5 of the latest resources from Augsburg Fortress publishing
Christian Economic Ethics: History and Implications by Daniel Finn
What does the history of Christian views of economic life mean for economic life in the twenty-first century? Here Daniel Finn reviews the insights provided by a large number of texts, from the Bible and the early church, to the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation, to treatments of the subject in the last century. Relying on both social science and theology, Finn then turns to the implications of this history for economic life today. Throughout, the book invites the reader to engage the sources and to develop an answer to the volume's basic question.
The Mission Table: Renewing Congregation and Community by Stephen Bouman
In a time of declining mainline Protestant church attendance, Bouman reminds us that the Holy Spirit is still very much at work. It is the mission of our churches to aid God's reconciling and restoring action in the world. This conversation on mission must involve everyone including laypeople, pastors, seminarians, and emerging congregational leaders. Each chapter contains scripture, questions, and activities, allowing for group study, reflection, and action. The goal is ultimately to help every member of the church to live as signs of the God who made the world and who will make all things new.
Chapters are:
- Table of Creation
- From the kitchen table to the alter table
- Seeking hospitality at new tables
- The Congregation: a table for mission
- Mission Table Leadership
- Setting Mission Tables
- Restoring the Broken Tables
This broadly adopted textbook weds literary and historical approaches to focus on the New Testament’s structure and meaning. Anatomy of the New Testament is systematic, critical, and reliable in its scope and content.
This seventh edition has been revised throughout, to take account of current trends in scholarship and to discuss important interpretative issues, such as the Gospel of Thomas. Each chapter includes two new features:
• Have You Learned It? offering questions for analysis and synthesis
• What Do They Mean? presenting definitions of key terms to enhance student comprehension and critical thinking
The text is augmented by numerous sidebars to stimulate discussion of matters “Behind,” “Within,” and “Beyond the New Testament.”
Other new features include:
• a more readable two-column format
• fresh, up-to-date maps
• nearly 100 new images and illustrations in black and white and color
• new charts and diagrams that facilitate deeper learning
• thoroughly updated bibliographies
After more than a decade in youth ministry, Michael Novelli felt like he'd tried everything to connect his students to the Bible. Then a missionary introduced him to the art of Bible storying—an imaginative way to engage in the scriptures through storytelling, creative reflection, and dialogue. He soon discovered that Bible storying was not only an effective teaching approach, but a powerful way to awaken people to new purpose and identity rooted in the biblical narrative.
In 2012, Michael partnered with sparkhouse to create Echo the Story curriculum, based on his approach to Bible storying. Michael has seen people of all ages benefit from this imaginative way of encountering God through the Bible.
In this book, you'll find methods for adapting Bible storying for varied contexts and ages, testimonials from people using this approach, tools to create your own Bible storying narratives, and details about the proven learning theories guiding this approach.
Our brains are hard-wired to experience the emotion of fear. Yet "do not be afraid" is a common refrain from the Bible, used for both comfort and chastening. Too often, we have treated fear, an emotion that helps protect us from threats, as something simply to be dismissed, ignored, or suppressed. Being afraid means so much more than simply fighting or running from a threat; to be afraid is to remember that something in life is worth living for. In fact, there may even be circumstances where fear is God's best response to what we are experiencing. In this book, Whitehead helps us find the roots of hope in the soil of our fears so that we can form lives and communities of hope in the midst of a culture of fear.
Sections include:
- Why Fear? Why NOW?
- What does it mean to be afraid?
- Pastoral theology of fear and hope
- Responding to our fears
