And so it is profoundly important to understand how to approach and experience these occasions with grace, endurance, and joy.In a culture that does its best to deny death, Timothy Keller--theologian and bestselling author--teaches us about facing death with the resources of faith from the Bible. With wisdom and compassion, Keller finds in the Bible an alternative to both despair or denial.A short, powerful book, On Death gives us the tools to understand the meaning of death within God's vision of life.

    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.

    As the youngest-ever op-ed columnist for The New York Times and the author of the critically acclaimed books Privilege and Grand New Party, Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. Now he offers a masterful and hard-hitting account of how American Christianity has gone off the rails — and why it threatens to take American society with it.In a story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat brilliantly charts traditional Christianity’s decline from a vigorous, mainstream, and bipartisan faith — which acted as a “vital center” and the moral force behind the Civil Rights movement — through the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s down to the polarizing debates of the present day. He argues that Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: Debased versions of Christian faith that breed hubris, greed, and self-absorption. Ranging from Glenn Beck to Eat Pray Love, Joel Osteen to The Da Vinci Code, Oprah Winfrey to Sarah Palin, Douthat explores how the prosperity gospel’s mantra of “pray and grow rich”; a cult of self-esteem that reduces God to a life coach; and the warring political religions of left and right have crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges, and accelerated American decline.His urgent call for a revival of traditional Christianity is sure to generate controversy, and it will be vital reading for all those concerned about the imperiled American future.

    Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright's findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony. Nearly a decade in the making, The Evolution of God is a breathtaking re-examination of the past, and a visionary look forward.

    Read this book to discover the clarity and beauty of the Gospel just as God intended. —Bart Millard, singer/songwriter for MercyMe Confront the lies that hold you back. Discover the truth that sets you free. Let's face it - the Bible contains passages that are challenging to interpret and can even incite fear. Sure, we want to believe that God's grace applies to our unique troubles: addiction, divorce, habitual sins, or a feeling of distance from God because we don't seem to measure up. Still, perplexing Bible passages eat at us.   Bestselling author and national radio host Dr. Andrew Farley is known to challenge legalistic and lifeless interpretations with his discerning take on controversial Scriptures.    In  Twisted Scripture , Andrew skewers sacred cows and shatters destructive lies, bringing the undiluted truth about God's love and grace in a colorful and conversational look at the most controversial passages in the New Testament.    This book offers more than just encouragement and freedom. It may change everything about the way you see yourself and God.

    The authors debunk 12 commonly accepted beliefs that cause bondage rather than liberty. They explain how nuggets of truth become cornerstones for error when wrongly understood, and they help build solid scriptural foundations that produce emotional freedom. Now with discussion guide.

    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.

    The evidence led him to an unexpected conclusion: Jesus really existed and launched the greatest movement for social good in human history.A first-of-its-kind book for a new generation, Jesus Skeptic takes nothing for granted as it explores whether Jesus actually lived and how his story has changed our world. You'll- learn what heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and Harriet Tubman believed about Jesus- discover how Jesus inspired women's rights, education rights, and modern hospitals- see visual proofs of Jesus's impact, never before compiled in one place- be inspired to continue Jesus's fight for human rights, justice, and progressJesus Skeptic unveils convincing physical evidence that will enlighten seekers, skeptics, and longtime Christians alike. In a generation that wants to make the world a better place, we can discover what humanity's greatest champions had in common: a Christian faith.

    Famously beginning by comparing the world to a watch, whose design is self-evident, he goes on to provide examples from biology, anatomy, and astronomy in order to demonstrate the intricacy and ingenuity of design that could only come from a wise and benevolent deity.This new edition, which coincides with the bicentennial of Paley's death, reprints the original text of 1802, which was very influential in its day, and still controversial in ours as we see a resurgence in the debate between"intelligent design" and "creationism." The introduction explains how the book built on the early modern natural theology tradition and why it was so influential. The book also contains two appendixes on Paley's courses, an extended bibliography, and full notes offering further background on the key figures of the day.

    A complete worldview is presented and defended, covering every subject from knowledge to art, from metaphysics to morality, from theology to politics. Topics include free will, the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, and much more, arguing from scientific evidence that there is only a physical, natural world without gods or spirits, but that we can still live a life of love, meaning, and joy.

    Frank Turek (I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist) will show you how atheists steal reason, evidence, science, and other arguments from God in trying to make their case for atheism. If that sounds contradictory, it's because it is! Atheists can't make their case without appealing to realities only theism can explain. In an engaging and memorable way, Stealing from God exposes these intellectual crimes atheists are committing and then provides four powerful reasons for why Christianity is true.

    Many critics complained of the book because it merely criticised current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer's own solitary and sincere speculations and then with the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if it is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

    In fact, according to a recent Barna study, only 3 percent of American evangelicals have an authentic biblical worldview.   As president of Summit Ministries and an authority on Christian worldview and apologetics, Dr. Jeff Myers will teach you how to understand what you believe, why you believe it, and how to defend it against these five fatal worldviews: SecularismMarxismIslamNew SpiritualityPostmodernism

    What does this mean for the basic claim of many Christians: that humans descend from Adam and Eve?Leading evangelical geneticist Dennis Venema and popular New Testament scholar Scot McKnight combine their expertise to offer informed guidance and answers to questions pertaining to evolution, genomic science, and the historical Adam. Some of the questions they explore include: - Is there credible evidence for evolution?- Do we descend from a population or are we the offspring of Adam and Eve? - Does taking the Bible seriously mean rejecting recent genomic science?- How do Genesis's creation stories reflect their ancient Near Eastern context, and how did Judaism understand the Adam and Eve of Genesis?- Doesn't Paul's use of Adam in the New Testament prove that Adam was a historical individual?The authors address up-to-date genomics data with expert commentary from both genetic and theological perspectives, showing that genome research and Scripture are not irreconcilable. Foreword by Tremper Longman III and afterword by Daniel Harrell.

    In this new book Richard Holloway takes us on a personal, scientific and philosophical journey to explore what he believes the answers to the biggest of questions are. He examines what we know about the universe into which - without any choice in the matter - we are propelled at birth and from which we are expelled at death, the stories we have told about where we come from, and the stories we tell to get through this muddling experience of life.Thought-provoking, revelatory, compassionate and playful, Stories We Tell Ourselves is a personal reckoning with life's mysteries by one of the most important and beloved thinkers of our time.