The Collage of God is for all who find it difficult to reconcile the realities of life with comfortable notions about faith. Following his experiences with suffering as a hospital chaplain, Mark Oakley reconstructs faith as a collage of traditions, texts, and experiences of living, imagination, silence and prayer. A contemporary spiritual classic.
City of God' started out as a kind of portrait of Christ on the cross, it developed quickly into not only a portrait of Jesus but also a portrait of man. When David Mach began the work, he soon realized he shouldn't keep it to himself, that it would have to be shared. Thirty artists were asked to provide artwork for each of the 'rooms' represented within the open chest of the figure on the cross. What you see in this book, therefore, is the work of thirty artists, and through them the collage has become a portrayal of the search for the soul, or at least a battleground of the senses. The artists include, among others, Adrian Mokes, Alf Lohr, Brian McCann, Dale Nicholas, David Cutts, Richard Riddick, Elaine Wilson, Harald Vlugt, Parm Rai, Peter Anderson and David Mach himself.
The disciples and early Christians faced doubt, opposition, and threats--just like many Christians do today. In Together with the World, Michael Wagenman shows how the book of Acts can help modern Christians respond to crisis and critique in our contemporary world. The book of Acts is about more than simply the beginning of church history. In Together for the World we find a group of disciples, empowered by the Holy Spirit, following God's call to spread the good news.
There's nothing more American than a road trip— and a spiritual road trip at that. From mosque to synagogue to chapel to coffee shop, Tom Levinson's entertaining and erudite stories of conversations with the faithful and the seeking get to the heart of religion in America today. All That's Holy is a fascinating conversational collage set against the backdrop of the author's deepening appreciation— both intellectually and spiritually— of his own religious roots. "Tom Levinson has given us a spiritual Odyssey, an extended adventure in the new meaning of faith and hope. Eloquent, heartfelt, and true, this is a book America needs." — James Carroll, author, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews and American Requiem, winner of the National Book Award "Tom Levinson has written an engaging and lucid personal essay on a timely and timeless subject." — Joyce Carol Oates, author, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Big Mouth & Ugly Girl, and I'll Take You There
“This book could literally change a generation, change the trajectory of our culture, change a whole world of broken toward hope.” - Ann Voskamp, New York Times bestselling author of The Broken Way God could have made us all exactly the same, but He didn’t. And our differences are good! As His children, those called by God to belong to His family, we can actually use our differences to help each other. Here’s some more great news: There are no rules about how we look or sound to be in His family. We have a delightfully different family on purpose. Every person is made by God, in His image, and therefore is equal in value and worth. Kids, somehow, already know this to be true. This short, colorful book (written with grade-schoolers in mind) will share the truth of God’s Word with them. The truth about how we were made with differences, how we sinned, how God rescued us, and how—if we understand that God’s diverse creation will be together in Heaven—it should motivate us to love one another on earth!
Few, if any, thinkers and writers today would have the imagination, the breadth of knowledge, the literary skill, and-yes-the audacity to conceive of a powerful, secular alternative to the Bible. But that is exactly what A.C. Grayling has done by creating a non-religious Bible, drawn from the wealth of secular literature and philosophy in both Western and Eastern traditions, using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic religions. The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible, in its beauty of language and arrangement into short chapters and verses for ease of reading and quotability, offering to the non-religious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of secular humanist traditions that are older, far richer and more various than Christianity. Organized in 12 main sections----Genesis, Histories, Widsom, The Sages, Parables, Consolations, Lamentations, Proverbs, Songs, Epistles, Acts, and the Good----The Good Book opens with meditations on the origin and progress of the world and human life in it, then devotes attention to the question of how life should be lived, how we relate to one another, and how vicissitudes are to be faced and joys appreciated. Incorporating the writing of Herodotus and Lucretius, Confucius and Mencius, Seneca and Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon, and so many others, The Good Book will fulfill its audacious purpose in every way.
*A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection* With poetic language and gorgeous handcrafted mixed-media collages and mosaics, Picturing God brings to life the many metaphors for God found in the Bible. God is the light, living water, a father, a mother, clothing, a rock, wind, comforter, a door, the Good Shepherd, and more. Poet and artist Ruth Goring invites children and adults alike to revisit the beautiful imagery found in Scripture and provides an opportunity for children to develop their imagination about who God is. At the end of the book, a list of Bible references is provided for each image depicted for families to look up and learn more about the Bible's many ways of picturing God.
Growing up the son of agnostics, John Koessler saw a Catholic church on one end of the street and a Baptist on the other. In the no-man’s land between the two, this curious outside wondered about the God they worshipped—and began a lifelong search to comprehend the grace and mystery of God. A Stranger in the House of God addresses fundamental questions and struggles faced by spiritual seekers and mature believers. Like a contemporary Pilgrim’s Progress, it traces the author’s journey and explores his experiences with both charismatic and evangelical Christianity. It also describes his transformation from religious outsider to ordained pastor. John Koessler provides a poignant and often humorous window into the interior of the soul as he describes his journey from doubt and struggle with the church to personal faith
Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today’s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.
