The Christian life is one of dualities: we are simultaneously sinner and saint, we know believers and non-believers, we interact in the left and right kingdoms, and we hear Law and Gospel.
For those who want to love God with their hearts and minds, editors Kelly Monroe Kullberg and Lael Arrington weave together both inspiration and illumination throughout this collection of daily readings. Faith and Culture: A Guide to a Culture Shaped by Faith translates the ideas of today’s Christian thought leaders, delivering them in accessible portions that fit into anyone’s busy schedule. Each chapter interacts with one of seven recurring themes: the Bible and theology, literature, history, contemporary culture, the arts, science and math, and philosophy. Along the way, Kullberg and Arrington explore significant ideas, people, and events from a distinctly Christian worldview. Some of the readings in this book include: Thee Secret Gospels (the Bible and theology), Slavery (history), A Response to God’s Beauty (art), Globalization (contemporary culture), and more Each day spent with this illuminating guide will inspire readers to wonder at the genius, power, and beauty of Jesus.
Every day, major headlines tell the story of how Christianity is attempting to influence American culture and politics. But statistics show that young Americans are disenchanted with a faith that has become culturally antagonistic and too closely aligned with partisan politics. In this personal yet practical work, Jonathan Merritt uncovers the changing face of American Christianity by uniquely examining the coming of age of a new generation of Christians. Jonathan Merritt illuminates the spiritual ethos of this new generation of believers who engage the world with Christ-centered faith but an un-polarized political perspective. Through personal stories and biblically rooted commentary this scion of a leading evangelical family takes a close, thoughtful look at the changing religious and political environment, addressing such divisive issues as abortion, gay marriage, environmental use and care, race, war, poverty, and the imbalance of world wealth. Through Scripture, the examples of Jesus, and personal defining faith experiences, he distills the essential truths at the core of a Christian faith that is now just coming of age.
Without a uniform dietary code, Christians around the world used food in strikingly different ways, developing widely divergent practices that spread, nurtured, and strengthened their religious beliefs and communities. Featuring never-before published essays, this anthology follows the intersection of food and faith from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century, charting the complex relationship among religious eating habits and politics, culture, and social structure. Theoretically rich and full of engaging portraits, essays consider the rise of food buying and consumerism in the fourteenth century, the Reformation ideology of fasting and its resulting sanctions against sumptuous eating, the gender and racial politics of sacramental food production in colonial America, and the struggle to define "enlightened" Lenten dietary restrictions in early modern France. Essays on the nineteenth century explore the religious implications of wheat growing and breadmaking among New Zealand's Maori population and the revival of the Agape meal, or love feast, among American brethren in Christ Church. Twentieth-century topics include the metaphysical significance of vegetarianism, the function of diet in Greek Orthodoxy, American Christian weight loss programs, and the practice of silent eating rituals among English Benedictine monks. Two introductory essays detail the key themes tying these essays together and survey food's role in developing and disseminating the teachings of Christianity, not to mention providing a tangible experience of faith.
Contemporary theology, argues Miller, is silent on what is unquestionably one of the most important cultural issues it faces: consumerism or "consumer culture." While there is no shortage of expressions of concern about the corrosive effects of consumerism from the standpoint of economic justice or environmental ethics, there is a surprising paucity of theoretically sophisticated works on the topic, for consumerism, argues Miller, is not just about behavioral "excesses"; rather, it is a pervasive worldview that affects our construction as persons-what motivates us, how we relate to others, to culture, and to religion. Consuming Religion surveys almost a century of scholarly literature on consumerism and the commodification of culture and charts the ways in which religious belief and practice have been transformed by the dominant consumer culture of the West. It demonstrates the significance of this seismic cultural shift for theological method, doctrine, belief, community, and theological anthropology. Like more popular texts, the book takes a critical stand against the deleterious effects of consumerism. However, its analytical complexity provides the basis for developing more sophisticated tactics for addressing these problems.
"Gregg's book is the closet thing I've encountered in a long time to a one-volume user's manual for operating Western Civilization." —The Stream "Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization offers a concise intellectual history of the West through the prism of the relationship between faith and reason." —Free Beacon The genius of Western civilization is its unique synthesis of reason and faith. But today that synthesis is under attack—from the East by radical Islam (faith without reason) and from within the West itself by aggressive secularism (reason without faith). The stakes are incalculably high. The naïve and increasingly common assumption that reason and faith are incompatible is simply at odds with the facts of history. The revelation in the Hebrew Scriptures of a reasonable Creator imbued Judaism and Christianity with a conviction that the world is intelligible, leading to the flowering of reason and the invention of science in the West. It was no accident that the Enlightenment took place in the culture formed by the Jewish and Christian faiths. We can all see that faith without reason is benighted at best, fanatical and violent at worst. But too many forget that reason, stripped of faith, is subject to its own pathologies. A supposedly autonomous reason easily sinks into fanaticism, stifling dissent as bigoted and irrational and devouring the humane civilization fostered by the integration of reason and faith. The blood-soaked history of the twentieth century attests to the totalitarian forces unleashed by corrupted reason. But Samuel Gregg does more than lament the intellectual and spiritual ruin caused by the divorce of reason and faith. He shows that each of these foundational principles corrects the other’s excesses and enhances our comprehension of the truth in a continuous renewal of civilization. By recovering this balance, we can avoid a suicidal winner-take-all conflict between reason and faith and a future that will respect neither.
Globalization has raised numerous questions about theology and culture for Christians. How should we respond to outsourcing and immigration? How does anti-Western sentiment affect the proclamation of the gospel? What is the role of the church in society? This book argues that Christians will be most fulfilled and most effective if they embrace their cultural activity rather than feel ambivalent about it. The central question of this book is, how does bearing God's image relate to cultural activity? Nehrbass explains that "spheres of culture," such as political, technological, and social structures, are systems that God has instilled in humans as his image bearers, so that they can glorify and enjoy him forever. Therefore, a theology of culture involves recognizing that the kingdom of God encompasses heaven and Earth, rather than pitting heaven against Earth. The text surveys anthropological explanations for humanity's dependence on culture, and shows that each explanation provides only partial explanatory scope. The most satisfying explanation is that a major functional aspect of bearing God's image is engaging in culture, since the Trinity has been eternally engaged in cultural functions like ruling, communicating, and creating. Each chapter contains a summary and questions about what it means to be a world-changer in the twenty-first century.