By John Hawthorne I was excited to receive this book by Josh Packard and Ashleigh Hope. It is a sociological report on The Dones: people who have been active in church life but have removed themselves from the institutional church. I first became aware of this phenomenon two years ago thanks to some blog posts by Michelle Van Loon reporting on church decline among those over 40. I returned to the topic the beginning of this year when I became... Read more
I’m going to try to keep this a bit brief. I know, I know, some of you won’t believe me. Some are already buckled down laughing. Well, just watch. Not too brief, though. That wouldn’t be prudent, as George Bush the First used to say. I don’t know if it is prudent to open a can of worms and try to be brief. I hope I don’t step on anyone’s toes. But here goes. You know we sell books at... Read more
This post originally appeared at The Well. Thanks, folks, for letting us reprint it! For the past couple of months, I’ve been carrying around two books with odd titles in my backpack. (Yes, even though I’m 40 years old, I still use a backpack.) One is called Faithful is Successful: Notes to the Driven Pilgrim (which also has a blog accompanying it, found here and is featured in a series at the Emerging Scholars blog) the other, even more startlingly,... Read more
This interview originally appeared at The High Calling. J.B. Wood, aka Shrinking Camel, aka the Work Editor for The High Calling, has collected his best columns (actually, all of his columns are best columns) in At Work As It Is in Heaven: 25 Ways to Re-imagine the Spiritual Purpose of Your Work, published as an e-book by Patheos Press. He’s a corporate executive and his writing has been featured at The Conference Board Review, Christianity Today’s faithintheworkplace.com and Men of Integrity,... Read more
“Natural disasters are not the only things shaking the earth.” This is the powerful, provocative first line of a brave new book by James W. Skillen called The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction (BakerAcademic; $22.99.) I want to ramble around a rumination about it as it is a book that means a lot to me and I think will help you. It is important and I’ll tell you a few of the reasons why. In a... Read more
The Cities of Tomorrow and the City to Come: A Theology of Urban Life Noah J. Toly The Scalpel and the Cross: A Theology of Surgery Gene L. Green The Political Disciples: A Theology of Public Life Vincent E. Bacote Faithful: A Theology of Sex Beth Felker Jones One of the themes of each of the speeches collected in my new book, Serious Dreams, is that God cares about all of life, and that we can discern a sense of... Read more
I hope you enjoyed the review I did last week of the latest memoir of the feisty and increasingly skilled writer, Rachel Held Evans. Searching for Sunday told of her frustrations with her experiences of conservative evangelical faith and her embrace of a more sacramental, open-minded sort of mainline denominational church experience. Our bookstore has always worked hard at showing books from various viewpoints and theological traditions, and while there seems to be an abundance these days of well-written memoirs... Read more
By Matt Perman I’m going through Keller’s Every Good Endeavor again and taking some notes. Here are four central points from my overall summary of the book (quotes are, interestingly, from the dust jacket — which for most books does a great job of highlighting the core points): A Christian view of work is “that we work to serve others, not ourselves.” We can indeed have “a thriving professional and balanced personal life.” This is a Christian goal, not just a worldly... Read more
We wanted to let you know about a new video from our friends at Christian History Institute which seeks to explain how work, while no vacation, can be a vocation. It’s distinguished particularly by its interviews, not only with experts and theologians, but with everyday people–a waitress, a cop, a stay-at-home-dad, a hairdresser, a small-town mayor, and quite a few others. You can learn more about it at this website: http://www.goingonvocation.com/ as wellas watch a trailer and download some additional... Read more
This post originally appeared at the blog BookNotes in 2012. These are all STILL great books! I want to show you a few books that you might find interesting, or that you might want to tell others about, but, as is often the case, I want to tell you about them by way of a story. It’s part of who we are, to get these sorts of books out to those who are interested and we believe you, too, are... Read more
Work Cited
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In