You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Foreword Reviews INDIES Book of the Year Award - Honorable Mention for Essays (2023) In this brilliantly crafted essay collection, Tiffany Eberle Kriner weaves together literary criticism, nature writing, and memoir to explore what grows when we plant texts in the landscapes of our lives. The first time Tiffany Eberle Kriner walked the parcel of land that would become Root and Sky Farm its primary crop seemed to be chaos. Industrial agriculture practices had depleted the fields, leaving them littered with the detritus of consumerism and rural poverty—plastic deck chairs, bags of diapers, endless empty cans of Monster Energy Drink. In this landscape, she meets Virgil and Charles W. Ches...
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson is one of the most eminent public intellectuals in America today, and her writing offers probing meditations on the Christian faith. Based on the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, this volume brings together the thoughts of leading theologians, historians, literary scholars, and church leaders who engaged in theological dialogue with Robinson's work—and with the author herself.
Few writers in the twentieth century were as creative and productive as Dorothy L. Sayers, the English playwright, novelist, and poet. In this volume in the Hansen Lectureship Series, Christine Colón explores the role of community in Sayers's works. In particular, she considers how Sayers offers a vision of communities called to action, faith, and joy, and she reflects on how we also are called to live in community together.
Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from enduring Black voices and stories as captured in classic African American literature. Pastor and teacher Claude Atcho offers a theological approach to 10 seminal texts of 20th-century African American literature. Each chapter takes up a theological category for inquiry through a close literary reading and theological reflection on a primary literary text, from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Richard Wright's Native Son to Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain and James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. The book includes end-of-chapter discussion questions. Reading Black Books helps readers of all backgrounds learn from the contours of Christian faith formed and forged by Black stories, and it spurs continued conversations about racial justice in the church. It demonstrates that reading about Black experience as shown in the literature of great African American writers can guide us toward sharper theological thinking and more faithful living.
Pastor David Swanson knows that racial and environmental injustice share an origin story rooted in greed and oppression. Here, he shows how Christians can become communities of caretakers in dynamic relationship with our Creator that restore our relationship with creation and each other, and the holistic justice that can result.
In scripture, Jesus promises a future that potentially infuses all texts: "my words will not pass away"(Matt 24:28). This book argues that texts--even literary texts--, have an eschatology, too, a part in God's purpose for the cosmos. They, with all creation, move toward participation in the new creation, in the Trinity's expanding, creative love. This eschatological future for texts impacts how we understand meaning making, from the level of semiology to that of hermeneutics. This book tells the story of how readers participate in the future of the word, the eschatology of texts. If texts have a future in the kingdom of God, then readers' engagements with them--everything from preservation and utterance to translation, criticism, and call and response--can cultivate those futures in the love of the Trinity. Kriner explores how the fallenness and failures of texts, alongside readers' own failures, while seeming to challenge the future of the word, ultimately point to reading as a posture of reconciliation, in which reader and text meet in the Maranatha of all text.
Known for her bestselling detective novels, Dorothy L. Sayers lived a fascinating, groundbreaking life as a novelist, feminist, Oxford scholar, and important influence on the spiritual life of C.S. Lewis. This pioneering woman not only forged a literary career for herself but also spoke about faith and culture in revolutionary ways as she addressed the evergreen question of to what extent faith should hold on to tradition and to what extent it should evolve with a changing culture. Thanks to her unmatched wisdom, prophetic tone, and insistent strength, Dorothy Sayers is a voice that we cannot afford to ignore. Providing a blueprint for bridge-building in contemporary, polarizing contexts, Su...
How might we love God and our neighbors through the task of writing? This book offers a vision for expressing one's faith through writing and for understanding writing itself as a spiritual practice that cultivates virtue. Drawing on authors and artists throughout the church's history, we learn how we might embrace writing as an act of discipleship for today.
Cultural differences increasingly impact our everyday lives. Virtually none of us today interact exclusively with people who look, talk, and behave like we do. David Smith here offers an excellent guide to living and learning in our culturally interconnected world. / Learning from the Stranger clearly explains what "culture" is, discusses how cultural difference affects our perceptions and behavior, and explores how Jesus' call to love our neighbor involves learning from cultural strangers. Built around three chapter-length readings of extended biblical passages (from Genesis, Luke, and Acts), the book skillfully weaves together theological and practical concerns, and Smith’s engaging, readable text is peppered with stories from his own extensive firsthand experience. / Many thoughtful readers will resonate with this insightful book as it encourages the virtues of humility and hospitality in our personal interactions — and shows how learning from strangers, not just imparting our own ideas to them, is an integral part of Christian discipleship.