Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible's instructions for women as literally as possible for a year.Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a "gentle and quiet spirit" (1 Peter 3:4). It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period. See what happens when a thoroughly modern woman starts referring to her husband as "master" and "praises him at the city gate" with a homemade sign. Learn the insights she receives from an ongoing correspondence with an Orthodox Jewish woman, and find out what she discovers from her exchanges with a polygamist wife. Join her as she wrestles with difficult passages of scripture that portray misogyny and violence against women. With just the right mixture of humor and insight, compassion and incredulity, A Year of Biblical Womanhood is an exercise in scriptural exploration and spiritual contemplation. What does God truly expect of women, and is there really a prescription for biblical womanhood? Come along with Evans as she looks for answers in the rich heritage of biblical heroines, models of grace, and all-around women of valor.

    Internalizing society’s devaluation of the feminine, some women are killing their own natural impulses to pursue a feminist ideal that bears no relation to God’s good design. Other women struggle to conform to a fundamentalist, feminine caricature, which requires denying their full humanity and gifting.Defying both feminists and fundamentalists, Julie Roys reveals God’s true, affirming, and compelling vision for women, showing them how to reclaim what is uniquely feminine, and become healthy, balanced women of God.

    Anderson's new sexual ethics draw on core biblical principles and set a standard for today's Christians that may be as influential Joshua Harris' I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Don Raunikar's Choosing God's Best, and Elisabeth Elliot's Passion and Purity. Anderson uses her own illuminating experience with the purity movement to:* Reach out to women and men trying to reconcile their own sexuality with their understanding of "what God wants," cultural stigma, and media pressures* Demonstrate how Christian ideas about purity have infiltrated American politics and culture-and why women are losing* Offer an affirmative, healing path for everyone to understand their sexuality: one that reconciles scripture, culture, and common senseProvocative and engaging, she will revolutionize the way you think about sex, abstinence, politics, and faith.

    Our own time is obsessed by it. One would think that a society obsessed by sex would understand it very well. But the truth is that obsession drives out understanding. We no longer understand even the common sense of sexuality, the things that were common knowledge in supposedly less enlightened times.Acclaimed philosopher J. Budziszewski remedies this problem. His wise, gracefully written book about the nature, meaning, and mysteries of sexuality restores lost wisdom, raising and answering such questions as:•Does sex have to mean anything at all? •What is the meaning of the sexual powers, of sexual differences, of sexual love, of sexual beauty, of sexual purity? •Is sexuality “all about sex”? •why does sexuality stir up such transcendent longings for something more than sex? On the Meaning of Sex corrects the most prevalent errors about sex, particularly the errors of the sexual revolution, which by mistaking pleasure for a good in itself has caused untold pain and suffering. In restoring the meaning and purpose of sex, the author reclaims what Dante calls “the intelligence of love.”“Looking out over the sexual landscape of our time,” Budziszewski writes, “I see a terrain of unutterable sweetness, despoiled by unmentionable pain. Yet who knows? Perhaps it is not too late to redeem the unutterable sweetness. Shall we try to find out?”

    Westfall interprets passages on women and men together and places those passages in the context of the Pauline corpus as a whole. She offers viable alternatives for some notorious interpretive problems in certain Pauline passages, reframing gender issues in a way that stimulates thinking, promotes discussion, and moves the conversation forward. As Westfall explores the significance of Paul's teaching on both genders, she seeks to support and equip males and females to serve in their area of gifting.

    But he also brings a message of courage and comfort--a call to return to God with all our hearts and to fulfill God's purposes for us as His beloved children.

    With insightful commentary concerning frequent rebuttals used by apologists, it makes a solid case against evangelical claims to inerrancy. This 2nd edition has a much improved third chapter, providing several more examples of scribal changes to the New Testament, as well as a completely new section on textual differences in Greek manuscripts. The format of the paperback version has been adjusted in order to keep sale cost as low as possible.

    Yet I am a woman, and there are parts of my body; such as my breasts, my vagina, and my womb that are telling a story about God that I have never learned or understood. This is an exploration of the significance of a womb that must shed and bleed before it can create. How will we engage our body which cyclically bleeds most of our life and can build and birth a human soul? How will we honor the living womb, that lives and sometimes dies within us?This is a book about the theology found in the cycle of the womb, which births both life and death. Every day each one of us is invited to create, and every day we make a decision knowing that from our creation can come death or life. Women's voices have been silenced for a long time as society and the church has quieted their bodies. Will we courageously choose to listen to the sound of your voice, the song of your womb, and speak for the world to hear?

    From this point they learn to respond to their wives in a consistent Christlike manner. A radically transformed and renewed marriage is the result.Drawing from his own story and the stories of husbands whose marriages were dissolving, Ken Nair reveals major problems in life and marriage. After discussing the problems, he reveals relationship altering concepts which not only will revive a marriage, they will radiate throughout couple's lives as well.

    In this 7-week study, you will explore the “I am” sayings of Jesus found in the Gospel of John. This study will help you find and form an answer to the most essential question in the Christian faith: “Who do you say I am?”

    From choices about careers to roles in local churches to relationship dynamics, this belief shapes the everyday lives of evangelical women. Yet biblical womanhood isn't biblical, says Baylor University historian Beth Allison Barr. It arose from a series of clearly definable historical moments.This book moves the conversation about biblical womanhood beyond Greek grammar and into the realm of church history--ancient, medieval, and modern--to show that this belief is not divinely ordained but a product of human civilization that continues to creep into the church. Barr's historical insights provide context for contemporary teachings about women's roles in the church and help move the conversation forward.Interweaving her story as a Baptist pastor's wife, Barr sheds light on the #ChurchToo movement and abuse scandals in Southern Baptist circles and the broader evangelical world, helping readers understand why biblical womanhood is more about human power structures than the message of Christ.

    Mark Lanier, one of America's top trial lawyers, uses his experienced legal eye to examine the plausibility of the Christian faith. Bringing science, current knowledge, and common sense together in a courtroom approach, this "trial" elucidates a rich understanding of God and a strong foundation for Christian faith. Following the format of a traditional legal trial, Lanier takes us from opening statement to closing summation by way of testimony from well-known witnesses--the scientist, the theologian, the linguist, the humanist, the philosopher, the psychologist and the ancient biblical eye-witness. These sources and many others investigate the sticky subjects of the Christian worldview that are commonly scrutinized by skeptics or overlooked by marginal believers:Who is God in light of astronomical and subatomic science? How could divine inspiration of Scripture or Christ's bodily resurrection be possible? How should we see the nature of reality, free will and choice, ethics, morality and the idea of heaven and afterlife? Lanier presents a persuasive case for the Christian faith and leaves it up to us to choose what is worthy of belief and what is not. Christianity on Trial provides a thought-p

    Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is a resource to help church leaders improve the culture of their church and disciple men and women in their flock to read, understand, and apply Scripture to our lives in the church. Until both men and women grow in their understanding of their relationship to Scripture, there will continue to be tension between the sexes in the church. Church leaders need to be engaged in thoughtful critique of the biblical manhood and womanhood movement and the effects it has on their congregation.Do men and women benefit equally from God's word? Are they equally responsible in sharpening one another in the faith and passing it down to the next generation? While radical feminists claim that the Bible is a hopelessly patriarchal construction by powerful men that oppresses women, evangelical churches simply reinforce this teaching when we constantly separate men and women, customizing women's resources and studies according to a culturally based understanding of roles. Do we need men's Bibles and women's Bibles, or can the one, holy Bible guide us all? Is the Bible, God's word, so male-centered and authored that women need to create their own resources to relate to it? No! And in it, we also learn from women. Women play an active role as witnesses to the faith, passing it on to the new generations.This book explores the feminine voice in Scripture as synergistic with the dominant male voice. Through the women, we often get the story behind the story--take Ruth for example, or the birth of Christ through the perspective of Mary and Elizabeth in Luke. Aimee fortifies churches in a biblical understanding of brotherhood and sisterhood in God's household and the necessity of learning from one another in studying God's word.The troubling teaching under the rubric of "biblical manhood and womanhood" has thrived with the help of popular Biblicist interpretive methods. And Biblicist interpretive methods ironically flourish in our individualistic culture that works against the "traditional values" of family and community that the biblical manhood and womanhood movement is trying to uphold. This book helps to correct Biblicist trends in the church today, affirming that we do not read God's word alone, we read it within our interpretive covenant communities--our churches. Our relationship with God's word affects our relationship with God's people, and vice versa. The church is the school of Christ, commissioned to discipleship. The responsibility of every believer, men and women together, is being active and equal participants in and witnesses to the faith--the tradents of faith.

    Schwartz, Ph.D., there is compelling scientific evidence that we no longer have to accept God on faith alone. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Harvard University-educated Dr. Schwartz blends psychology, quantum physics, and mathematics to examine the science of spirit. Faith and science are not mutually exclusive, and a better understanding of their relationship can lead us to recognize how God operates in everything.Trained in the scientific method as an "open-minded skeptic," Dr. Schwartz was taught how to raise questions, turn them into hypotheses, and design experiments to test them. He was not trained to consider the nature of God. And yet, his scientific research led him directly to the discovery of God's existence in intelligent evolution and everyday life.Scientifically rigorous and spiritually reassuring, this eye-opening book is a wake-up call for anyone who wonders about life's true meaning and who longs to believe in the existence of a universal intelligence.

    In this book Debbie Blue looks closely at Hagar (mother of Islam), Esther (Jewish heroine), and Mary (Christian matriarch)—and finds in them unexpected and inviting new ways of navigating faith and life. As she sets out to explore these biblical characters who live and move in places and ways outside of the strict boundaries of tradition, Blue encounters many real life characters who challenge her expectations and renew her hope—a Muslim tattoo artist, a Saudi Arabian sculptor, a rabbi in a Darth Vader costume, Aztec dancers at a feast of Guadalupe, an Islamic feminist scholar, and more.Readers who embark with Blue on the sometimes unorthodox, subversive paths of these curious and lively figures will be led to envision more expansive and hopeful possibilities for faith, human connection, and love in our divided, violent world.