Download or read book If God Still Breathes Why Can t I written by Angela N. Parker and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A challenge to the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that calls into question how Christians are taught more about the way of Whiteness than the way of Jesus Angela Parker wasn’t just trained to be a biblical scholar; she was trained to be a White male biblical scholar. She is neither White nor male. Dr. Parker’s experience of being taught to forsake her embodied identity in order to contort herself into the stifling construct of Whiteness is common among American Christians, regardless of their race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. This book calls the power structure behind this experience what it is: White supremacist authoritarianism. Drawing from her perspective as a Womanist New Testament scholar, Dr. Parker describes how she learned to deconstruct one of White Christianity’s most pernicious lies: the conflation of biblical authority with the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility. As Dr. Parker shows, these doctrines are less about the text of the Bible itself and more about the arbiters of its interpretation—historically, White males in positions of power who have used Scripture to justify control over marginalized groups. This oppressive use of the Bible has been suffocating. To learn to breathe again, Dr. Parker says, we must “let God breathe in us.” We must read the Bible as authoritative, but not authoritarian. We must become conscious of the particularity of our identities, as we also become conscious of the particular identities of the biblical authors from whom we draw inspiration. And we must trust and remember that as long as God still breathes, we can too.
Download or read book God Is Just Not Fair written by Jennifer Rothschild and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a book I'll be recommending for years to come." -- Lysa TerKeurst, New York Times bestselling author Do you believe God is just not fair? If you're like Jennifer Rothschild, you wrestle with questions when you experience painful circumstances. Does God care? Does he hear my prayers? Is he even there? Blinded as a teenager, Jennifer overcame daunting obstacles, found strength in God, and launched a successful speaking and writing ministry. Then in her 40s, everything changed. Jennifer hit a wall of depression and discontent that shook her to her core, undermining many of her past assumptions about her faith. She wondered who God was and why he continued to allow her to struggle and doubt. Where, she pleaded, is his hand of healing and hope in my life now? This is a book about finding more than just answers. It's for anyone who needs hope when life doesn't make sense--for all who reach for a God who feels distant. As Jennifer tackles the six big questions of faith, she will help you: Trust God more than your feelings. Strengthen your faith when you feel beat up by life. Embrace your obstacles and start experiencing their purpose. Face your disappointment and grow stronger from your loss.
Download or read book Review of Biblical Literature 2023 written by Alicia J. Batton and published by SBL Press. This book was released on 2024-01-30 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.
Download or read book Does God See Me written by Dieula Magalie Previlon and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We all experience suffering in our lives. It may be domestic violence, sexual abuse, abandonment, racial trauma, or any other number of injustices. You can unravel the layers of pain and move towards healing. In Does God See Me?, women of all backgrounds, with a special resonance for Black women and women of color, will discover a safe space to find their voice, receive healing, and walk toward transformation. Through her professional expertise in trauma recovery, the biblical story of Hagar, and the lived experience of her own painful stories, Dieula Magalie Previlon delivers a message of unshakeable hope. Dieula invites you to embark on your own healing journey. Bridging the gap between experience and empowerment, Does God See Me? invites you to apply effective principles for healing trauma, engage in reflective questions, and practice whole-body exercises that lead to understanding, self-discovery, and growth. Dieula delivers additional thoughtful, faith-informed insights, drawing from her own testimony, on topics like shame, grief, and abandonment. Here is your compassionate guide to help you embrace your pain and emerge with a story of triumph, redemption, and a renewed connection to the Divine.
Download or read book Loyal Sisters written by Doreen W. McCalla and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Loyal Sisters is about Loyal Sisters it is not only for them. From ethnographic exploration into mainly two churches: Messa Pentecostal and High Parish, the religiosity and faith in the Triune God, through the Holy Spirit (pneumatology), of Loyal Sisters is realized. They are faithful and avid ecclesiastical worshipers amidst a tide of dwindling church-attendance. We can reflect on their faith-lifestyle and ontological passion for God which propels them into action in the British church. We discover their values and beliefs and how they transcend and redeem adversity and/or immigration, patriarchy, and racism, “come what may,” and seek for womanist, cultural, and religious change in the church through the Spirit. Furthermore, this book provides an insight into my autobiography/womanist testimonies as a British, Black, female practicing, ecumenical Christian who is an ally with Loyal Sisters. You do not have to be a Loyal Sister or identify as female of color to read this book. There is much we can learn from Loyal Sisters and about the British church which can enrich our understanding, epistemology, and/or spirituality as faith-believers or persons of no religious faith: whether we agree with all, some or none of their womanist spirituality.
Download or read book Holy Runaways written by Matthias Roberts and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2023 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Psychotherapist Matthias Roberts speaks with empathy and compassion to people who have left their faith community after experiencing trauma, hypocrisy, or resistance to change. Blending personal stories, new interpretations of Christian parables, and research on religious trauma, Roberts guides "holy runaways" toward new and loving spiritual homes.
Download or read book Revelation written by Lynn R. Huber and published by Liturgical Press. This book was released on 2023-11-23 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While feminist interpretations of the Book of Revelation often focus on the book’s use of feminine archetypes—mother, bride, and prostitute, this commentary explores how gender, sexuality, and other feminist concerns permeate the book in its entirety. By calling audience members to become victors, Revelation’s author, John, commends to them an identity that flows between masculine and feminine and challenges ancient gender norms. This identity befits an audience who follow the Lamb, a genderqueer savior, wherever he goes. In this commentary, Lynn R. Huber situates Revelation and its earliest audiences in the overlapping worlds of ancient Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and first-century Judaism. She also examines how interpreters from different generations living within other worlds have found meaning in this image-rich and meaning-full book.
Download or read book Decolonial Theory and Biblical Unreading written by Stephen D. Moore and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Postcolonial theory in the mode of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and, above all, Homi Bhabha has long been a resource for biblical scholars concerned with empire and imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. Outside biblical studies, however, postcolonial theory is increasingly eclipsed by decolonial theory with its key concepts of the coloniality of power, decoloniality, and epistemic delinking. Decolonial theory begs a radical reconception of the origins of critical biblical scholarship; invites a delinking of biblical interpretation from the colonial matrix of power; and provides resources for doing so, as this book demonstrates through a decolonial (un)reading of the Gospel of Mark.
Download or read book Marriage in the Bible written by Jennifer Bird and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-12-15 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marriage in the Bible: What Do the Texts Say? is an honest engagement with the relevant passages in the two primary Testaments of the Christian Bible. Rather than making the Bible confirm a specific stance on marriage, the author invites her readers to be honest about what these biblical stories, laws, commands, and sayings meant in their original contexts. In doing this, the author engages the conflicting messages about biblical marriage from such figures as Jesus, St. Paul, and St. Augustine. The first part of the book addresses four passages that many people believe defines “biblical marriage” as being intended for procreation, only between a man and a woman, anti-divorce, and holy or sacred. While these passages quoted out of context may be read to mean these things, when read in context the first two are not even talking about marriage, and the latter two assert that wives should be fearfully submissive to their husbands and show Jesus affirming a non-binary gender and non-hetero sex, among other things. The reader then gets a crash course on what marriages in the Bible actually look like, including additional content from Jesus and Paul that is anything but positive about marriage. The final section of the book highlights several of the themes in the Bible that are still alive and well, today, themes that have an impact on relational and social expectations of men and women, though most detrimentally for women. What might be most surprising are the insights in the final chapter, inviting people to take a fresh look at select moments for Jesus and Paul. Marriage in the Bible invites its reader to take these passages and their messages seriously, to consider the ways they influence beliefs and behaviors, and to decide if marriage as it is presented in the Bible is helpful and healthful for people today.
Download or read book If God Loves Me Why Can t I Get My Locker Open written by Lorraine Peterson and published by Bethany House. This book was released on 2006-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Oxford University Press's publication in 2000 of Michael Emerson and Christian Smith's groundbreaking study, Divided by Faith (DBF), research on racialized religion has burgeoned in a variety of disciplines in response to and in conversation with DBF. This conversation has moved outsideof sociological circles; historians, theologians, and philosophers have also engaged the central tenets of DBF for the purpose of contextualizing, substantiating, and in some cases, contesting the book's findings. In a poll published in January 2012, nearly 70% of evangelical churches professed adesire to be racially and culturally diverse. Currently, only around 8% of them have achieved this multiracial status. To an unprecedented degree, evangelical churches in the United States are trying to overcome the deep racial divides that persist in their congregations. Not surprisingly, many of these evangelicals have turned to DBF for solutions. The essays in Christians and the Color Line complicate the researchfindings of Emerson and Smith's study and explore new areas of research that have opened in the years since DBF's publication. The book is split into two sections. The chapters in the first section consider the history of American evangelicalism and race as portrayed in DBF. In the second sectionthe authors pick up where DBF left off, and discuss how American churches could ameliorate the problem of race in their congregations while also identifying problems that can arise from such attempted amelioration.
Download or read book We Are All Witnesses written by Mitzi J. Smith and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-02-10 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We Are All Witnesses is a remarkable, sassy, creative, disruptive, and deeply personal textbook. It is like no other text on biblical interpretation. Smith and Newheart have produced a groundbreaking milestone book about how to do biblical interpretation that prioritizes justice and the reader’s context. It is both memoir and metatestimony! The layperson, college students, and seminary students will find this book accessible. It is indeed creative, witty, and wayward!
Download or read book It s Not Supposed to Be This Way written by Lysa TerKeurst and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Lysa TerKeurst unveils her heart amid shattering circumstances and shows readers how to live assured when life doesn't turn out like they expected. What do you do when God’s timing seems questionable, His lack of intervention hurtful, and His promises doubtful? Life often looks so very different than we hoped or expected. Some events may simply catch us off guard for a moment, but others shatter us completely. We feel disappointed and disillusioned, and we quietly start to wonder about the reality of God’s goodness. Lysa TerKeurst understands this deeply. But she's also discovered that our disappointments can be the divine appointments our souls need to radically encounter God. In It's Not Supposed to Be This Way, Lysa invites us into her own journey of faith and, with grit, vulnerability, and honest humor, helps us to: Stop being pulled into the anxiety of disappointment by discovering how to better process unmet expectations and other painful situations. Train ourselves to recognize the three strategies of the enemy so we can stand strong and persevere through unsettling relationships and uncertain outcomes. Discover the secret of being steadfast and not panicking when God actually does give us more than we can handle. Shift our suspicion that God is cruel or unfair to the biblical assurance that God is protecting and preparing us. Know how to encourage a friend and help her navigate hard realities with real help from God's truth.
Download or read book Extremists for Love written by J. T. Young and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2024-08-23 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The histories of race and religion in America are inextricably intertwined. From the antebellum South to the civil rights era and the modern #BlackLivesMatter movement, Christianity has played a key role. It may be tempting to believe—in light of the way far-right politics has hijacked Christian language and ideas in recent decades—that religion was used exclusively as an oppressive tool; but the ways in which Christianity played a key role in active resistance to white supremacy from its earliest days cannot be overlooked. Extremists for Love gives readers a critical overview of twenty central figures from the history of the black liberation struggle in the United States, exposing the theological trappings of their work and what they mean for the church today. Accessible in style and academic in quality, this volume examines civil rights activists, scholars, theologians, pop culture icons, and collectives who (either implicitly or explicitly) deployed Christian ideas in their work for black liberation.
Download or read book Fire in the Whole written by Robert G. Callahan, II and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2024-09-24 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fire in the Whole explores the anger of Black Christians who feel betrayed by white Christianity’s complicity of perpetuating racism. In this transformative work, author Robert Callahan not only empathizes with this pain, giving words to strong and powerful emotions, but also provides guidance for healing church-related wounds. How can all Christians claim to love and serve the same God and yet see and act in the world so differently? Texas attorney and writer Robert Callahan makes the case that white American Christians have failed to embody both their civic commitment to liberty and justice for all and their biblical call to love every neighbor as Christ loves us. In Fire in the Whole, Callahan explores the poignant journey of Christians who grapple with their sense of belonging within a faith tainted by toxic political ideologies—seeking healing for their souls. Boldly questioning the authenticity of individuals within the white Christian community who adhere to Christian nationalism or claim color-blind ignorance of racial injustice through cultural conflicts, this book navigates the complex modern Christian landscape, illuminating deep-rooted racial and religious rifts exacerbated by recent political figures and toxic theology. Through compelling storytelling and analysis, Callahan provides meticulous research and heartfelt insights, drawing a roadmap for healing. Whether you are a Christian minority who is hurt and angry, a progressive white ally seeking understanding of what went wrong, or a conservative white Christian willing to engage in constructive dialogue to rebuild a fractured community, this book is a powerful guide to navigating the flames of righteous anger and emerging whole again.
Download or read book Good Book written by Jill Hicks-Keeton and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2023-10-03 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good Book?interrogates how white evangelical Christians in the US make the Bible the "Good Book." An inanimate object with a contested table of contents ripe for multiple meanings and uses, the Bible cannot be a moral agent on its own. People must make it so, as indeed they have. As prevailing social norms change, evangelical Christians confront intellectual and interpretive challenges as they quest to make an ancient book newly relevant and ever benevolent, especially for historically oppressed populations. While histories show us that white Christians in the US have frequently appealed to their Bibles in support of issues now judged to be on the wrong side of history, including racism, sexism, and colonialism, contemporary white evangelical figures have in recent years worked steadfastly to defend the Bible against charges of complicity in harm. This is especially the case when it comes to patriarchy and the place of women, as evangelicals conscript the Bible into arguments for and against patriarchal normativity in response to changing conceptions of what is good. The Bible's historical origins in the hierarchical, patriarchal contexts of the ancient world create challenges for any Christian seeking to interpret their Bible as fundamentally liberative.?Good Book?shows the creative negotiations that Bible-benevolence projects demand, as evangelicals wrestle both Jesus and Paul into advocates for women. The quest to maintain the Bible's goodness is ultimately a respectability project for evangelical Christians in the US who seek to maintain moral authority in an increasingly diverse religious landscape. Whether they rebrand patriarchy or seek to untangle the Bible from sexism, white evangelical Bible-benevolence projects perpetuate misogyny.
Download or read book Reparations and the Theological Disciplines written by Michael Barram and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-10-10 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historically, many churches and theologians defended and supported race-based slavery and subsequent forms of racial hierarchy and violence. The essays in Reparations and the Theological Disciplines argue that it is urgent that the theological disciplines engage the issue of reparations by revisiting Scripture and our theological traditions. The time is now for remembrance, reckoning, and repair.
Download or read book Scapegoats written by Jennifer Garcia Bashaw and published by Fortress Press. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scapegoats are innocent victims who have experienced blame and violence at the hands of society. Ren Girard proposes that the Gospels present Jesus as a scapegoat whose innocent death exposes how humans have always created scapegoats. This revelation should have cured societal scapegoating, yet those who claim to live by the Gospels have missed that message. They continue to scapegoat and remain blind to the suffering of scapegoats in modern life. Christians today tend to read the New Testament as victors, not as victims. The teachings and actions of Jesus thus lose much of their subversive significance. The Gospels become one harmonized story about individual salvation rather than distinct representations of Jesus's revolutionary work on behalf of victims. Scapegoats revisits the Gospel narratives with the understanding that they tell scapegoats' stories, and that through those stories the kingdom of God is revealed. Bashaw goes beyond Girard's arguments to show that Jesus's whole public ministry (not only his death) combats the marginalization of victims. These scapegoat stories work together to illuminate an essential truth of the Gospels--that Jesus modeled a reality in which victims become survivors and the marginalized become central to the kingdom.
