing prose and a conversational style that has ensured its status as a classic."False ideas may be refuted by argument, but by true ideas alone are they expelled. I will vanquish," Newman promised, "not my accuser, but my judges." His honest and passionate defense consists of a personal history of his religious convictions, from earliest memory through the Oxford movement and his ultimate conversion. His concluding point-by-point refutation of Kingsley's charges features thought-provoking contentions that strike at the very roots of the principles underlying Protestantism. Newman won respect and admiration with his Apologia, a work that has helped clarify perceptions of Roman Catholicism among readers of every faith.

The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 2021
    Within those walls, voices were lifted up in song to call forth the best in each other, and to comfort each other when times were at their worst. In this book, his tender and magisterial reckoning with the meaning of the Black church in American history, Gates takes us from his own experience onto a journey across more than four hundred years and spanning the entire country. At road's end, we emerge with a new understanding of the centrality of the Black church to the American story--as a cultural and political force, as the center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as an unparalleled incubator of talent, and as a crucible for working through the community's most important issues, down to today.In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black church has always been more than a sanctuary; it's been a place to nourish the deepest human needs and dreams of the African-American community. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meeting houses were subject to surveillance, and often destruction. So it continued, long after slavery's formal eradication; church burnings and church bombings by the Ku Klux Klan and others have always been a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the struggle for equality for the African-American community. The past often isn't even past--Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in Charleston's Emanuel AME Church 193 years after the church was first burned down by whites following a thwarted slave rebellion.But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the vital center of the civil rights movement, and produced many of its leaders, from the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. on, but at the same time there have always been churches and sects that eschewed a more activist stance, even eschewed worldly political engagement altogether. That tension can be felt all the way to the Black Lives Matter movement and the work of today. Still and all, as a source of strength and a force for change, the Black church is at the center of the action at every stage of the American story, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

The Book of God: The Bible as a Novel


Walter Wangerin Jr. - 1996
    From Abraham wandering in the desert to Jesus teaching the multitudes on a Judean hillside, this award-winning bestseller follows the biblical story from start to finish.Priests and kings, apostles and prophets, common folk and charismatic leaders—individual stories offer glimpses into an unfolding revelation that reaches across the centuries to touch us today. The Book of God:Follows the biblical story in chronological orderFilled with carefully researched cultural and historical background Includes biblical events viewed through the eyes of minor charactersMaster storyteller Walter Wangerin Jr. shares the story of the Bible from beginning to end as you've never read it before, retold with exciting detail and passionate energy. Experience the Bible in a beautiful new way!

A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith


Brian D. McLaren - 2010
    [A New Kind of Christianity] is one of these.” —Peter Rollins, IkonA New Kind of Christianity is Brian D. McLaren’s much anticipated follow-up to his breakthrough work of the emergent-church movement, A New Kind of Christian. Named by Time magazine as one of America’s top 25 evangelicals, McLaren, along with such contemporaries as N.T. Wright, Jim Wallis, and Rob Bell, is one of the acknowledged leaders of a new generation of Christians who want to update their faith for current times while remaining true to the core message of Jesus. In this controversial and thought-provoking book, McLaren explores the questions that will determine the shape of Christianity for the next 500 years.

The Devils of Loudun


Aldous Huxley - 1952
    He had been found guilty of conspiring with the devil to seduce an entire convent of nuns in what was the most sensational case of mass possession and sexual hysteria in history. Grandier maintained his innocence to the end and four years after his death the nuns were still being subjected to exorcisms to free them from their demonic bondage. Huxley's vivid account of this bizarre tale of religious and sexual obsession transforms our understanding of the medieval world.

The Rise of Christianity


William H.C. Frend - 1984
    With many maps, chronologies, and graphics, Frend's text is an engaging story but also an immensely learned and careful work of scholarship. Elegantly written. It is a marvelous reference work. It will become the standard church history of our time for scholar and novice alike.

Mere Christianity


C.S. Lewis - 1942
    Lewis's forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief. First heard as informal radio broadcasts and then published as three separate books - The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality - Mere Christianity brings together what Lewis saw as the fundamental truths of the religion. Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity's many denominations, C.S. Lewis finds a common ground on which all those who have Christian faith can stand together, proving that "at the centre of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all divergences of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks the same voice."

Abandonment to Divine Providence


Jean-Pierre de Caussade - 1861
    For de Caussade, living in the moment meant having a complete trust and faith in God, for God's will defined and guided all things. The practical advice contained in his guidebook for the faithful was originally a series of letters written for the Nuns of the Visitation of Nancy, meant to help them navigate the confusing and difficult work of spiritual enlightenment, and comes together here in two distinct parts, one for the theoretical foundations of abandoning oneself to the present moment and one with practical advice on how to live such a life. Though a departure from the standard Christian perspective, Abandonment to Divine Providence remains a deeply spiritual work with a message that many Christians may find freeing and inspiring.

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible


A.J. Jacobs - 2007
    Raised in a secular family but increasingly interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to dive in headfirst and attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to play a ten-string harp; to stone adulterers.The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound, reverent and irreverent, personal and universal and will make you see history's most influential book with new eyes.Jacobs's quest transforms his life even more radically than the year spent reading the entire "Encyclopedia Britannica" for "The Know-It-All." His beard grows so unruly that he is regularly mistaken for a member of ZZ Top. He immerses himself in prayer, tends sheep in the Israeli desert, battles idolatry, and tells the absolute truth in all situations - much to his wife's chagrin.Throughout the book, Jacobs also embeds himself in a cross-section of communities that take the Bible literally. He tours a Kentucky-based creationist museum and sings hymns with Pennsylvania Amish. He dances with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn and does Scripture study with Jehovah's Witnesses. He discovers ancient biblical wisdom of startling relevance. And he wrestles with seemingly archaic rules that baffle the twenty-first-century brain.Jacobs's extraordinary undertaking yields unexpected epiphanies and challenges. A book that will charm readers both secular and religious, "The Year of Living Biblically" is part Cliff Notes to the Bible, part memoir, and part look into worlds unimaginable. Thou shalt not be able to put it down.