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Life is full of questions—about our identity, our relationships, our faith—and sometimes it seems like there are no easy answers. But our questioning can lead us on a journey into greater understanding and purpose. Jeffrey Keuss takes us on a tour of Scripture to find insights from people who asked questions of God and others, exploring what those questions can teach us about doubt, faith, and uncertainty in our everyday lives.
Freedom of the Self revitalizes the question of identity formation in a postmodern era through a deep reading of Christian life in relation to current trends seen in the Emergent and Missional church movements. By relocating deep identity formation as formed and released through a renewed appraisal of kenotic Christology coupled with readings of Continental philosophy (Derrida, Levinas, Marion) and popular culture, Keuss offers a bold vision for what it means to be truly human in contemporary society, as what he calls the "kenotic self." In addition to providing a robust reflection of philosophical and theological understanding of identity formation, from Aristotle and Augustine through to contemporary thinkers, Freedom of the Self suggests some tangible steps for the individual and the church in regard to how everyday concerns such as economics, literature, and urbanization can be part of living into the life of the kenotic self.
Your Neighbor's Hymnal provides a winsome and thoughtful exploration of popular music, from rock to hip-hop to metal to soul, as a vital source contemporary culture continues to go to learn about faith, hope, and love. Where some Christians have kept their focus only on a hymnal found in their church or formed by the genre of Contemporary Christian Music, Keuss argues that your neighbor's hymnal is filled with great music that God is using and deserves a deeper listen. Offering forty songs spanning time and genres, each section includes a number of representative reflections on the history and artist that created the song, reflections on its lyrical content, and theological and biblical conn...
The essays in Paul Ricoeur and the Hope of Higher Education: The Just University discuss diverse ways that Paul Ricoeur’s work provides hopeful insight and necessary provocation that should inform the task and mission of the modern university in the changing landscape of Higher Education. This volume gathers interdisciplinary scholars seeking to reestablish the place of justice as the central function of higher education in the twenty-first century. The contributors represent diverse backgrounds, including teachers, scholars, and administrators from R1 institutions, seminary and divinity schools as well as undergraduate teaching colleges. This collection, edited by Daniel Boscaljon and Jef...
BETTER INFORMED, BETTER EQUIPPED TO MINISTER to today’s blurred youth culture Mobile. Connected. Wired in. This is a generation that skips over perceived cultural boundaries and resists definition. They are a mash-up of identity, a blur of old categories and classes. Creators and consumers of a rapidly changing culture. But how does one reach a demographic that is so difficult to pin down? Many of the most popular approaches to youth ministry today begin by portraying youth as collections of fixed snapshots, “profiles” based on sociological research studies. Yet according to Dr. Jeff Keuss, today’s teens cannot be adequately characterized by these simplistic and static descriptions. Keuss argues that what is needed, instead, is a qualitative approach to describing young people, one that recognizes the “blurred” nature of today’s mobile youth culture. Jeff Keuss presents an optimistic new way of thinking about youth, one that sees them more holistically and less clinically. As we learn to see youth culture through this new lens, we will become better informed and better equipped to minister to the teens of today’s rapidly changing world.
Cutting-edge social science research into what young adults want out of a faith community Purpose and meaning, healing and growth, community and fellowship--these values have traditionally been found in church. Though they are leaving the pews in droves, young adults are still seeking these spiritual benefits. How can churches entice them to return? Jeffrey F. Keuss thinks that's the wrong question to ask. Instead, his multigenerational team of scholars investigated how faith communities can make themselves more hospitable to the next generation of Christians. Backed by five years of qualitative and quantitative research, the Pivot NW research team offers practical recommendations for involv...
Evangelicals are supposed to be experts at telling their story. From an early age you are expected to have a "testimony," a story of how God saved you from a life of sin and sadness and gave you a new life of joy and gladness. What happens if you don't have such a testimony? What if your story just doesn't fit the before-and-after mold? What are you supposed to do if your voice is not one usually heard? In these offbeat, witty, and often bittersweet essays, up-and-coming writers tell the truth about growing up female and evangelical. Whether they stayed in the church or not, evangelicalism has shaped their spiritual lives. Eschewing evangelical cliches, idyllic depictions of Christian upbrin...
After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript and proof documents within their historical context to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf's cultural analysis during 1931-1941. By demonstrating that Woolf's late cultural criticism developed through her literary experimentalism as well as in response to contemporary social, political and economic upheavals, this book offers a fresh perspective on her emergence as a cultural commentator in her final decade and paves the way for further genetic enquiries in the field.
Discusses the major literary works of the 1950s, which introduced new forms and dealt with such controversial topics as racial discrimination, religious differences, and social class.
The Book and the Roses presents a study of how Sufi women in contemporary Istanbul practice the repetitive zikir prayer and how they seek legitimacy for their activities. The study is based on fieldwork in the 1990s and is focused on one of the many small groups that lately have seen the light of day within the Turkish Muslim movement.