Showing titles in Social Issues

What does a Christian political witness look like in our day? Politics ought to be defined by fidelity to the common good of all the members of society. But our modern Western politics are defined by a determination to bend the natural world and human life to its own political and economic ends.

When she was fifteen years old, Leslie King ran away from an abusive home, looking for a better life and longing for real love. What she found instead was a man who wooed her just long enough to trap her in a life of prostitution. She became one of the many thousands of trafficked individuals in the United States, a number that continues to rise.

Fear feeds on the stories we tell ourselves, Higgins claims, and in How Not to Be Afraid, he delves into the mechanisms of fear, as well as the quiet, immense strength of individuals and communities that refuse to let it reign.

Racial and ethnic hostility is one of the most pervasive problems the church faces. It hinders our effectiveness as one body of believers. It damages our witness. Why won't this problem just go away? Because it is a spiritual battle. In response, we must employ spiritual weapons - prayer, repentance, forgiveness. In this book Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson provide a model of racial reconciliation, social justice, and spiritual healing that creates both individual and communal transformation.

Jesus commands us to love our neighbors. So why are so many Christians taught to fear their neighbors? The American church is known as a people who are afraid, who have been nurtured through fear into hatred, and who have moved from hatred to violence - or at least to neglect. This fear, too often lived out boldly in the name of Jesus, is a false religion.

New technologies can inspire us, but the breakneck pace of change can also frighten us. So how do Christians walk by faith through the innovations of Silicon Valley? To build a biblical theology of technology, journalist and tech optimist Tony Reinke examines nine key texts from Scripture to show how the world’s discoveries are divinely orchestrated. With the help of several theologians and inventors throughout history, Reinke dispels 12 common myths in the church and offers 14 ethical convictions to help Christians live by faith in the age of big tech.

Do we use social media, or are we being used by it? Social media is brilliant and obscene. It sharpens the mind and dulls it. It brings nations together and tears them apart. It perpetuates, reveals, and repairs injustice. It is an untamed beast upon which we can only hope to ride, but never quite corral. What is it doing to us? In Terms of Service, Chris Martin brings listeners his years of expertise and experience from building online brands, coaching authors and speakers about social media use, and thinking theologically about the effects of social media.

Drawing on ten years of survey data with over three thousand teenagers and over two hundred interviews, God, Grades, and Graduation offers a revealing and at times surprising account of how teenagers' religious upbringing influences their educational pathways from high school to college. Dr. Ilana M. Horwitz estimates that approximately one out of every four students in American schools are raised with religious restraint. These students orient their lives around God so deeply that it alters how they see themselves and how they behave, inside and outside of church.

Drawing on her lifelong journey to know her family's history, leading Christian activist Lisa Sharon Harper recovers the beauty of her heritage, exposes the brokenness that race has wrought in America, and casts a vision for collective repair.

Guided by current research from Barna Group, Mettes illustrates the profound physical, emotional, and social toll of loneliness in the United States. Surprisingly, her research shows that it is not the oldest Americans but the youngest adults who are loneliest and that social media can actually play a positive role in alleviating loneliness.

In The Silencing of the Lambs, Dr. Michael L. Brown lays out what is happening in the world around us - from the assault on children in schools and on college campuses to the unprecedented censorship of Christians and conservatives through Big Tech. He then maps out strategies for how we can turn the pitfalls into platforms and find courage in the midst of opposition.

The Bruised Reed walks Christians through Christ’s consistent and unconditional love for his children. Richard Sibbes elaborates on the metaphor of a humble reed that may be bent or bruised as a result of life’s errors and the consequences of sin.

One of the most fiercely debated topics in modern Christianity centers on the inclusion of sexual and gender minorities into the full life of the church. Dozens of scholars have stepped forward, seeking to make a compelling case for LGBT+ inclusion based on their contextualized reading of the six traditional passages that refer to homosexuality in Scripture. But these arguments alone fall short of providing a comprehensive framework for radical inclusion of LGBT+ people.

In The God Solution, acclaimed spiritual author Neale Donald Walsch explores how we can bring an end to anger, violence, disagreements between people and nations, financial hardships, poverty, starvation, and the suffering of millions. He explains how we can bring peace, prosperity, security, opportunity, and joy to people around the world. In short, all that humanity has ever hoped for or dreamt of—and what we were truly meant to experience—can be ours. This could happen virtually overnight. And it can be done with the embracing of a single idea.

These ancient words offer a guide for modern Christians wrestling with their privileged place in an unequal and unjust world. The Kenosis Hymn (as this passage quoted by the apostle Paul is known) celebrates Jesus for his willingness to forego the divine glory that he is due, instead humbling himself to serve the oppressed and outcast of his society.

In The Coming Tsunami, pastor and cultural scholar Dr. Jim Denison addresses the gravest threat Christians in America have ever faced — four cultural tidal waves threatening to submerge Christians in America and the biblical morality they proclaim. Through proactive, biblical steps, he helps us redeem these challenges so that we can live the way Jesus calls us to live.

Emmy Kegler has a complicated relationship with the Bible. As a queer woman who grew up in both conservative Evangelical and progressive Protestant churches, she knows too well how Scripture can be used to wound and exclude. And yet, the stories of Scripture continue to captivate and inspire her - both as a person of faith and as a pastor to a congregation. So she set out to fall in love with the Bible, wrestling with the stories inside, where she met a God who continues to seek us out - appearing again and again as a voice, a presence, and a promise.

This book is about a Black man's experience of reading Mark Twain's classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time while in graduate school. The story captures the author's emotional struggle with Twain's use of the racial epithet more than 200 times in the text. This is a courageous memoir that wrestles with the historic stain of racism and the ongoing impact of racist language in postmodern society. The book is about Harris' flashbacks, conversations, and dilemmas spawned by use of the epithet in a classroom setting where the author was the only Black person.

Neither "everything's fine" nor "burn it all down", Stringer offers a thoughtful appreciation of evangelicalism's history, identity, and strengths, but also lament for its blind spots, toxic brokenness, and complicity with injustice. From this complicated space, we can move forward with informed vision rather than resignation and with hope for our future together.

We live in an age uniquely attentive to the problem of mental illness. More than half of us will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in our lifetime. It has been easy, for centuries, to relegate persistent emotional and mental struggles entirely to the realm of a failed personal work ethic ("Just don't worry so much!"), not enough faith ("Just pray harder!"), or, in recent years, a chemical imbalance in our brains ("Just take this pill!").