Download or read book Still Evangelical written by Mark Labberton and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - Religion Evangelicalism in America has cracked, split on the shoals of the 2016 presidential election and its aftermath, leaving many wondering if they want to be in or out of the evangelical tribe. The contentiousness brought to the fore surrounds what it means to affirm and demonstrate evangelical Christian faith amidst the messy and polarized realities gripping our country and world. Who or what is defining the evangelical social and political vision? Is it the gospel or is it culture? For a movement that has been about the primacy of Christian faith, this is a crisis. This collection of essays was gathered by Mark Labberton, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, who provides an introduction to the volume. What follows is a diverse and provocative set of perspectives and reflections from evangelical insiders who wrestle with their responses to the question of what it means to be evangelical in light of their convictions. Contributors include: Shane Claiborne, Red Letter Christians Jim Daly, Focus on the Family Mark Galli, Christianity Today Lisa Sharon Harper, FreedomRoad.us Tom Lin, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Karen Swallow Prior, Liberty University Soong-Chan Rah, North Park University Robert Chao Romero, UCLA Sandra Maria Van Opstal, Grace and Peace Community Allen Yeh, Biola University Mark Young, Denver Seminary Referring to oneself as evangelical cannot be merely a congratulatory self-description. It must instead be a commitment and aspiration guided by the grace and mercy of Jesus Christ. What now are Christ's followers called to do in response to this identity crisis?

Download or read book Can We Still Believe the Bible written by Craig L. Blomberg and published by Brazos Press. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenges to the reliability of Scripture are perennial and have frequently been addressed. However, some of these challenges are noticeably more common today, and the topic is currently of particular interest among evangelicals. In this volume, highly regarded biblical scholar Craig Blomberg offers an accessible and nuanced argument for the Bible's reliability in response to the extreme views about Scripture and its authority articulated by both sides of the debate. He believes that a careful analysis of the relevant evidence shows we have reason to be more confident in the Bible than ever before. As he traces his own academic and spiritual journey, Blomberg sketches out the case for confidence in the Bible in spite of various challenges to the trustworthiness of Scripture, offering a positive, informed, and defensible approach.

Download or read book Pure written by Linda Kay Klein and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us “inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can” (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity’s views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a “purity industry” emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is “a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society’s larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, “Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom” (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).

Download or read book Jesus and John Wayne How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation written by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.

Download or read book Still Christian written by David P. Gushee and published by Presbyterian Publishing Corp. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book for folks whose commitment to Jesus has put them at odds with American evangelicalism. —Shane Claiborne So many Americans today love their faith but have found their church doesn't love them back. They then leave, seeking community elsewhere. Of all those personal stories, few have ever been told by someone so far inside the powerful places of white evangelical Christianity. In this provocative tell-all, David Gushee opens the door to the frictions and schisms of evangelicalism, tells his own story of leaving, and shows that you, too, can find a Christianity that is worth following. Gushee’s experiences begin with becoming a born-again Southern Baptist in 1978 and end with being kicked out of evangelicalism in 2014 for his principled stance on full LGBTQ inclusion. But his religious pilgrimage proves even broader than that, as he leads his doctoral studies at Union Seminary in New York, his dismay when the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary expelled female professors and fellow colleagues, to his days as every evangelical’s least-favorite liberal, and more. In telling his story, Gushee speaks to those who have been disillusioned by American Christianity. As he describes his own struggles to find the right path at different stages of his journey, he highlights the turning points and decisions that we all face. When do we compromise, and when do we stand our ground? Is holding to moral conviction worth sacrificing friendship, jobs, and security? As he takes us through his sometimes-amusing, sometimes-heartbreaking, and always-stirring journey, Gushee shows us that we can retain our faith in Christ even when Christians disappoint us.

Download or read book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind written by Mark A. Noll and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award (1995) “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism’s most respected historians. Unsparing in his indictment, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship. While nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have so many evangelicals failed to sustain a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture? Over twenty-five years since its original publication, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has turned out to be prescient and perennially relevant. In a new preface, Noll lays out his ongoing personal frustrations with this situation, and in a new afterword he assesses the state of the scandal—showing how white evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism, their deepening distrust of science, and their frequent forays into conspiratorial thinking have coexisted with surprisingly robust scholarship from many with strong evangelical connections.

Download or read book Unapologetic written by Francis Spufford and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Spufford's Unapologetic is a wonderfully pugnacious defense of Christianity. Refuting critics such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the "new atheist" crowd, Spufford, a former atheist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, argues that Christianity is recognizable, drawing on the deep and deeply ordinary vocabulary of human feeling, satisfying those who believe in it by offering a ruthlessly realistic account of the grown-up dignity of Christian experience. Fans of C. S. Lewis, N. T. Wright, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Karr, Diana Butler Bass, Rob Bell, and James Martin will appreciate Spufford's crisp, lively, and abashedly defiant thesis. Unapologetic is a book for believers who are fed up with being patronized, for non-believers curious about how faith can possibly work in the twenty-first century, and for anyone who feels there is something indefinably wrong, literalistic, anti-imaginative and intolerant about the way the atheist case is now being made.

Download or read book I Kissed Dating Goodbye written by Joshua Harris and published by Multnomah. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joshua Harris's first book, written when he was only 21, turned the Christian singles scene upside down...and people are still talking. More than 800,000 copies later, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, with its inspiring call to sincere love, real purity, and purposeful singleness, remains the benchmark for books on Christian dating. Now, for the first time since its release, the national #1 bestseller has been expanded with new content and updated for new readers. Honest and practical, it challenges cultural assumptions about relationships and provides solid, biblical alternatives to society's norm.Clear, stylish typeset, with user-friendly links to referenced Scripture.

Download or read book Faith Unraveled written by Rachel Held Evans and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2014-04-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From New York Times bestselling author Rachel Held Evans: a must-read for anyone on the journey of doubt, deconstruction, and ultimately faith reborn. Eighty years after the Scopes Monkey Trial made a spectacle of Christian fundamentalism and brought national attention to her hometown, Rachel Held Evans faced a trial of her own when she began to have doubts about her faith. In Faith Unraveled, Rachel recounts growing up in a culture obsessed with apologetics, struggling as her own faith unraveled one unexpected question at a time. In order for her faith to survive, Rachel realizes, it must adapt to change and evolve. Using as an illustration her own spiritual journey from certainty to doubt to faith, Evans challenges you to disentangle your faith from false fundamentals and to trust in a God who is big enough to handle your tough questions. In a changing cultural environment where new ideas seem to threaten the safety and security of the faith, Faith Unraveled is a profoundly moving, fearlessly honest, and relentlessly hopeful story of survival. This book was previously titled Evolving in Monkey Town.

Download or read book Struggling with Evangelicalism written by Dan Stringer and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When evangelicals make a mess, who cleans it up? Many today are discarding the evangelical label, even if they still hold to the historic tenets of evangelicalism. But evangelicalism is a space, not just a brand, and living in that space is complicated. As a lifelong evangelical who happens to be a biracial Asian/White millennial, Dan Stringer has felt both included and alienated by the evangelical community and has wrestled with whether to stay or go. He sits as an uneasy evangelical insider with ties to many of evangelicalism's historic organizations and institutions. 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.

Download or read book Still Time to Care written by Greg Johnson and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the start of the gay rights movement in 1969, evangelicalism's leading voices cast a vision for gay people who turn to Jesus. It was C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer and John Stott who were among the most respected leaders within theologically orthodox Protestantism. We see with them a positive pastoral approach toward gay people, an approach that viewed homosexuality as a fallen condition experienced by some Christians who needed care more than cure. With the birth and rise of the ex-gay movement, the focus shifted from care to cure. As a result, there are an estimated 700,000 people alive today who underwent conversion therapy in the United States alone. Many of these patients were treated by faith-based, testimony-driven parachurch ministries centered on the ex-gay script. Despite the best of intentions, the movement ended with very troubling results. Yet the ex-gay movement died not because it had the wrong sex ethic. It died because it was founded on a practice that diminished the beauty of the gospel. Yet even after the closure of the ex-gay umbrella organization Exodus International in 2013, the ex-gay script continues to walk about as the undead among us, pressuring people like me to say, "I used to be gay, but I'm not gay anymore. Now I'm just same-sex attracted." For orthodox Christians, the way forward is a path back to where we were forty years ago. It is time again to focus with our Neo-Evangelical fathers on care--not cure--for our non-straight sisters and brothers who are living lives of costly obedience to Jesus. With warmth and humor as well as original research, Still Time to Care will chart the path forward for our churches and ministries in providing care. It will provide guidance for the gay person who hears the gospel and finds themselves smitten by the life-giving call of Jesus. Woven throughout the book will be Richard Lovelace’s 1978 call for a "double repentance" in which gay Christians repent of their homosexual sins and the church repents of its homophobia--putting on display for all the power of the gospel.

Download or read book How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative written by Roger E. Olson and published by Zondervan. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people equate evangelical Christianity with conservatism in religion, politics, theology and social attitudes. Some are scandalized by any separation between them. As one evangelical pastor's wife declared to a church group "We are a conservative people!"In fact, however, evangelicals have not always been conservative; radical stances on doctrines, worship, social norms, politics and church leadership have often marked evangelicalism in the past. The 2007 movie Amazing Grace about William Wilberforce's protracted battle against the slave trade featured a small group of British evangelicals committed to abolition. The same radicalism characterized much of American evangelicalism in the years before the Civil War.In recent years the American media have portrayed the evangelical movement as a conservative force in society sometimes equating it with fundamentalism and puritanism. The missing piece of the story is, however, that both fundamentalism and puritanism contained radical elements that opposed the status quo.This book sets forth evidence that the link between evangelicalism and conservatism has not always been as strong as it is today in the popular mind and it will provide suggestions for contemporary evangelicals who want to remain evangelical (and not become "post-evangelical") without identifying with conservatism in every way.

Download or read book Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense written by C. Stephen Evans and published by Baker Academic. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years the Christian faith has been challenged by skeptics, including the New Atheists, who claim that belief in God is simply not reasonable. Here prominent Christian philosopher C. Stephen Evans offers a fresh, contemporary, and nuanced response. He makes the case for belief in a personal God through an exploration of natural "signs," which open our minds to theistic possibilities and foster belief in the Christian revelation. Evans then discusses why God's self-revelation is both authoritative and authentic. This sophisticated yet accessible book provides a clear account of the evidence for Christian faith, concluding that it still makes sense to believe.

Download or read book Evangelical Christendom written by and published by . This book was released on 1857 with total page 954 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book White Evangelical Racism written by Anthea Butler and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-02-23 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power. Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation's founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism's racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.

Download or read book God Spare the Girls written by Kelsey McKinney and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-06-22 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Read it for twists on twists, meditations on faith, and a deeply thoughtful treatment of an evangelical community." — Glamour, Beach Reads That Are Like Summer in a Book “A thoughtful and candid meditation on faith, family, and forgiveness . . . fabulous.” —Claire Lombardo, New York Times bestselling author of The Most Fun We Ever Had Recommended by Good Housekeeping, Elle, Parade, Real Simple, Glamour,Refinery29,Bustle, Oprah Daily, The Millions, Shondaland, Yahoo!, Literary Hub, and more! A mesmerizing debut novel set in northern Texas about two sisters who discover an unsettling secret about their father, the head pastor of an evangelical megachurch, that upends their lives and community—a story of family, identity, and the delicate line between faith and deception. Luke Nolan has led the Hope congregation for more than a decade, while his wife and daughters have patiently upheld what it means to live righteously. Made famous by a viral sermon on purity co-written with his eldest daughter, Abigail, Luke is the prototype of a modern preacher: tall, handsome, a spellbinding speaker. But his younger daughter Caroline has begun to notice the cracks in their comfortable life. She is certain that her perfect, pristine sister is about to marry the wrong man—and Caroline has slid into sin with a boy she’s known her entire life, wondering why God would care so much about her virginity anyway. When it comes to light, five weeks before Abigail’s wedding, that Luke has been lying to his family, the entire Nolan clan falls into a tailspin. Caroline seizes the opportunity to be alone with her sister. The two girls flee to the ranch they inherited from their maternal grandmother, far removed from the embarrassing drama of their parents and the prying eyes of the community. But with the date of Abigail’s wedding fast approaching, the sisters will have to make a hard decision about which familial bonds are worth protecting. An intimate coming-of-age story and a modern woman’s read, God Spare the Girls lays bare the rabid love of sisterhood and asks what we owe our communities, our families, and ourselves. “A deeply felt book about love — love for family and community, for people who sustain you and people who disappoint you. And love for God, too, which Kelsey McKinney writes about with humane and incisive frankness.”—Linda Holmes, New York Times bestselling author of Evvie Drake Starts Over “The accomplishment of this canny novel is in positing coming of age itself as a loss of faith—not only in the church, but in our parents, our family, and the world as we thought we understood it.” — Rumaan Alam, New York Times bestselling author of Leave the World Behind and Rich and Pretty

Download or read book After Evangelicalism written by David P. Gushee and published by Westminster John Knox Press. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year in 2020 by the Academy of Parish Clergy "Drawing on his own spiritual journey, David Gushee provides an incisive critique of American evangelicalism [and] offers a succinct yet deeply informed guide for post-evangelicals seeking to pursue Christ-honoring lives." —Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Calvin University Millions are getting lost in the evangelical maze: inerrancy, indifference to the environment, deterministic Calvinism, purity culture, racism, LGBTQ discrimination, male dominance, and Christian nationalism. They are now conscientious objectors, deconstructionists, perhaps even "none and done." As one of America's leading academics speaking to the issues of religion today, David Gushee offers a clear assessment and a new way forward for disillusioned post-evangelicals. Gushee starts by analyzing what went wrong with U.S. white evangelicalism in areas such as evangelical history and identity, biblicism, uncredible theologies, and the fundamentalist understandings of race, politics, and sexuality. Along the way, he proposes new ways of Christian believing and of listening to God and Jesus today. He helps post-evangelicals know how to belong and behave, going from where they are to a living relationship with Christ and an intellectually cogent and morally robust post-evangelical faith. He shows that they can have a principled way of understanding Scripture, a community of Christ's people, a healthy politics, and can repent and learn to listen to people on the margins. With a foreword from Brian McLaren, who says, “David Gushee is right: there is indeed life after evangelicalism,” this book offers an essential handbook for those looking for answers and affirmation of their journey into a future that is post-evangelical but still centered on Jesus. If you, too, are struggling, After Evangelicalism shows that it is possible to cut loose from evangelical Christianity and, more than that, it is necessary.