Non-Fiction Archives - Life Is Story: Recent Episodes
Josh Olds
People talk a lot about how polarized America is and how increasingly uncivil our public discourse has become, but people rarely suggest substantive solutions for how to deal with this. In Claiming the Courageous Middle, [...]
The post Claiming the Courageous Middle: Daring to Live and Work Together for a More Hopeful Future – Shirley A. Mullen appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is full of practical, helpful advice for Christian women in corporate leadership positions. As Peggy Bodde explains at the beginning, it is rare for these leaders to get the support that they need, [...]
The post Sacred Work: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Leadership in the Marketplace – Peggy Bodde appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book of prayers is designed for Christian parents who are going through a child’s medical crisis or facing the death of their child. Eric M. Schumacher and Jessika Sanders wrote this book from their [...]
The post In His Hands: Prayers for Your Child or Baby in a Medical Crisis – Eric M. Schumacher and Jessika Sanders appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Aimee Byrd shares some of her own journey through church trauma, and she explores topics and themes that will resonate with many other people who have experienced disillusionment with the church, whether [...]
The post The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment – Aimee Byrd appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this thoughtful book, Elizabeth Oldfield explores how the Seven Deadly Sins and Christianity as a whole help to explain the human condition. She writes that even though postmodern, secular cultures have lost the concept [...]
The post Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times – Elizabeth Oldfield appeared first on Life Is Story.
Everyone has experiences of feeling like their life will never change. Transitional periods between life stages, jobs, and relationships seem to drag on forever. Suffering feels like it will never end. A more fulfilling, meaningful [...]
The post Now and Not Yet: Pressing in When You’re Waiting, Wanting, and Restless for More – Ruth Chou Simons appeared first on Life Is Story.
Mimetic Theoy and Middle-earth. Don’t let the title scare you, Matthew Distefano’s perspective on JRR Tolkien’s legendarium through the lens of mimetic theory isn’t some academic text about some obscure philosophy. Instead—read the subtitle—this is [...]
The post Mimetic Theory and Middle-earth – Matthew J. Distefano appeared first on Life Is Story.
Several years ago, my wife and I began donate monthly to Compassion International to sponsor a child. Over the years, we’ve exchanged letters and watched that kid grow to adulthood. Giving money can sometimes feel [...]
The post What Are You Going to Do – Eric Wilson & Matt Bronleewe appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2013, I accepted a job as a youth pastor at a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and served there until 2020. Across town in Tulsa, at a different church, there was very much a similar [...]
The post De-Sizing the Church – Karl Vaters appeared first on Life Is Story.
A few years ago, I enjoyed reading Marvin Olasky’s book Lament for a Father, in which he explored the family history and generational trauma that shaped his childhood. In this memoir, he writes about his [...]
The post Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment – Marvin Olasky appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book explores how Christians can find hope and rest in God, even when they are dealing with broken dreams and questioning why God would let something bad happen to them. Kat Shultis writes in [...]
The post My Lowest for His Highest: Fixing Our Eyes on Jesus in the Midst of Broken Dreams – Kat Shultis appeared first on Life Is Story.
This guide for mental health professionals explores how they can partner with churches to provide quality mental health care to a broader number of people. As the authors explain, the need for mental health services [...]
The post Beyond the Clinical Hour: How Counselors Can Partner with the Church to Address the Mental Health Crisis – James N. Sells, Amy Trout, and Heather C. Sells appeared first on Life Is Story.
This reflective, personal book explores the theme of belonging, with each chapter addressing different topics about identity and community. Sarah E. Westfall writes in a vulnerable way about her struggles to feel like she belongs, [...]
The post The Way of Belonging: Reimagining Who We Are and How We Relate – Sarah E. Westfall appeared first on Life Is Story.
This Bible study explores the story of Elijah, alongside some other Scripture passages about prayer. Liz Ditty designed this for study groups to use together, but she also suggests modifications for people who are studying [...]
The post Hear My Prayer: Learning from the Faith of Elijah―A 6-Week Bible Study Experience – Liz Ditty appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have enjoyed Jay Y. Kim’s other books about Christian spiritual formation in the digital age, and this one builds on the previous books’ themes in a different way, focusing on what it truly means [...]
The post Listen, Listen, Speak: Hearing God and Being Heard in a Noisy World – Jay Y. Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book of written prayers engages with topics from everyday life, reflecting lots of different concerns and common requests to God. In the introduction, W. David O. Taylor describes his experience writing daily prayers throughout [...]
The post Prayers for the Pilgrimage: A Book of Collects for All of Life – W. David O. Taylor and Phaedra Taylor appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this powerful book, Ryan George shares his personal story about surviving spiritual abuse and coming to know the real Jesus through genuine Christian community. He explains that even though he experienced great harm in [...]
The post Hurt and Healed by the Church: Redemption and Reconstruction After Spiritual Abuse – Ryan George appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this concise, thoughtful book, Stacy Reaoch explores tough topics about body image, food, and exercise through a biblical lens. She encourages Christian women to exchange negative cultural messages for the truth of Scripture, and [...]
The post Beautiful Freedom: How the Bible Shapes Your View of Appearance, Food, and Fitness – Stacy Reaoch appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s generally acknowledged in Christian circles that being a pastor is an incredibly demanding job, and that it’s difficult to balance the always-on pressures of ministry with personal needs. For example, people talk a lot [...]
The post The Unhurried Pastor: Redefining Productivity for a More Sustainable Ministry – Brian Croft and Ronnie Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This beautifully written memoir tells the author’s story of surviving Christian patriarchy, the Stay at Home Daughters movement, and her father’s emotional abuse. She directs her story both to people with similar backgrounds in the [...]
The post Rift: A Memoir of Breaking Away from Christian Patriarchy – Cait West appeared first on Life Is Story.
How did we get the Bible? That’s a huge question and the answer is way more complicated than I went to the local Christian bookstore.” But even when we try to go deeper—to talk about [...]
The post Gospel Media – Nicholas Elder appeared first on Life Is Story.
To understand being here: Prayers for Curiosity, Justice, and Love you have to understand two things: liturgy and living in the moment. For me, this book was a personal journey on learning about both. I [...]
The post being here – Pádraig Ó Tuama appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I told my wife the title of this book, Surviving God, she asked “Do they mean that God survives bad interpretation of who they are or that people survive bad interpretations of God?” It’s [...]
The post Surviving God – Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw appeared first on Life Is Story.
In July 2018, Nia Chiaramonte came out at transgender to her wife, Katie, after years of marriage and five children. It sounds like a marriage death knell, doesn’t it? How does one remain married to [...]
The post Embracing Queer Family – Nia and Katie Chiaramonte appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2012, fresh out of seminary, I—a white man speaking zero Mandarin—took the position of youth pastor at a Chinese Church. At the time, I knew nothing about Chinese culture, little about Asian-American Christianity (did [...]
The post Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China – Glen L. Thompson appeared first on Life Is Story.
They say we are trash people. White trash. That’s the opening to Cedar Monroe’s memoir/study of how white supremacy and capitalism has harmed poor white rural America—all while convincing them it is their savior. Monroe [...]
The post Trash: A Poor White Story – Cedar Monroe appeared first on Life Is Story.
In the introduction to Everything Good About God is True, Bruce Chow-Reyes writes that “We can no longer abdicate the Chrisian story to hate, violence, and oppression. Those of us who occupy this more loving, [...]
The post Everything Good About God is True – Bruce Chow-Reyes appeared first on Life Is Story.
Several years ago, I interviewed Christian author Jerry Jenkins about a novel he wrote and he told me the story about a gang member he interviewed for the book who gave his life to Christ [...]
The post Forged: Following Jesus into a New Kind of Family – TC Moore appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s no secret that the subject of missionary work is growing increasingly controversial in discussions of religion, cultural identity, and national sovereignty. Much has been said about the wrong turns and misguided efforts of Westerners [...]
The post What Are You Doing To Do? – Eric Wilson and Matt Bronleewe appeared first on Life Is Story.
I grew up in the Church of Christ, but never really got into its history. The independent nature of the denomination (to the point some still wince at it being called that) means that the [...]
The post Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America – Richard T. Hughes and James L. Gorman appeared first on Life Is Story.
Little House on the Prairie remains a cultural phenomenon ninety years after their publication and fifty years after the popular television show loosely based on the books. Over sixty million copies have been sold and [...]
The post A Prairie Faith: The Religious Life of Laura Ingalls Wilder – John J. Fry appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2020, I was living in Philadelphia for a few months just down the road from St. Edwards church, an abandoned cathedral that, in 1995 housed the homeless and is where Shane Claiborne and his [...]
The post Gone for Good: Navigating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition – ed. Mark Elsdon appeared first on Life Is Story.
Andy Serkis almost made me go to the wrong college. As a middle-schooler, I was entranced with Lord of the Rings. I came to the series backward, first watching the movies and then reading the [...]
The post Gollum: How We Made Movie Magic – Andy Serkis appeared first on Life Is Story.
Wisdom from the witch of Endor? Growing up in a conservative denomination, the story of Saul consulting a witch in order to get the advice of a dead Samuel was—well, it was never really spoken [...]
The post Wisdom from the Witch of Endor – Tikva Frymer-Kensky appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 1992, a Baptist pastor named Gary Chapman published a book called The Five Love Languages and a revolution was born. In the thirty years since, the concept of a “love language” has become almost [...]
The post Loving Adopted Children Well – Gary Chapman and Laurel Shaler appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this unique book, Sylvie Vanhoozer explores the church calendar and the seasons of the year through the lens of santons, small clay figures that represent people bringing gifts to baby Jesus based on their [...]
The post The Art of Living in Season: A Year of Reflections for Everyday Saints – Sylvie Vanhoozer appeared first on Life Is Story.
There are lots of great books on the market about pastoral ministry, and about how ministry families can deal with the unique pressures that come with always being on call and in the spotlight. This [...]
The post Pastors’ Wives Tell All: Navigating Real Church Life with Honesty and Humor – Stephanie Gilbert, Jessica Taylor, and Jenna Allen appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book originally appealed to me because of the beautiful cover, and I found the book relaxing, comforting, and encouraging. Jodie H. Grubbs shares her personal story of driving herself to burnout and then learning [...]
The post Live Slowly: A Gentle Invitation to Exhale – Jodie H. Grubbs appeared first on Life Is Story.
This unique memoir combines the author’s love of birding with her reflections on grief and loss, and even though it sounds like an incredibly niche book, it deals with universal topics in a way that [...]
The post Looking Up: A Birder’s Guide to Hope Through Grief – Courtney Ellis appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book flows from the authors’ experience counseling church leaders whose congregations are going through periods of organizational change. Kevin G. Ford and Jim Singleton have consulted with a great variety of churches in many [...]
The post Attentive Church Leadership: Listening and Leading in a World We’ve Never Known – Kevin G. Ford and Jim Singleton appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Sexpectations, Carol Tanksley shares advice as both a doctor and a Christian minister, helping Christians rethink their stories about sex, relationships, and God to work towards greater holiness and wholeness. She is honest about [...]
The post Sexpectations: Reframing Your Good and Not-So-Good Stories about God, Love, and Relationships – Carol Tanksley MD, DMin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This thoughtful, well-written book explores how lawyers can integrate their faith with their work. Richard F. Cochran Jr. writes from the perspective of an attorney and a law school professor, and he shows that even [...]
The post The Servant Lawyer: Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice – Richard F. Cochran Jr. appeared first on Life Is Story.
I grew up in a small, rural town in Indiana. I remember once my mom saying that she thought it was a small town without much racism when she was growing up: “We all loved [...]
The post Beyond Ethnic Loneliness – Prasanta Verma appeared first on Life Is Story.
This new addition to the 5 Love Languages series focuses on adoptive families, with insights for how parents can better understand their adopted children’s needs and show clear expressions of love. This book is [...]
The post Loving Adopted Children Well: A 5 Love Languages® Approach – Gary Chapman and Laurel Shaler appeared first on Life Is Story.
Many Christians struggle with perfectionism in their faith, and it can be especially difficult for people to recognize this form of perfectionism as what it really is. After all, we need to strive for holiness, [...]
The post Peace over Perfection: Enjoying a Good God When You Feel You’re Never Good Enough – Faith Chang appeared first on Life Is Story.
This thoughtful book explores how Christians can maintain a gentle, soft spirit even when they are suffering in ways that would normally lead to harshness, cynicism, and resentment. Charaia Rush reflects on her own experiences, [...]
The post Courageously Soft: Daring to Keep a Tender Heart in a Tough World – Charaia Rush appeared first on Life Is Story.
This graphic novel adaptation of the bestselling memoir The Hiding Place is incredibly powerful. It will introduce a new generation to Corrie ten Boom’s powerful testimony of faith, perseverance, and resistance against evil, and the [...]
The post The Hiding Place: A Graphic Novel – Corrie ten Boom, Elizabeth Sherrill, John Sherrill, Mario DeMatteo, and Ismael Castro appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book addresses a variety of timely topics related to how Christians can think about the church’s role in a swiftly changing, secularizing society. Stephen McAlpine encourages his readers to consider ways that the church [...]
The post Futureproof: How to Live for Jesus in a Culture That Keeps on Changing – Stephen McAlpine appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this brief book, Helen Thorne shares themed lists of prayer prompts that people can use to pray for suffering loved ones. Each list focuses on a different theme, such as praying for your friend [...]
The post 5 Things to Pray for a Suffering Friend: Prayers That Change Things for Friends or Family Who Are Walking through Trials – Helen Thorne appeared first on Life Is Story.
This powerful book explores what forgiveness can look like for trauma survivors, without unhealthy pressures to prematurely forgive or return to an abusive situation. Susannah Griffith shares a biblical theology of forgiveness alongside her personal [...]
The post Forgiveness after Trauma: A Path to Find Healing and Empowerment – Susannah Griffith appeared first on Life Is Story.
Brian Zahnd explores the crucifixion of Christ in a multifaceted way in this book, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of the cross. Zahnd writes about theological topics related to what Jesus accomplished [...]
The post The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross – Brian Zahnd appeared first on Life Is Story.
JRR Tolkien was not only a writer, but he loved to illustrate as well. From 1973-1979 (with a gap in 1975), a series of calendars were published that used Tolkien’s paintings, drawings, and designs. 1973 [...]
The post Pictures – JRR Tolkien appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Road Goes Ever On was published in 1968, during JRR Tolkien’s lifetime, in collaboration with composer Donald Swann. It’s quite the testament to Tolkien’s popularity that people wanted to hear the songs come to [...]
The post The Road Goes Ever On – JRR Tolkien and Donald Swann appeared first on Life Is Story.
The one thing that has kept me in the faith is deconstructing from the brand of Christianity in which I was raised and trained and, amid the smoke and ashes, finding it but one cramped [...]
The post A Faith of Many Rooms – Debie Thomas appeared first on Life Is Story.
Holy Runaways is a memoir of and blueprint for reconstructing a new and vibrant faith after walking away from toxic religion. Specifically, it is a handbook that recounts Matthias Roberts journey away from his evangelical [...]
The post Holy Runaways – Matthias Roberts appeared first on Life Is Story.
One of the things that I have attempted to do this is read books that are challenging to the status quo of my beliefs. Raised in evangelicalism, I was taught to question everything (unless it [...]
The post God’s Monsters – Esther Hamori appeared first on Life Is Story.
What could possibly be said about JRR Tolkien that has not already been said? In the decades since Tolkien’s death, he has become an enduring figure in literature. Christopher Tolkien heavily expanded his father’s legacy [...]
The post JRR Tolkien: Christian Maker of Middle-earth – Jeremy Johnston appeared first on Life Is Story.
I knew going into this book that it would present me with some challenging viewpoints. I grew up within fundamentalist purity culture and for all that it got wrong and for all the convictions that [...]
The post Beyond Shame – Matthias Roberts appeared first on Life Is Story.
“Good trouble” was the phase coined by the late civil rights activist John Lewis to describe the work of activism. It’s work that’ll get you into trouble with the principalities and powers of the age, [...]
The post Troubling the Water – Ben McBride appeared first on Life Is Story.
Books about productivity are a dime a dozen in the publishing world, and they typically cover a lot of the same advice. This book stands out as a particularly good option for Christians, since the [...]
The post Make the Most of Your Productivity: A Guide to Honoring God with Your Time – Ana Ávila appeared first on Life Is Story.
This powerful biography tells the story of how Everett Swanson founded the ministry that is now known as Compassion International. The biography begins with his childhood and teen years, and portrays his experiences with faith [...]
The post What Are You Going to Do?: The Inspiring Story of Everett Swanson and the Founding of Compassion International – Eric Wilson and Matt Bronleewe appeared first on Life Is Story.
Before he was a fantasy author, JRR Tolkien was a philologist. And I mean, before in the sense of prior to and in the sense of preceding in importance. In a very real way, it [...]
The post A Secret Vice – JRR Tolkien (ed. Dimtra Fimi and Andrew Wiggins) appeared first on Life Is Story.
Good friendships are hard to find. They’re even harder to keep. In this short volume, using the book of Philemon, Bryan Loritts walks readers through the value of Enduring Friendship. Loritts begins with his own [...]
The post Enduring Friendship – Bryan Loritts appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this accessible, engaging guide to the Bible, Susan C. Lim shares her personal testimony of coming to know Jesus and the story of her “second confession,” when after years of faithful Christian living, she [...]
The post Light of the Word: How Knowing the History of the Bible Illuminates Our Faith – Susan C. Lim appeared first on Life Is Story.
It is no exaggeration to say this book will save lives. Using practical wisdom from her own journey of parenting and advocacy, Jamie Bruesehoff offers readers a personal, practical, and holy perspective on raising and [...]
The post Raising Kids Beyond the Binary: Celebrating God’s Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children – Jamie Bruesehoff appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this spiritual memoir, Mike Cosper reflects on key experiences and turning points in his life that took him to thrilling highs and crushing lows. Over recent years, Cosper has spoken and written a great [...]
The post Land of My Sojourn: The Landscape of a Faith Lost and Found – Mike Cosper appeared first on Life Is Story.
Mike Cosper first came to my attention a while back when he hosted the podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, a podcast documentary chronicling what the title suggests, offering specific condemnations of founding [...]
The post Land of My Sojourn – Mike Cosper appeared first on Life Is Story.
Daniel Reinhardt is a former police officer, and because of his vocational experience, he has an especially helpful perspective. A lot of people have big opinions about this topic without really understanding the issues at [...]
The post Rethinking the Police: An Officer’s Confession and the Pathway to Reform – Daniel Reinhardt appeared first on Life Is Story.
How Ableism Fuels Racism explores how racism and disability justice issues intersect and intertwine, particularly within the American church. Lamar Hardwick writes from his perspective as an autistic Black pastor, and his recent battles with [...]
The post How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church – Lamar Hardwick appeared first on Life Is Story.
This unique, thoughtful book explores the significance of metaphors for the human life. Joy Marie Clarkson explains that the way we think and talk about ourselves shapes our expectations and affects how we live. For [...]
The post You Are a Tree: And Other Metaphors to Nourish Life, Thought, and Prayer – Joy Marie Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Clint Watkins shares important spiritual truths about lament in this book, alongside his personal story of losing his firstborn child due to a tragic prenatal diagnosis. He reflects on how difficult it was for him [...]
The post Just Be Honest: How to Worship through Tears and Pray without Pretending – Clint Watkins appeared first on Life Is Story.
This Lent devotional explores the story of Jesus’s transfiguration. As Tim Chester explains at the beginning of the book, many Christians aren’t very familiar with the gospel accounts of the Transfiguration or don’t know what [...]
The post Our Radiant Redeemer: Lent Devotions on the Transfiguration of Jesus – Tim Chester appeared first on Life Is Story.
Brian Zahnd begins The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross with the words “I dare to write about God, which is, admittedly, an audacious undertaking.” This sentence, I think, encapsules the [...]
The post The Wood Between the Worlds: A Poetic Theology of the Cross – Brian Zahnd appeared first on Life Is Story.
This workbook connects with The Wisdom of Your Body by the same author. As Hillary McBride explains in the introduction, although she designed this as a practical supplement to her previous book, it also works [...]
The post Practices for Embodied Living: Experiencing the Wisdom of Your Body – Hillary L. McBride, PhD appeared first on Life Is Story.
This unique book shares theological insights and practical ideas for how churches can empower people with disabilities to take leadership roles in the church. The authors reflect on how well-meaning disability ministries often end up [...]
The post Disabling Leadership: A Practical Theology for the Broken Body of Christ – Andrew T. Draper, Jody Michele, and Andrea Mae appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is one of the best books that I have read about body image issues. Heather Creekmore carefully analyzes societal messages and skewed ideas in the church, delves deep into Scripture, and shares nuanced perspectives [...]
The post The 40-Day Body Image Workbook: Hope for Christian Women Who’ve Tried Everything – Heather Creekmore appeared first on Life Is Story.
This 30-day devotional offers encouragement for Christian mothers as they deal with life’s challenges. Sarah Walton wrote this with her mother, Linda Green, and they each cover different topics from their own perspectives, speaking to [...]
The post He Gives More Grace: 30 Hope-Filled Reflections for the Ups and Downs of Motherhood – Sarah Walton and Linda Green appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Story of Abortion in America explores the presence of abortion throughout American history in great and nuanced detail, bringing hidden histories to light, introducing colorful characters, and showing how people’s attitudes and beliefs about [...]
The post The Story of Abortion in America: A Street-Level History, 1652–2022 – Marvin Olasky and Leah Savas appeared first on Life Is Story.
Courtney Reissig explains that when she experienced her darkest moments, she found the psalms uniquely helpful. When she was dealing with pregnancy complications, fearing her own death and the death of her unborn child, the [...]
The post Teach Me To Feel: Worshiping Through the Psalms in Every Season of Life – Courtney Reissig appeared first on Life Is Story.
Why would Africa’s children turn to the God of their oppressors for liberation? In Black Theology and Black Faith, Dr. Noel Leo Erskine—professor of theology and ethics at Candler School of Theology—outlines the historic development [...]
The post Black Theology and Black Faith – Noel Leo Erskine appeared first on Life Is Story.
It is the year of our Lord 2024 and there is still somehow a debate over the influence, impact, and importance of Jesus’s female disciples. Holly J. Carey’s Women Who Do makes a pretty strong [...]
The post Women Who Do – Holly Carey appeared first on Life Is Story.
I don’t think I’ve sobbed so hard over a book before. Robert Hubbard’s Scenes with My Son is a touching, raw, reflective memoir of the life of Robert’s son, Auggie, who died from suicide at [...]
The post Scenes with My Son – Robert Hubbard appeared first on Life Is Story.
Sara Watterson’s This Dreamer holds the distinction of being the first independently published novel to win a Christy Award. That alone is a huge accomplishment. While the big publishers have the right to just pay [...]
The post This Dreamer (The Chronicles of the Marked #1) – Sara Watterson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Churches, Cultures, and Leadership was originally published in 2011 by InterVarsity Press and authors Mark Lau Branson and Juan F. Martinez. The authors are both professors at Fuller Theological Seminary and have experience in cross-cultural [...]
The post Churches, Cultures, and Leadership – Mark Lau Branson and Juan Martinez appeared first on Life Is Story.
Christian discipleship is commonly considered to be a personal spiritual practice. Discipleship means reading the Bible and perhaps memorizing parts of it. It means praying more and maybe writing in a journal. It means the [...]
The post Just Discipleship – Michael Rhodes appeared first on Life Is Story.
We Become What We Normalize. That sentence—the title of David Dark’s latest think piece—is poignant and demands self-reflection. Not “we become what we do” or “we come what we think” but “we become what we [...]
The post We Become What We Normalize – David Dark appeared first on Life Is Story.
In seminary, there was this saying that 10% of the people do 90% of the work. In reality, that might be closed to 5/95. Now, volunteering and doing the work necessary to keep a church [...]
The post Centering Discipleship – EK Strawser appeared first on Life Is Story.
Fifteen years ago, the Scottish Journal of Theology called Beyond Homelessness: Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement a “remarkable, important, and timely book.” This fifteenth anniversary edition remains remarkable, important, and—perhaps to our shame—even [...]
The post Beyond Homelessness (15th Anniversary Edition) – Steven Bouma-Prediger and Brian J. Walsh appeared first on Life Is Story.
Small groups have always been the key to Christian discipleship. The Sunday morning service is a mostly collective celebration, but the emphasis in many mid-size to larger churches when it comes to discipleship is the [...]
The post Intergenerational Christian Formation (2nd Ed) – Holly Catterton Allen, Christine Lawton, and Cory L. Seibel appeared first on Life Is Story.
Breaking Bread: The Emergence of Eucharist and Agape in Early Christian Communities is one of those highly technical and precise works of history and theology that seemingly has little practical value to the majority of [...]
The post Breaking Bread – Alastair Stewart appeared first on Life Is Story.
The interpretation of the Creation narrative is one of the most contentious and divisive subjects within Christianity. Fundamentalist Young Earth Creationists (YEC) stand on one extreme of the platform, attempting to interpret every element of [...]
The post Recruiting the Ancients for the Creation Debate – Andrew J. Brown appeared first on Life Is Story.
There are a lot of books on racial justice, both from a Christian and secular perspective. For a time, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020, the New York Times best-seller’s [...]
The post Healing Conversations on Race – Veola Vasquez, Joshua Knabb, Charles Lee-Johnson, and Krystal Hays appeared first on Life Is Story.
As I write this review, the United Nations Climate Change Conference is meeting in Dubai to discuss what action is necessary to curtail human influence on climate change. The news coming from the conference is [...]
The post So We and Our Children May Live – Sarah Augustine and Sheri Hostetler appeared first on Life Is Story.
A Quiet Mind to Suffer With is a haunting memoir/theological reflection the explores the intersection of mental illness, trauma, and faith. John Andrew Bryant is in recovery. Just a few years before writing this book, [...]
The post A Quiet Mind to Suffer With – John Andrew Bryant appeared first on Life Is Story.
John Goldingay is a scholar whom I’ve come to describe as approachably academic in style. Goldingay does not sacrifice academic rigor for accessibility, but rather manages to blend the two together to make what other [...]
The post Proverbs: Commentary for Christian Formation – John Goldingay appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Jesus Handbook is a historical-critical look at the historical Jesus, his world, and the impact of his life. Originally published in German in 2017, this comprehensive and wide-ranging exploration of the person of Jesus [...]
The post The Jesus Handbook – edited by Jens Schroter and Christine Jacobi appeared first on Life Is Story.
In the field of New Testament interpretation, Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings: The Use of the Old Testament in the New stands alone. Literally and figuratively. Literally because, at over 1000 pages, this is [...]
The post Israel’s Scriptures in Early Christian Writings – Edited by Mattias Henze and David Lincicum appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have a confession: Growing up I read every single Left Behind book. I don’t just mean the 12 books in the original series. Or the 3 prequels and 1 sequel. Or the 40 middle [...]
The post The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism – Daniel Hummel appeared first on Life Is Story.
Have you…like…been online recently? Read the comments of a news article? Had an uncomfortable conversation with that one very opinionated coworker? Maybe you are that one very opinionated coworker? We live in polarizing times. A [...]
The post Loving Disagreement – Kathy Khang and Matt Mikalatos appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s a classic book by Mark Noll called The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that beings with “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” When it [...]
The post The Evangelical Imagination – Karen Swallow Prior appeared first on Life Is Story.
Skye Jethani’s “What if Jesus was Serious?” books are sort of like blog posts being printed out and bound in book form. And I mean that as a compliment. In fact, I wonder if the [...]
The post What If Jesus Was Serious About Heaven – Skye Jethani appeared first on Life Is Story.
Wake Up to Wonder is a collection of twenty-two devotional essays with practical suggestions—the author calls them “invitations”—to help readers become more in tune with the amazing things that surround them. It’s an eclectic work, [...]
The post Wake Up to Wonder – Karen Wright Marsh appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s an image that stands out to me when I think of how Scripture has been weaponized and misused in American politics: It’s then-President Donald Trump, stern-faced, holding a Bible in front of St. John’s [...]
The post The Ballot and the Bible – Kaitlyn Schiess appeared first on Life Is Story.
Growing up in an evangelical church, the word “ritual” was almost a curse word. It was identified with old, dead religion where people did what they did not because they really felt it but because [...]
The post Meaning in the Moment – Amy F. David Abdallah appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve had this book for several months and not written a review of it because I kept waiting to feel like I could write something that could do justice to how transformative this book has [...]
The post Jesus, Jubilee, and the Politics of God’s Reign – Christian T. Collins Winn appeared first on Life Is Story.
I must admit that before bell hooks died in December of 2021, the sum of my knowledge about her was that she eschewed the use of capital letters in her nom de plume and that [...]
The post bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision – Nadra Nittle appeared first on Life Is Story.
What interested me the most with In Church as it is in Heaven was the subtitle: Cultivating a Multiethnic Kingdom Culture. I thought that phrase was interesting since, in my experience, many churches desire diversity, [...]
The post In Church as it is in Heaven – Jamaal Williams and Timothy Paul Jones appeared first on Life Is Story.
COVID changed everything. It didn’t just expose the vulnerability of humanity despite all our technologies or the inadequacies of some health care and governmental systems, it disrupted us in our very souls. From the perspective [...]
The post From Pandemic to Renewal – Chris Rice appeared first on Life Is Story.
Though the furor seems to have died down in the current cultural moment, there was a time just a few years ago when the removal and replacement (or even just contextualization) of statues honoring Confederate [...]
The post All God’s Children – Terence Lester appeared first on Life Is Story.
What Makes You Bloom is a shocking affront to my conservative evangelical upbringing….and that’s okay. Every time I think I’ve deconstructed to a place of progressivism, I meet someone like Kevin Garcia who reminds me [...]
The post What Makes You Bloom – Kevin Garcia appeared first on Life Is Story.
The late Michael Green was a British evangelist and theologian whose work is even more relevant today in the United Kingdom than it was during his years of ministry. Eerdmans has been publishing his writing [...]
The post Evangelism: Learning from the Past – Michael Green appeared first on Life Is Story.
Why is it that Christians seem to be the most susceptible to conspiracy theories and wild beliefs? I mean, there is the whole thing where the central concept of our belief system is predicated on [...]
The post QAnon, Chaos, and the Cross – ed. Michael Austin and Gregory Bock appeared first on Life Is Story.
The title of What Jesus Intended: Finding True Faith in the Rubble of Religion left me a bit uncomfortable. On one hand, I absolutely believe that the name of Jesus has been co-opted for the [...]
The post What Jesus Intended – Todd Hunter appeared first on Life Is Story.
A few days before I wrote this review, the Prime Minister of Israel referenced the Old Testament in an attempt to justify his nation’s violent destruction of Gaza—an alleged attempt to root out the terrorist [...]
The post Flood and Fury – Matthew Lynch appeared first on Life Is Story.
In my experience, the boy versions of things are ALWAYS better, and this is no exception. To be fair, I never read the girls’ version of this book, which didn’t exist until I was an [...]
The post Lies Boys Believe: And the Epic Quest for Truth / A Parent’s Guide to Lies Boys Believe – Erin Davis and Jason Davis appeared first on Life Is Story.
Bruce D. Strom writes about important paradigm shifts that can help people endure suffering, sharing a combination of biblical advice, personal experiences, and touching stories from Administer Justice, the legal aid ministry he founded. He [...]
The post Persevering Power: Encouragement for When You’re Oppressed by Life – Bruce D. Strom appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book by renowned priest and author Fleming Rutledge focuses on the lesser-known liturgical season of Epiphany. Rutledge explains what Epiphany is and why it is an important part of the church calendar, saying that [...]
The post Epiphany: The Season of Glory – Fleming Rutledge appeared first on Life Is Story.
This devotional from Jackie Hill Perry involves sixty days of Scripture verses and short reflections. The Scripture selections are wide-ranging, involving verses from the Old and New Testaments, and the author includes verses from Bible [...]
The post Upon Waking: 60 Daily Reflections to Discover Ourselves and the God We Were Made For – Jackie Hill Perry appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have started reading more books about work and vocation recently, and Working from the Inside Out stands out as a particularly thoughtful and practical one. Jeff Haanen encourages Christians to recognize the importance of [...]
The post Working from the Inside Out: A Brief Guide to Inner Work That Transforms Our Outer World – Jeff Haanen appeared first on Life Is Story.
This poignant, unique book is about the sensation of longing that so many of us feel when we experience beauty. Amy Baik Lee explores this concept from multiple angles throughout the book, exploring how different [...]
The post This Homeward Ache: How Our Yearning for the Life to Come Spurs on Our Life Today – Amy Baik Lee appeared first on Life Is Story.
I had never heard of Layla Palmer before I learned about this book, but the title and cover immediately appealed to me, and I enjoyed this a lot. Coming Home will appeal to Palmer’s online [...]
The post Coming Home: A Roadmap from Fearful to Fully Alive – Layla Palmer appeared first on Life Is Story.
This new look at the ever-popular topic of C.S. Lewis’s work focuses on the critical reception his early nonfiction works and science fiction trilogy received in America. This book focuses on his career prior to [...]
The post C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935–1947 – Mark A. Noll appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book came out months ago, and I should have already reviewed it, but it took me forever to get through it. This is partly due to personal matters, but also because the book is [...]
The post The Meaning of Singleness: Retrieving an Eschatological Vision for the Contemporary Church – Danielle Treweek appeared first on Life Is Story.
Many people criticize the liberal arts for being elitist, outdated, unmarketable, and a waste of time. In this refreshing book, a number of different academics reflect on how the humanities liberate people to know their [...]
The post The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education – Jeffrey Bilbro, Jessica Hooten Wilson, and David Henreckson (Editors) appeared first on Life Is Story.
If you’re white, the past few years have exposed the culture of violence that seems inherent in police culture. If you’re not white, then you’ve known that for generations. Whether we’re talking about the blatant [...]
The post Rethinking the Police – Daniel Reinhardt appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this collection of poems and essays, Katy Bowser Hutson shares insights from her journey with cancer. She wrote the majority of these poems while she was battling breast cancer, and she has written the [...]
The post Now I Lay Me Down to Fight: A Poet Writes Her Way Through Cancer – Katy Bowser Hutson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Sacred Belonging is a mystical, introspective devotional for people who don’t like devotionals. I’ve pretty much sworn off reading or utilizing most devotionals. They can be done well, but they’re overdone. Their brevity and compartmentalization [...]
The post Sacred Belonging – Kat Armas appeared first on Life Is Story.
Stop me if you’ve heard this story before: Baylor University is accused of covering up sexual misconduct amongst powerful people in their ranks. Yeah, yeah, you’re thinking, we all know about that. We know that [...]
The post Remembering Antonia Teixeira – Mikeal Parsons and Joao Chaves appeared first on Life Is Story.
A couple semesters ago, I took a class in creating multicultural unity in the church as part of my Doctor of Ministry studies. With all due respect to my professors and the materials used in [...]
The post The Offensive Church – Bryan Loritts appeared first on Life Is Story.
I grew up proudly evangelical. Was trained at evangelical seminaries. Pastored at an evangelical church. But as time went on and the political underbelly of evangelicalism became more apparent to me, I was left with [...]
The post The Other Evangelicals – Isaac Sharp appeared first on Life Is Story.
I was first introduced to Karen Gonzalez with her 2019 book from Herald Press entitled The God Who Sees, a part-memoir, part-immigration policy reform, part-biblical reflection that began with the words “Will we live out [...]
The post Beyond Welcome – Karen Gonzalez appeared first on Life Is Story.
I read this book a few weeks ago, but as I sit down to write this review rockets are flying between Israel and Hamas and over two million people—many of them children—sit on the brink [...]
The post What Would Jesus See: Ways of Looking at a Disorienting World appeared first on Life Is Story.
Job’s friends get a bad rap. Sure, they offer bad advice—but it was sincere, popular, and compassionate advice. And before they do all of that? They come and simply sit with him in the literal [...]
The post Can You Just Sit with Me – Natasha Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
I worked my way into the world of Tolkien backwards from how you might expect. It was the Peter Jackson movies, not the books, that first grabbed my attention and introduced me to this vast [...]
The post Tolkien Dogmatics – Austin M. Freeman appeared first on Life Is Story.
Fake news is a tale as old as time, but the invention of the Internet and the ability to spread believable (or even unbelievable but emotionally compelling or bias satisfying) misinformation has caused it to [...]
The post Faith and Fake News – Rachel Wightman appeared first on Life Is Story.
New International Commentaries are the one commentary set of which I own every volume and it has become my constant companion in biblical exegesis and sermon preparation. Even when I don’t agree with the conclusions, [...]
The post The Books of Joel, Obadiah, and Jonah (NICOT) – James Nogalski appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this devotional book, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth explores six classic Christmas carols, reflecting on what they teach us about Jesus, the gospel, and our lives as Christians. Because the carols she chose encompass so many [...]
The post Born a Child and Yet a King: The Gospel in the Carols: A 31-Day Advent Devotional – Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth appeared first on Life Is Story.
This Advent devotional features twenty-four readings based on Christmas talks that the renowned Bible teacher R. C. Sproul gave during his lifetime. His wife helped with the editing process for this book, and the devotions [...]
The post The Advent of Glory: 24 Devotions for Christmas – R. C. Sproul appeared first on Life Is Story.
Friendship is a sadly neglected topic in Western society in general, and in the church. In this book, Rebecca McLaughlin encourages people to pursue friendship and hold it in high regard, and she shares personal [...]
The post No Greater Love: A Biblical Vision for Friendship – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This brief evangelistic booklet is for people who aren’t very familiar with the biblical Christmas story, and just have a cultural concept of it. Carl Laferton explains that there’s a lot that doesn’t show up [...]
The post Christmas Uncut: What Really Happened and Why It Really Matters – Carl Laferton appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have read three books this year about women and work, and this one is my favorite. Chelsea Patterson Sobolik shares some of her personal journey throughout this book, and she explores important topics and [...]
The post Called to Cultivate: A Gospel Vision for Women and Work – Chelsea Patterson Sobolik appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I was a child, I memorized a lot of Scripture, and I was very good at it! I enjoyed being talented at something for a change, but as my life got busier in high [...]
The post Memorizing Scripture: The Basics, Blessings, and Benefits of Meditating on God’s Word – Glenna Marshall appeared first on Life Is Story.
This beautiful book features thirty daily readings of classic hymns, prose writings, and poems about the birth of Christ. Literary expert Leland Ryken chose each of these with an eye to their enduring value, literary [...]
The post Journey to Bethlehem: A Treasury of Classic Christmas Devotionals – Leland Ryken appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this new addition to the Love Your Church series, Steve Robinson addresses some theological ideas and practical considerations for how Christians should serve the church. He encourages believers to recognize that even though it’s [...]
The post Serve: Loving Your Church with Your Heart, Time and Gifts – Steve Robinson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Adam Ramsey shares helpful insights about the importance of accepting when and where you are in life, making the most of your present moment instead of constantly looking for the next thing and fighting your [...]
The post Faithfully Present: Embracing the Limits of Where and When God Has You – Adam Ramsey appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this raw, personal book, Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines reflect on difficult times they have weathered together, sharing insights about how they have found hard-won solace during times of suffering. Amber reflects on [...]
The post The Deep Down Things: Practices for Growing Hope in Times of Despair – Amber C. Haines and Seth Haines appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this guide to 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Ligon Duncan draws out different ideas and applications to help people better understand these books of the Bible and how they apply to our lives. Duncan moves [...]
The post 1 & 2 Thessalonians For You – Ligon Duncan appeared first on Life Is Story.
This short, highly readable book shares encouragement for women who are working professional jobs and want to better understand the role between their vocational work and their relationship with God. As the author reflects at [...]
The post Women, Work, and Calling: Step into Your Place in God’s World – Joanna Meyer appeared first on Life Is Story.
More and more, I’m seeing people who grew up in the church walk away from it. And I don’t mean those who attended occasionally or casually, but those who were all in, every service, knew [...]
The post When Religion Hurts You – Laura Anderson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Terra McDaniel writes about how essential lament is in the Christian life, helping her readers understand how they can truly grieve their losses without papering over their pain through platitudes or spiritual bypassing. She writes [...]
The post Hopeful Lament: Tending Our Grief Through Spiritual Practices – Terra McDaniel appeared first on Life Is Story.
Pastor Dai Hankey shares spiritual reflections and personal stories in this book, encouraging Christians who feel weary and are struggling to endure. He writes about his experience with ministry burnout and spiritual exhaustion, and he [...]
The post Hopeward: Gospel Grace for Weary Souls – Dai Hankey appeared first on Life Is Story.
Pastor Ike Miller challenges his readers to think of the benefits their emotional baggage can bring to their adult lives, rather than just focusing on the harmful elements. He shares his personal story throughout this [...]
The post Good Baggage: How Your Difficult Childhood Prepared You for Healthy Relationships – Ike Miller appeared first on Life Is Story.
This second volume completes the authorized biography of Elisabeth Elliot, covering her life from 1963 to her death. I enjoyed the first book when it came out a few years ago, and I enjoyed this [...]
The post Being Elisabeth Elliot: The Authorized Biography: Elisabeth’s Later Years – Ellen Vaughn appeared first on Life Is Story.
Katie Schnack writes with humor and heart about challenges she has faced, showing that it’s possible to admit that you’re not fine and still find hope, humor, and light in difficult circumstances. Parts of the [...]
The post Everything Is (Not) Fine: Finding Strength When Life Gets Annoyingly Difficult – Katie Schnack appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this beautifully written book, Natasha Smith shares about her own struggles with grief and loss, and she shares wisdom for people walking through similar situations. Each chapter begins with a personal story, and then [...]
The post Can You Just Sit with Me?: Healthy Grieving for the Losses of Life – Natasha Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
I just need to stop reading Alistair Begg. This is my own fault. My theological leanings have shifted and where I once found myself in agreement with Begg’s theology and methodology, now I do not. [...]
The post A Christian Manifesto – Alastair Begg appeared first on Life Is Story.
Another book on racial reconciliation? Well…sort of. Gracism: The Act of Inclusion was originally released in 2007 and a lot has happened since then. This revised and updated edition takes all of that into account [...]
The post Gracism: The Art of Inclusion – David Anderson with David Heiliger appeared first on Life Is Story.
If you were asked to summarize your religion in one sentence, how would you do it? That’s the underlying premise of World Religions in Seven Sentences by Douglas Groothius. Using single-sentence premises, Groothius offers readers [...]
The post World Religions in Seven Sentences – Douglas Groothius appeared first on Life Is Story.
In the past few years, I’ve begun to develop a personal ecclesiology of being what I call a “faithful presence.” In the community I live in, there is very little church presence with only two [...]
The post Faithfully Present – Adam Ramsey appeared first on Life Is Story.
This memoir is about the author’s experience contorting herself into the demands of hyper-conservative Christianity, both before and after her marriage to Joshua Harris, the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. This is one of [...]
The post The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife – Shannon Harris appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book about grief and loss comes from the perspective of a husband and wife team who have suffered together and ministered together. Chuck Elliot is a pastor, and Ashley Elliot is a licensed counselor. [...]
The post I Used to Be ___: How to Navigate Large and Small Losses in Life and Find Your Path Forward – Chuck Elliot and Ashley Elliot appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ten years ago, I read my first book about the negative impacts of digital technology, and I never looked back. I have read so many books about tech, from short self-help titles to long academic [...]
The post Digital Liturgies: Rediscovering Christian Wisdom in an Online Age – Samuel D. James appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Emily Hunter McGowin writes about the origins of Christmas and reflects on profound, meaningful themes from Christ’s coming. I enjoyed her eloquent writing and thoughtful reflections, and even though I have read [...]
The post Christmas: The Season of Life and Light – Emily Hunter McGowin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This thoughtful, nuanced guide to a contentious topic will appeal to Christian men and some women who want to rethink masculinity in light of cultural controversy. This book is pretty basic, but it covers a [...]
The post Reclaiming Masculinity: Seven Biblical Principles for Being the Man God Wants You to Be – Matt Fuller appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book features forty reflections on how people can connect their faith and work. Barry L. Rowan shares from his personal journey, explaining how even though he struggled to find purpose and meaning in his [...]
The post The Spiritual Art of Business: Connecting the Daily with the Divine – Barry L. Rowan appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this short book, Kevin DeYoung shares a refreshing, helpful take on what it really means to follow Jesus. He writes with a pastoral heart for people who feel discouraged, overwhelmed, and beaten down in [...]
The post Impossible Christianity: Why Following Jesus Does Not Mean You Have to Change the World, Be an Expert in Everything, Accept Spiritual Failure, and Feel Miserable Pretty Much All the Time – Kevin DeYoung appeared first on Life Is Story.
The History of the Hobbit is a massive work. At nearly one thousand pages and almost three inches thick, John Rateliff’s work of literary archaeology stands alone—literally and figuratively. Originally published in 2007 as a [...]
The post The History of the Hobbit – John Rateliff appeared first on Life Is Story.
Melissa L. Johnson writes about the harmful effects of modern American beauty standards, sharing sobering statistics, her personal story of overcoming anorexia, and encouragement for other women dealing with shame and feelings of inadequacy. She [...]
The post Soul-Deep Beauty: Fighting for Our True Worth in a World Demanding Flawless – Melissa L. Johnson appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this unique approach to a complex topic, Karen Swallow Prior delves into the ways that the evangelical “social imaginary” leads many Christians to confidently believe that certain ideas and practices are biblical when they [...]
The post The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis – Karen Swallow Prior appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a young adult, I was never much for nature. Outdoors was what someone experienced as they walked between the building they were in and their vehicle. I think that’s the result of outdoors = [...]
The post Collisions of Earth and Sky – Heidi Barr appeared first on Life Is Story.
Of course, I know of Beth Moore! Everybody in evangelical circles knows of Beth Moore! But truth be told, I really didn’t know that much about Beth Moore, particularly pre-2016 Beth Moore. I’m not exactly [...]
The post All My Knotted-Up Life – Beth Moore appeared first on Life Is Story.
Jon Ward was a child of the Evangelical movement, particularly of the Southern Baptist brand and even more particularly the strain surrounding Sovereign Grace Ministries and Covenant Life Church. As such, his memoir, Testimony: Inside [...]
The post Testimony – Jon Ward appeared first on Life Is Story.
Oral Roberts is probably one of the most overlooked and understudied figures in American evangelicalism. His legacy—particularly within Tulsa, Oklahoma—is as big as his personality. Not quite as irenic as Billy Graham, not quite as [...]
The post Oral Roberts and the Rise of the Prosperity Gospel – Jonathan Roots appeared first on Life Is Story.
The thesis of Paul M. Gould’s A Good and True Story is really quite simple: “Our identity is wrapped up with the story of our lives: the story we tell, the story we live in.” [...]
The post A Good and True Story – Paul M. Gould appeared first on Life Is Story.
When it comes to the work of advocacy, there’s so much to do that it can be overwhelming to know where to start or how to feel effective. I’ve watched protests and felt like I [...]
The post The Everyday Advocate – Ross Murray appeared first on Life Is Story.
The back cover of Finding Phoebe: What New Testament Women Were Really Like reads “Forget What You Think You Know About Women in the Early Church.” That’s a pretty bold claim, especially considering that different [...]
The post Finding Phoebe – Susan Hylen appeared first on Life Is Story.
Transitions. Whether you’re four or forty, transitions can be difficult. Planned on unplanned, transitions often take us from someplace stable into something unknown. Hopefully they’re good and needed, but that doesn’t make the movement any [...]
The post Recalibrate Your Life – Kenneth Boa and Jenny Abel appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I was growing up, there was this anti-drug program that advocated “Just Say No to Drugs.” Police would come into schools or churches with small amounts of various drugs, show you what they looked [...]
The post Addiction Nation – Timothy McMahan King appeared first on Life Is Story.
Resisting Apartheid America is Miguel A. De La Torre’s third and final book in the Badass Gospel trilogy. Burying White Privilege talked about how racist hierarchy has been maintained in our systems of government, economics, [...]
The post Resisting Apartheid America – Miguel A. De La Torre appeared first on Life Is Story.
Decolonizing Christianity is the second of Miguel A. de la Torre’s Badass Christianity trilogy, sandwiched between Burying White Privilege and Resisting Apartheid America. Each volume builds on the other, with Decolonizing Christianity being written—in de [...]
The post Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers – Miguel A. De La Torre appeared first on Life Is Story.
Burying White Privilege is the first of Miguel A. de la Torre’s Badass Christianity trilogy, preceding Decolonizing Christianity and Resisting Apartheid America. I had not read de la Torre before and let me tell you, [...]
The post Burying White Privilege: Resurrecting a Badass Christianity – Miguel A. De La Torre appeared first on Life Is Story.
In undergraduate school, I had to take a class on evangelism. Evangelism 101 with professors Kirk Cameron (yes, that one) and Ray Comfort. They weren’t really the professors, but it was their The Way of [...]
The post Trauma-Informed Evangelism – Charles Kiser and Elaine Health appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is not just a book you read; it’s a book that you live. Search the shelves and you’ll see a glut how-to books, living better books, finding identity books and none of them will [...]
The post Living Resistance – Kaitlin Curtice appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of this book, Dan and Anna Martin share their story about losing one of their twins shortly after birth. They share about their experiences grieving their son’s diagnosis and eventual death, and [...]
The post Near to the Broken-Hearted: The Comfort of Jesus in the Grief of Losing a Child – Dan Martin and Anna Martin with Chris Mouring appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this very accessible book, Gregg R. Allison shares insights about the Holy Spirit, helping Christians better understand this member of the Trinity and the Spirit’s work in their lives. Allison begins by writing about [...]
The post God, Gift, and Guide: Knowing the Holy Spirit – Gregg R. Allison appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book collects essays from Christian women about vocational work. Each one is about a different topic, such as the connection between work and bearing God’s image, what it means to be called, and practical [...]
The post Women and Work: Bearing God’s Image and Joining in His Mission through our Work – ed. Courtney Moore appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this parenting book, Ed Drew shares insights from the Bible and from his personal experiences, highlighting ways that parents can help their kids thrive by instilling confidence in them and helping them ground their [...]
The post Raising Confident Kids in a Confusing World: A Parent’s Guide to Grounding Identity in Christ – Ed Drew appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Valuable, Liz Carter emphasizes that even though Christians often focus on what people do for God, God loves us for who we are, not for what we do. She dismantles harmful or unhelpful ways [...]
The post Valuable: Why Your Worth Is Not Defined by How Useful You Feel – Liz Carter appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Sarah J. Hauser shares about some of her struggles and how she has found rest in her relationship with God. She writes about dealing with depression and feelings of failure as a [...]
The post All Who Are Weary: Finding True Rest By Letting Go of the Burdens You Were Never Meant to Carry – Sarah J. Hauser appeared first on Life Is Story.
Many people forget about rural areas. Most church resources assume a suburban context, and people often think that if you want to really have an impact, then you need to change the world through urban [...]
The post Pastoring Small Towns: Help and Hope for Those Ministering in Smaller Places – Ronnie Martin and Donnie Griggs appeared first on Life Is Story.
Katie Westenberg writes about the important role that memory plays in our spiritual lives, especially as we deal with so many competing claims for our attention in the modern world. She reflects on our cognitive [...]
The post But Then She Remembered: How to Give God Your Full Attention in a Distracted World – Katie Westenberg appeared first on Life Is Story.
World War II history fascinates me. I see too many similarities in today’s sentiments as what ran rampant during World War II. And with each news story, my heart breaks. I don’t want today’s society [...]
The post The Last Secret of the Secret Annex – Joop van Wijk-Voskuijl and Jeroen De Bruyn appeared first on Life Is Story.
A few months ago, I came across a 1980 debate between then-Presidential candidates Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. I was floored with how both Republican candidates spoke about the need for open borders to [...]
The post The God Who Sees – Karen Gonzalez appeared first on Life Is Story.
From 2013-2020, I served as a pastor at a primarily Asian-American church. Growing up in an almost exclusively white environment, I was not at all prepared to suddenly be working with a congregation that had [...]
The post Learning Our Names – Sabrina Chan, Linson Daniel, E Daniel De Leon, and La Thao appeared first on Life Is Story.
Every so often, a book comes along that is transformative, which moves and alters your perception of spiritual life. Under the Wings of God by Cornelius Plantinga is one such offering. Plantinga, a seasoned theologian, [...]
The post Under the Wings of God – Cornelius Plantinga appeared first on Life Is Story.
In her latest book, Join the Resistance, Michelle Ferrigno Warren rallies a call to arms for justice, equality, and societal change. Warren, a seasoned advocate and activist, leverages her years of experience and heartfelt passion [...]
The post Join the Resistance – Michelle Ferrigno Warren appeared first on Life Is Story.
Some biographies come from historians. There’s usually a theme, a particular perspective or interest, some sort of driving reason for the author’s time and talents spent in research and writing. Other biographies come from individuals [...]
The post Unruly Saint – Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and its Challenge for Our Times – D.L. Mayfield appeared first on Life Is Story.
Lysa TerKeurst has always been exhortative and inspirational. As the founder of Proverbs 31 ministries, she’s been one of those women who have been able to create a niche for themselves within a predominantly male, [...]
The post You’re Going to Make It – Lysa TerKeurst appeared first on Life Is Story.
How the Sea Came to Be is an exploration of primordial evolution. In rhyming verse, Jennifer Berne begins with a burning, volcanic earth that over millions of years cools and builds up steam that finally [...]
The post How the Sea Came to Be – Jennifer Berne and Amanda Hall appeared first on Life Is Story.
I really wanted to like this book. I read books every day. That plural, “books,” is no exaggeration. I’m always in the middle of a physical book (for my dedicated reading time), an e-book (for [...]
The post Reading for the Love of God – Jessica Hooten Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a coach and teacher, one of the biggest things I teach is that kids learn best when kids are interested in what they are learning. Put something important in a context they love and [...]
The post All About Bible Animals – Simona Piscioneri appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to put my thoughts about Touch the Earth into words. Part of that struggle has simply been time constraints in my current schedule. Part of it is that [...]
The post Touch the Earth – Drew Jackson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I think we’ve all been there. It’s those moments what Mother Teresa called “the dark night of the soul” where God’s presence simply isn’t felt. When God Seems Gone is a brief exploration, based on [...]
The post When God Seems Gone – Adam Mabry appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ever since Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ in the 1990s, a whole subgenre of apologetics has popped up with various professions using their expertise to evaluate Christianity or critique the competition. This is one [...]
The post Religion on Trial – W. Mark Lanier appeared first on Life Is Story.
Over my years in ministry, I found myself accidentally an Anabaptist. Most of this had to do with practical theology and shifting political alignments in my own personal philosophy that led to an increased emphasis [...]
The post Anabaptist Essentials – Palmer Becker appeared first on Life Is Story.
The summary attached to Feminist Prayers for My Daughter reads that the book is a “book of prayers for mothers.” While that emphasis on its intended audience does show through—Shannon K. Evans is a mother [...]
The post Feminist Prayers for My Daughter – Shannon K. Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
Whenever I think of Rich Mullins, I think of the Old Testament prophet Enoch. Scripture tells us that Enoch left this earth at a relatively early age for his day, that he walked with God [...]
The post Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven – James Bryan Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
We all know that Jesus told his followers that they should have “faith like a child,” but what does that mean? Throughout this book, Lacy Finn Borgo shares her perspective on how we can develop [...]
The post Faith Like a Child: Embracing Our Lives as Children of God – Lacy Finn Borgo appeared first on Life Is Story.
Zachary Wagner covers a dizzying array of issues in this book, unpacking the implications of evangelical purity culture on men’s internal experiences, perception of their sexuality, and relationships with women. Wagner makes space for a [...]
The post Non-Toxic Masculinity: Recovering Healthy Male Sexuality – Zachary Wagner appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Sober Spirituality, Erin Jean Warde shares her perspective as an Episcopal priest with a former alcohol problem, explaining how struggled to change her relationship with alcohol because of the drinking culture in her church [...]
The post Sober Spirituality: The Joy of a Mindful Relationship with Alcohol – Erin Jean Warde appeared first on Life Is Story.
This fascinating addition to the Crossway Short Classics series shares four sermons from Lemuel Haynes, the first African American ordained as a minister in America. This Black Puritan preacher served as a pastor and fought [...]
The post Selected Sermons – Lemuel Haynes appeared first on Life Is Story.
This addition to the Crossway Short Classics series begins with a preface from Carl R. Trueman that provides historic context for when Luther wrote this treatise. A brief biography of Luther follows, and the rest [...]
The post The Freedom of a Christian: A New Translation – Martin Luther appeared first on Life Is Story.
Tarah-Lynn Saint-Elien shares her story of processing challenging life realities and turning to God for emotional healing. She writes about how she was able to overcome lies that she believed about God and herself, and [...]
The post She Reigns: Conquering Your Triggers, Fears, and Worries With God’s Truth – Tarah-Lynn Saint-Elien appeared first on Life Is Story.
This compassionate, insightful book is about the reality of mental suffering. Alan Noble makes it clear from the beginning that this is not a memoir, but it is a deeply personal book. He shares thoughts [...]
The post On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living – Alan Noble appeared first on Life Is Story.
Near the beginning of Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice, Jessica Hooten Wilson addresses why we should read fiction, responding to arguments in some Christian circles that we [...]
The post Reading for the Love of God: How to Read as a Spiritual Practice – Jessica Hooten Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Sky is Not the Limit is visually stunning. If this book was just a series of art panels with no text, it would still be worth the cost just to appreciate Jeremie Decalf’s exploration [...]
The post The Sky is Not the Limit – Jeremie Decalf appeared first on Life Is Story.
Bear is Never Alone is the story of a Bear. He is never alone. I think we tend to take that phrase as a positive, given that loneliness and isolation are epidemic in modern society [...]
The post Bear is Never Alone – Marc Veerkamp and Jeska Verstegen appeared first on Life Is Story.
In a book called Wind: Discovering Air in Motion, the illustrations are paramount. Wind is invisible. You don’t see it, but you see what it does. Translating the effect of wind to pictures is the [...]
The post Wind: Discovering Air in Motion – Olga Fadeeva appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Miracle Seed is an incredible story. In 1963, archaeologist Yigael Yagin and his crew excavated Masada, where they found—among other things—a clay pot containing seeds of the extinct Judean date palm. The clay pot [...]
The post The Miracle Seed – Martin Lemelman appeared first on Life Is Story.
Carolyn Lacey begins this book by acknowledging how often we all, herself included, struggle to say the right thing. She reflects that when she was growing up in church, teachings about the tongue tended to [...]
The post Say the Right Thing: How Your Words Can Glorify God and Encourage Others – Carolyn Lacey appeared first on Life Is Story.
Lyndsey Medford shares her chronic illness journey in this book, writing about the ways that her body has challenged her deepest assumptions about faith, the world, and what it means to be successful. She acknowledges [...]
The post My Body and Other Crumbling Empires: Lessons for Healing in a World That Is Sick – Lyndsey Medford appeared first on Life Is Story.
This excellent book addresses an important topic in a timely, compassionate way, giving church leaders and members the information they need to better understand and support people struggling with mental health issues. The first section [...]
The post Mental Health and Your Church: A Handbook for Biblical Care – Helen Thorne and Steve Midgley appeared first on Life Is Story.
Pastor and author J.D. Greear explains the basic story of Christianity in this book, summarizing the gospel in ten words, exploring biblical teachings from Romans, and focusing on different foundational elements of faith in each [...]
The post Essential Christianity: The Heart of the Gospel in Ten Words – J.D. Greear appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve followed Eric Wilson’s career through its ups and downs ever since being hooked fifteen years ago by Field of Blood, the first in his Jerusalem’s Undead trilogy. If it has Eric Wilson’s name on [...]
The post American Leftovers – Eric Wilson, Shaun Wilson, and Heidi Wilson-Messner appeared first on Life Is Story.
This brief book isn’t a theological treatise or a memoir, but is a fellow sufferer’s reflection on important things to remember in the midst of suffering. Adam Mabry writes about the experience of feeling like [...]
The post When God Seems Gone: Finding Hope When Nothing Makes Sense – Adam Mabry appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this devotional, Adam Ramsey explores the words of Jesus. Each reading begins with a short quote and its Scripture reference, and then Ramsey unpacks its meaning and implication over a few pages. The readings [...]
The post Truly, Truly, I Say to You: Meditations on the Words of Jesus from the Gospel of John – Adam Ramsey appeared first on Life Is Story.
This in-depth look into C.S. Lewis’s later years is the final volume in a biographical trilogy, and it covers many of the themes and topics that Lewis fans find the most interesting, such as his [...]
The post The Completion of C. S. Lewis (1945–1963): From War to Joy – Harry Lee Poe appeared first on Life Is Story.
Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven originally came out in 2000, three years after Mullins died in a car accident. This new, reissued edition honors the twenty-fifth anniversary of this Christian musician’s death, and [...]
The post Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven – James Bryan Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of this book, Kia Stephens shares that when she first started talking about her father wounds, other women in all kinds of contexts would open up about their own, making her realize [...]
The post Overcoming Father Wounds: Exchanging Your Pain for God’s Perfect Love – Kia Stephens appeared first on Life Is Story.
Look at me, venturing into the nonfiction genre! For the most part, I review fiction for Life is Story. Every so often, though, I come across a nonfiction book that piques my interest, and The [...]
The post The Watchmaker’s Daughter – Larry Loftis appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve never felt so beat up and so energized by a book all at the same time. Dear Revolutionaries is Lenny Duncan’s invective epistle is a follow-up/corrective to their previous book, Dear Church. Published in [...]
The post Dear Revolutionaries – Lenny Duncan appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’m a huge fan of Tales that Tell the Truth. As the series has expanded in length, it has also expanded in depth adding board book versions, activity books, and devotionals. The Friend Who Forgives [...]
The post The Friend Who Forgives Devotional – Katy Morgan appeared first on Life Is Story.
With all the current discussion about pronouns and gender identity, it begs the question What is God’s gender? On a surface level, we might immediately say that God transcends gender, but He certainly present Himself [...]
The post Women and the Gender of God – Amy Peeler appeared first on Life Is Story.
Growing up as a conservative evangelical, I knew we were supposed to be suspicious of global warming. There were two reasons for this: First, God wouldn’t let the earth be destroyed until it was his [...]
The post Following Jesus in a Warming World – Kyle Meyaard-Schaap appeared first on Life Is Story.
One pressing question in New Testament—and particularly Pauline—literature is the relationship between early Christianity and the Roman Empire. We know from history that Rome’s initial indifference to Christianity gave way to persecution and then eventually [...]
The post The Apostle and the Empire – Cristoph Heilig appeared first on Life Is Story.
In my own pastoral life, I’ve always broken down Christian doctrine into three tiers: foundational doctrines, secondary doctrines, and preferences/opinions. Foundational doctrines are Essential Christianity. Take a doctrine away—like the Resurrection of Jesus—and you no [...]
The post Essential Christianity – JD Greear appeared first on Life Is Story.
Kingdom Conversations is a series of book published by NavPress, in partnership with MissioAlliance, that seeks to bring together the best of evangelical scholarship to talk through some of the most pressing issues of public [...]
The post Kingdom and Country (Kingdom Conversations #2) – Angie Ward appeared first on Life Is Story.
James Patterson has written a lot of crap in his career. Blowback is not one of those books. The Trump presidency and the January 6th insurrection has left the country a lot to consider when [...]
The post Blowback – James Patterson and Brendan DuBois appeared first on Life Is Story.
Is Easter Unbelievable? is a short booklet that asks four questions that everyone should ask about the Resurrection story: Did Jesus really live in history? While there isn’t much debate about this at the academic [...]
The post Is Easter Unbelievable? – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Love Your Church series is a new series from The Good Book Company and Acts 29 focusing on creating flourishing local church congregations. The Acts 29 network is currently headed by Matt Chandler, but [...]
The post Love Your Church (Welcome, Gather, Belong) – Jen Oshman, Tony Merida, Barnabas Piper appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I first posted a photo on social media of myself reading Martin Marty’s The Mystery of the Child, the response was predictable: “Let me know when you figure it out!” But the whole premise [...]
The post The Mystery of the Child – Martin Marty appeared first on Life Is Story.
The American healthcare system is broken. Whether it’s insurance being tied to employment, high deductibles, lack of access to services, refusal of coverage even if you have insurance, long wait times, or any other of [...]
The post Care: How People of Faith Can Respond to Our Broken Health System – G. Scott Morris appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Jen Oshman shares biblical teaching and practical encouragement for how Christians can make their churches more welcoming to outsiders. She shares her personal story of coming to know Christ when a teammate [...]
The post Welcome: Loving Your Church by Making Space for Everyone – Jen Oshman appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Barnabas Piper explores how Christians can experience belonging and build meaningful relationships in their local churches. He begins by sharing a story about his experience visiting a new church while suffering from [...]
The post Belong: Loving Your Church by Reflecting Christ to One Another – Barnabas Piper appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, pastor Tony Merida explains why corporate worship is so important for the Christian life. He writes about why embodied gathering is essential for the church, and goes through different elements of the [...]
The post Gather: Loving Your Church as You Celebrate Christ Together – Tony Merida appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this devotional, Tim Chester covers a variety of topics that are fundamental to the Christian faith, church life, and personal holiness. Each section includes an imaginary anecdote, a Scripture reading and explanation, comprehension questions, [...]
The post Life with Jesus: A Discipleship Course for Every Christian – Tim Chester appeared first on Life Is Story.
This beautiful devotional book features Leland Ryken’s selections of fifty historic devotional readings, along with his explanations of them. The readings are usually less than two pages long, and Ryken’s explanations are often equal in [...]
The post The Heart in Pilgrimage: A Treasury of Classic Devotionals on the Christian Life – Leland Ryken appeared first on Life Is Story.
The first time I ever really felt at home was in an online forum. The year was 2008 and I signed up to play an online game hosted by my favorite author where the winner [...]
The post IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World – Chris Stedman appeared first on Life Is Story.
On the back cover of In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies, the book lists its Library of Congress categorization: Social Science / LGBT Studies / Transgender Studies. In the conversation about gender, [...]
The post In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies – Dianna E. Anderson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Every year approximately five thousand volumes about Advent are published. I don’t know if that’s true, but it certainly feels like it. Every year, right around Advent, I find my TBR pile filled with review [...]
The post The First Advent in Palestine – Kelley Nikondeha appeared first on Life Is Story.
Hi. My name is Josh. And I used to be one of the Red State Christians. It was something I grew up in, being raised in rural Indiana where being a Democrat meant you were [...]
The post Red State Christians – Angela Denker appeared first on Life Is Story.
Martin Luther King Jr said “A riot is the language of the unheard.” Throughout history, we’ve seen how protests have turned into rioting as anger and grief over injustice have expressed themselves in very physical [...]
The post The God Who Riots – Damon Garcia appeared first on Life Is Story.
This short, highly readable apologetics resource addresses four key questions that people should ask to fully understand the Easter story and the Christian faith. These questions are about the historicity of Jesus’s life, whether or [...]
The post Is Easter Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the Resurrection Story – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve met a lot of orphaned believers in the past ten years. People who grew up in the church, usually the evangelical church, and now as adults find that they can no longer be associated [...]
The post Orphaned Believers – Sara Billups appeared first on Life Is Story.
This concise, highly readable book shares encouragement for Christian mothers who are suffering. Katie Faris shares some about her own experiences, and she includes varied examples about other things mothers might be dealing with, such [...]
The post God Is Still Good: Gospel Hope and Comfort for the Unexpected Sorrows of Motherhood – Katie Faris appeared first on Life Is Story.
This short, highly readable book is filled with encouragement for Christians who are struggling with doubt, temptation, and self-defeating thoughts. Judy Dunagan shares biblical teaching and personal stories to illustrate the freedom we can experience [...]
The post The Loudest Roar: Living in the Unshakable Victory of Christ – Judy Dunagan appeared first on Life Is Story.
This thirty-one day devotional for women is about finding peace and quietness in the midst of a fast-paced, hectic world. The author, Denise J. Hughes, writes about her own challenges with social media overuse and [...]
The post Sanctuary: Cultivating a Quiet Heart in a Noisy and Demanding World – Denise J. Hughes appeared first on Life Is Story.
I think the first NakedPastor cartoon I ever saw was one of his most famous. It’s simple. Three women on the left, a crowd of men on the right, with the caption “So ladies, thanks [...]
The post Flip It Like This – David Hayward (NakedPastor) appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve long believed in the power of telling stories. It’s one of the reasons for this website and definitely the reason why it was named Life is Story. When we think of our life as [...]
The post Between the Listening and the Telling – Mark Yaconelli appeared first on Life Is Story.
In the acknowledgements at the end of this book, Molly Phinney Baskette writes that working title of this book was God is Not an Asshole. I really wish they had kept that title. Don’t get [...]
The post How to Begin When Your World is Ending – Molly Phinney Baskette appeared first on Life Is Story.
Two years after Along Came a Spider put James Patterson on the map, he returned to the world of Alex Cross for a thriller featuring double the killers—Casanova and The Gentleman Caller. Killings are happening [...]
The post Kiss the Girls (Alex Cross #2) – James Patterson appeared first on Life Is Story.
After the success of their unscientific, fearmongering, marketing-disguised-as-research book The Day America Told the Truth, James Patterson and Peter Kim reunited for a second non-fiction title using a similar premise. The Second American Revolution reveals [...]
The post The Second American Revolution – James Patterson and Peter Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
In The Thrill of Orthodoxy, Trevin Wax argues that even though Christian denominations can vary in their opinions on secondary issues, it is vital for Christians to hold fast to the orthodox tenets of Christianity. [...]
The post The Thrill of Orthodoxy: Rediscovering the Adventure of Christian Faith – Trevin Wax appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this well-researched, carefully argued book, Michael J. Kruger takes on the thorny problem of spiritual abuse. He defines the nature of spiritual abuse, explains how and why churches often overlook it, and explores the [...]
The post Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church – Michael J. Kruger appeared first on Life Is Story.
Not seeing much success in the fiction writing department, James Patterson turned to his advertising career and non-fiction to keep his name on bookstore shelves. In 1991, he—along with advertising associate Peter Kim—published a book [...]
The post The Day America Told the Truth – James Patterson and Peter Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
Radically Whole goes through the biblical book of James, drawing out each theme and exploring important implications for our lives. At the beginning, David Gibson addresses ways that Christians have often misunderstood James, and he [...]
The post Radically Whole: Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart – David Gibson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Eric Costanzo, Daniel Yang, and Matthew Soerens begin Inalienable: How Marginalized Kingdom Voices Can Help Save the American Church with an incisive look into why the American church is in the position of needing saved. [...]
The post Inalienable – Eric Costanzo, Daniel Yang, and Matthew Soerens appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s a Christian tradition that speaks of the impassibility of God. No, that doesn’t mean that you can’t go around God on the interstate. Impassibility means that God does not experience emotional change. Augustine, Luther, [...]
The post The Emotions of God – David Lamb appeared first on Life Is Story.
When We Belong is a story about Christianity on the margins. Not on the margins of faith or of faithfulness, or on the margins of God’s love or grace, but a Christianity on the margins [...]
The post When We Belong – Rohadi Nagassar appeared first on Life Is Story.
With every adoption journey that my family has taken, people have always asked what they can do to help. My answer has always been the same: prayer and money. While Fostering Hope won’t necessarily help [...]
The post Fostering Hope – ed. Robert W. Lee appeared first on Life Is Story.
The title of A Grace Disguised is somewhat a reference to classic C.S. Lewis book, A Grief Observed. In that book, Lewis collects essays written in the wake of his wife’s death from cancer. It’s [...]
The post A Grace Disguised – Jerry Sittser appeared first on Life Is Story.
What if you did everything right and it all still fell apart? What if you believed with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and still you felt disconnected? What if you loved God and [...]
The post Gaslighted by God – Tiffany Yecke Brooks appeared first on Life Is Story.
I love to read. You might have already gathered that from the fact that I run a book review website as a hobby. I also like to learn from what I read. The best fiction [...]
The post On Reading Well – Karen Swallow Prior appeared first on Life Is Story.
Justo Gonzalez is a one of the most influential Hispanic theologians in Church history. He’s a prolific author and church historian, and his contributions to the development of Latin American theology is unparalleled. I had [...]
The post The Bible in the Early Church – Justo Gonzalez appeared first on Life Is Story.
The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind. I was in my mid-teens when I first read that scathing opening line of Mark Noll’s The Scandal of [...]
The post The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind – Mark Noll appeared first on Life Is Story.
Churches are almost famously bad at communication. We’re talking about an institution where, in 2022, the primary method of information is still the printed bulletin. The secondary method, of course, being the church sign. Churches [...]
The post Church Communications – Katie Allred appeared first on Life Is Story.
This Advent devotional features twenty-five readings that focus on God’s grace and the wonderful gifts we receive from Him. Each daily reading begins with a line or a phrase from a classic Christmas hymn, the [...]
The post Gifts of Grace: 25 Advent Devotions – Jared C. Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This moving memoir shows how one man left behind patterns of abuse and dysfunction to find life and healing on the other side. Although I had never heard of the author, this book caught my [...]
The post Exit the Cave: Embracing a Life of Courage, Creativity, and Radical Imagination – Blaine Hogan appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher share insight into how churches can help men and women flourish in ministry together while still holding to a complementarian view of gender. They argue that since [...]
The post Embracing Complementarianism: Turning Biblical Convictions into Positive Church Culture – Graham Beynon and Jane Tooher appeared first on Life Is Story.
This new installment in the God’s Word for You series focuses on the gospel of Mark, going through it verse by verse in fairly short, readable sections. This book is longer than some of the [...]
The post Mark For You – Jason Meyer appeared first on Life Is Story.
This highly readable, encouraging book offers paradigm shifts and practical advice for pursuing meaningful conversations. Heather Holleman, a professor, author, and speaker, shares stories and social science research about how essential it is for people [...]
The post The Six Conversations: Pathways to Connecting in an Age of Isolation and Incivility – Heather Holleman appeared first on Life Is Story.
There are always new books published about Jesus, and this one is ahead of the game by not claiming to say anything radical. Rebecca McLaughlin focuses on the gospel accounts about Jesus’s life, adding more [...]
The post Confronting Jesus: 9 Encounters with the Hero of the Gospels – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This brief book addresses the core things that people desire, showing how hope, peace, purpose, and confidence are central to our ideas of the good life even when we disagree about how to get there. [...]
The post The Ultimate Christmas Wishlist: What If You Could Get What You’re Really Hoping For? – Rico Tice appeared first on Life Is Story.
Melissa Zaldivar reflects on her experiences with loss in this powerful memoir, showing how profoundly her best friend’s death upended her world. Throughout the book, she draws parallels between her grief experiences and what Louisa [...]
The post What Cannot Be Lost: How Jesus Holds Us Together When Life Is Falling Apart – Melissa Zaldivar appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this powerful memoir, Tori Hope Petersen shares about her experiences growing up in an abusive, unstable home and rotating through different foster care placements. Throughout the book, she shares about her faith in God [...]
The post Fostered: One Woman’s Powerful Story of Finding Faith and Family through Foster Care – Tori Hope Petersen appeared first on Life Is Story.
When popular bloggers write books, a common critique is that each chapter seems like a blog post. Shannan Martin avoids that common problem in Start with Hello, building on her theme in a sequential way [...]
The post Start with Hello (And Other Simple Ways to Live as Neighbors) – Shannan Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This powerful true story is hard to put down. Peter Mutabazi shares about his childhood suffering from his father’s abuse, his years living on the street in his home country of Uganda, and the powerful [...]
The post Now I Am Known: How a Street Kid Turned Foster Dad Found Acceptance and True Worth – Peter Mutabazi appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Phillip Cary addresses common evangelical beliefs, showing how mantras like “let go and let God” create unnecessary stress and anxiety for people who believe them. He approaches this topic from his vantage [...]
The post Good News for Anxious Christians: 10 Practical Things You Don’t Have to Do – Phillip Cary appeared first on Life Is Story.
The metaphors of light and darkness in Scripture are not always kind to darkness. God is light, and in him is no darkness, says John. Christ lives in unapproachable light, says Timothy. We accept these [...]
The post God’s Holy Darkness – Sharei Green, Beckah Selnick, and Nikki Faison appeared first on Life Is Story.
I went through a Left Behind phase growing up. Read the adult books before the kids books. Read the prequels and sequel and non-fiction associated the Tim LaHaye School of Prophecy. Eventually even went to [...]
The post Upside-Down Apocalypse – Jeremy Duncan appeared first on Life Is Story.
Since its release in 2020, Wondrously Wounded: Theology, Disability, and the Body of Christ has become the textbook for disability theology. Let’s begin with Dr. Brock’s credentials for this book. Brian Brock is the editor-in-chief [...]
The post Wondrously Wounded – Brian Brock appeared first on Life Is Story.
There have been droves of books on antiracism, both for the general market and specifically designed for the Christian market. Silencing White Noise is the latter, written by Willie Francois III, president of the Black [...]
The post Silencing White Noise – Willie Francois III appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2019, Miroslav Volf presented the University of Birmingham’s Cadbury Lectures, speaking on the topic of the world as God’s home. That content has been reworked with Ryan McAnnally-Linz into book form and released as [...]
The post The Home of God – Miroslav Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz appeared first on Life Is Story.
I saw a photo the other day of a police officer writing a person experiencing homelessness a citation for experiencing homelessness while the tagline “SERVE AND PROTECT” was prominently emblazoned on the police cruiser in [...]
The post Grace Can Lead Us Home – Kevin Nye appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am a white, male American pastor. When I consider my academic training—B.S. in Religion, M.A. in Theological Studies, D.Min. in Ministerial Leadership—and reflect on my professors, they are almost exclusively also white, also male, [...]
The post Abuelita Faith – Kat Armas appeared first on Life Is Story.
Prayer is simultaneously the most spiritually-rich discipline and the one most facetiously offered. We’ve all been on the end of an “I’ll pray for you” where we’re pretty sure no prayer ever happened. We’ve all [...]
The post Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools – Tyler Staton appeared first on Life Is Story.
I recently enjoyed the new Katelyn Beaty book Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church, and The Call to Follow immediately appealed to me as a related read. Richard Langer [...]
The post The Call to Follow: Hearing Jesus in a Culture Obsessed with Leadership – Richard Langer and Joanne J. Jung appeared first on Life Is Story.
Even though I’m not a pastor, I still found this book refreshing. Jonathan K. Dodson is emotionally honest about the challenges that he has faced while leading his church in recent years, and he addresses [...]
The post The Unwavering Pastor: Leading the Church with Grace in Divisive Times – Jonathan K. Dodson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is filled with great practical advice for Christian parents, and the author’s unexpected death before its publication gives it even greater poignancy, especially when he talks about how little time you’ll have left [...]
The post Write It On Their Hearts: Practical Help for Discipling Your Kids – Chris Swain and Melissa Swain appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of this journal, Sophie Killingley explains that during a time when she was struggling with her mental health, she started doodling or lettering Bible verses as a way to still maintain a [...]
The post Draw Near: Your Creative Spiritual Journal – Sophie Killingley appeared first on Life Is Story.
Susie Larson writes about facing spiritual challenges and periods of hardship with faith and courage, sharing stories from her own life and delving into relevant Bible passages. Each chapter focuses on a different main theme, [...]
The post Strong in Battle: Why the Humble Will Prevail – Susie Larson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Back in 2020, I greatly enjoyed Analog Church, Jay Y. Kim’s prescient book about the importance of church gatherings and the physical elements of the Christian faith. In this follow-up book, he addresses themes from [...]
The post Analog Christian: Cultivating Contentment, Resilience, and Wisdom in the Digital Age – Jay Y. Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
This unique Advent devotional features Bette Dickinson’s beautiful art and brief daily reflections on the Nativity story from Luke. This first appealed to me because of the beautiful cover design, and every reading begins with [...]
The post Making Room in Advent: 25 Devotions for a Season of Wonder – Bette Dickinson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This encouraging book pushes back against cultural pressures to dream big dreams, achieve amazing goals, and impress everyone. Seth Lewis starts out by saying that he’s nobody you’ve ever heard of, but that saying you’re [...]
The post Dream Small: The Secret Power of the Ordinary Christian Life – Seth Lewis appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have read a vast number of books about managing life in the digital world. Technology changes so quickly that there are always new things for authors to say, but all the same, I’ve gotten [...]
The post Following Jesus in a Digital Age – Jason Thacker appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Hold that Thought, Gem Fadling encourages Christian women to recognize that they are more than their thoughts. She shares psychological information and spiritual wisdom to reframe common thought patterns, identifying them by names like [...]
The post Hold That Thought: Sorting Through the Voices in Our Heads – Gem Fadling appeared first on Life Is Story.
An updated edition from the original 2011 text, Christian Apologetics is a massive tome that comprehensively covers apologetics from a classical, evangelical perspective. Douglas Groothius divides the book into three parts: apologetic preliminaries, the case [...]
The post Christian Apologetics – Douglas Groothius appeared first on Life Is Story.
During his earthly ministry, Jesus was deeply and personally involved in the lives of the disabled. In all four Gospels, from the beginning of his ministry to the end, Jesus heals the disabled—but more importantly, [...]
The post Jesus and Disability – Chris Hulshof appeared first on Life Is Story.
The goal of a book review is to offer readers an objective overview of a book’s contents and interact with some salient portions the reviewer thinks their audience will find interesting. I’ve written this review [...]
The post My Body is Not a Prayer Request – Amy Kenny appeared first on Life Is Story.
Technology is inherently amoral. It’s a tool that empowers people and intensifies their moral abilities. People who would lie to dozens can now lie to thousands. Evil can be spread quickly, easily, and anonymously. But [...]
The post Following Jesus in A Digital Age – Jason Thacker appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s an old apologetics story, meant to get people to think critically about their concept of God that goes something like this: During a flight, a man asks his seatmate what he does for a [...]
The post Let the Light In – Colin McCartney appeared first on Life Is Story.
I read a lot. Fiction. Non-fiction. Lifeisstory.com was started an outlet for that obsession for stories—real and imagined—and how they effect and change individuals and societies. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more cognizant of [...]
The post Reading Black Books – Claude Atcho appeared first on Life Is Story.
In an era of political polarization and increasing Christian nationalism, a contingent of moderate evangelicals have decried the politicization of faith and sought out compromise, believing that unity will come only when we put choose [...]
The post Jesus Takes a Side – Jonny Rashid appeared first on Life Is Story.
Where does the church go from here? It seems like anywhere you turn, the American evangelical church is undergoing a reckoning as its abuses, racism, patriarchy, nationalism, and lust for power. People who grew up [...]
The post Next Sunday – Nancy Beach and Samantha Beach Kinley appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this unique book about grace, David Zahl encourages his readers to embrace a “low anthropology” of human nature. Although this sounds very academic, Zahl wrote this at the popular level, and he defines our [...]
The post Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself) – David Zahl appeared first on Life Is Story.
Growing up, I wanted to be Ravi Zacharias. I read all his books, listened to all of his radio programs, could quote his most quotable quotes, and made plans to one day attend his apologetics [...]
The post Celebrities for Jesus – Katelyn Beaty appeared first on Life Is Story.
Sarah and Beth have different political beliefs, but are still friends. And in a very politically polarized age, that’s somewhat incredible. As civically-minded people who have spent their lives engaged in politics and community organizing, [...]
The post Now What? – Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers appeared first on Life Is Story.
If there’s one thing the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 taught me, it was that the way we did church was a routine more than it was worship. It wasn’t that we just went through the [...]
The post Reawakened – Glen Guyton appeared first on Life Is Story.
The past half-decade, and probably longer, has seen an increasing number of people raised in the church pack their bags and leave. The reasons are multifaceted but the result is the same. Many are leaving [...]
The post The Road Away from God – Jonathan Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
Like several of the recent New International Commentary releases, Hannah K. Harrington’s The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah replaces an older volume on those books in the series, offering a more in-depth analysis with updated [...]
The post The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah (NICOT) – Hannah K. Harrington appeared first on Life Is Story.
For nearly fifty years, New International Commentaries have been the evangelical standard for a commentary set. Intended for clergy and biblical scholars, the NIC is an academic commentary that understands that not all of its [...]
The post The Books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah (NICOT) – Thomas Renz appeared first on Life Is Story.
Two long-time friends, one Black and one white, join together for a conversation about race. While the content of Not So Black and White can be found in any number of books, it’s the camaraderie [...]
The post Not So Black and White – Reggie Dabbs and John Driver appeared first on Life Is Story.
A 2021 Ipsos poll found that Gen Z individuals were four times as likely to identify as transgender, nonbinary, gender-fluid, or some other genderqueer categorization. Gender identity has become part of the culture wars with [...]
The post Gender Identity and Faith – Mark Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s been ten years since Peter Enns released The Evolution of Adam, a groundbreaking work that explored the possibility that a faithful reading of Scripture could be aligned with evolutionary theory. Now, in a revised [...]
The post The Evolution of Adam – Peter Enns appeared first on Life Is Story.
Social media (and the Internet at large) has pushed human behaviors to the extreme while making more people more aware of those behaviors. It’s easier than ever to share information (and lies), to make friends [...]
The post Terms of Service – Chris Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
I had some amount of hope for Stand Up, Stand Strong before reading it. A call to bold faith? Needed. The way of Christ is countercultural? Absolutely. Engage culture with the redemptive story of the [...]
The post Stand Up, Stand Strong – Sara Barratt appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve always been an exegetical preacher. Not to the extent that some people are—because if you go to some theological circles you’ll find those that think it’s heresy to preach any other way—but it’s my [...]
The post Topical Preaching in a Complex World – Sam Chan and Malcolm Gill appeared first on Life Is Story.
Been in the Struggle is the reflections of two individuals who have spent the last few decades cultivating an antiracist spirituality while tearing down systemic racism. In a lot of ways, this felt similar to [...]
The post Been in the Struggle: Pursuing an Antiracist Spirituality – Regina Shands Stoltzfus and Tobin Miller Shearer appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve read a lot of books on racial relations, particularly from a Christian perspective, and after a while you begin to recognize the familiar beats. Most books are written to rally the troops. Some books [...]
The post Talking About Race – Isaac Adams appeared first on Life Is Story.
Tony Dungy doesn’t know it, but his coaching style had quite the effect on my own. I read his first book, Quiet Strength, just after he retired from coaching the Indianapolis Colts. Growing up in [...]
The post Uncommon Influence – Lauren and Tony Dungy appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of Celebrities for Jesus, Katelyn Beaty differentiates fame from celebrity, showing that even though fame can be a worthwhile byproduct of a virtuous life, celebrity is a different beast. At this point, [...]
The post Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits Are Hurting the Church – Katelyn Beaty appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Mothering by the Book, Jennifer Pepito shares personal stories about how different books have encouraged her during challenging times. She references favorite classics like All of a Kind Family and The Hiding Place, drawing [...]
The post Mothering by the Book: The Power of Reading Aloud to Overcome Fear and Recapture Joy – Jennifer Pepito appeared first on Life Is Story.
This beautifully bound book collects historic ecumenical and Reformed documents that articulate the Christian faith. Before each one, Chad Van Dixhoorn shares a brief introduction, explaining the document’s origins, historical context, and significance throughout time. [...]
The post Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms: A Reader’s Edition – Chad Van Dixhoorn appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this devotional collection, Leland Ryken shares his considerable literary expertise to explore Christian hymns as poetry. Each reading begins with the text of the hymn, and then Ryken offers literary analysis, spiritual reflections, and [...]
The post 40 Favorite Hymns of the Christian Faith: A Closer Look at Their Spiritual and Poetic Meaning – Leland Ryken appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book initially appealed to me because of the title, and Nick Turner’s short, punchy chapters live up to the unique premise. In the introduction, he explains that even though God is omnipotent, omniscient, and [...]
The post 12 Things God Can’t Do …and How They Can Help You Sleep at Night – Nick Tucker appeared first on Life Is Story.
My familiarity with the book of Nehemiah mainly stems from my childhood church’s building campaign, and I read Nehemiah For You: Strength to Build for God with one of the “Let us rise up and [...]
The post Nehemiah For You: Strength to Build for God – Eric Mason appeared first on Life Is Story.
James Patterson has made his name by using his name to highlight the work of his coauthors. The Elephant Girl, a story about a young African girl who protects elephants from poachers even at the [...]
The post The Elephant Girl – James Patterson and Ellen Banda-Aaku with Sophia Krevoy appeared first on Life Is Story.
We’ve all seen the really cringey gender reveal parties: guns or glitter, ruffles or rifles, wheels or heels, touchdowns or tutus, bows or baskets. And most of us rightfully recognize these false binaries for the [...]
The post Buried Talents: Overcoming Gendered Socialization to Answer God’s Call – Susan Harris Howell appeared first on Life Is Story.
I love a good debate, which is probably why I own all of the Counterpoints books and have read most of them. Biblical/theological positions aside, the Counterpoints books stand as an example of how to [...]
The post Four Views on Heaven (Counterpoints) appeared first on Life Is Story.
Rick Hamlin says he doesn’t consider himself an expert on prayer, even though he’s written several books and articles about it. His focus on writing about prayer comes from the desire to improve in his [...]
The post Even Silence is Praise – Rick Hamlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
3:16: the Numbers of Hope might be the quintessential Max Lucado text. It’s should be no surprise that one of the most well-known Christian author’s book on the most well-known verse in the Bible is [...]
The post 3:16 The Numbers of Hope – Max Lucado appeared first on Life Is Story.
In his High Priestly Prayer in John 17, Jesus prays for something that remains unfulfilled—he prays for unity. Although we see glimmers of this unity within the early church, the saga of history is a [...]
The post That We May Be One – Gary Agee appeared first on Life Is Story.
The story of the early church is the story of a marginalized and oppressed people. It should come as not surprise, then, that the Gospel message is quite concerned about the presence of injustice and [...]
The post Might from the Margins – Dennis Edwards appeared first on Life Is Story.
Hermeneutics is a big word, but basically it just means a method of interpretation. At some level, everything is interpretation. We experience nothing objectively, but everything is subject to some form of interpretation and it’s [...]
The post In All the Scriptures: The Three Contexts of Biblical Hermeneutics – Nicholas Piotrowski appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this highly readable, engaging book, Glen Scrivener shows that Christianity is “the air we breathe” within Western society, regardless of our individual beliefs. He shows that core Western moral convictions, such as the idea [...]
The post The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality – Glen Scrivener appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have read many different books about miscarriage and child loss, but they are all written by women and to women. Normally, authors will include one chapter about the dad, but they usually still address [...]
The post Ours: Biblical Comfort for Men Grieving Miscarriage – Eric Schumacher appeared first on Life Is Story.
This parenting book focuses on specific challenges that boys face in understanding and regulating their emotions. David Thomas shares both general information and examples from his counseling practice to show how many boys’ problematic, destructive [...]
The post Raising Emotionally Strong Boys: Tools Your Son Can Build On for Life – David Thomas appeared first on Life Is Story.
If I could pick one book to teleport back in time to my teenage self, this would be it. God was faithful and present in my journey with intrusive thoughts, and I wouldn’t want to [...]
The post A Still and Quiet Mind: Twelve Strategies for Changing Unwanted Thoughts – Esther Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Lindsey Carlson emphasizes how important it is for women to feel encouraged in genuine, meaningful ways. She contends that Christian women are often at a loss for how to encourage themselves and [...]
The post A Better Encouragement: Trading Self-Help for True Hope – Lindsey Carlson appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this devotional collection, Katie Faris shares meaningful reflections on persevering through suffering. There are twenty different readings, and each one is approximately eight pages long. Faris begins with a story or example from her [...]
The post He Will Be Enough: How God Takes You by the Hand Through Your Hardest Days – Katie Faris appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Dear Susan, licensed counselor Ronda Barney shares short reflections for women facing chronic or terminal illnesses. Her own history with illness contributed to her writing this book, but she keeps the letters general enough [...]
The post Dear Susan: Letters of Comfort, Hope, and Peace for Women Facing a Life-Changing Illness – Ronda Barney appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ever since Lee Strobel’s now-classic The Case for Christ, the atheist-turned-Christian apologetics-themed memoir has popped up from time to time to varying levels of success. Confessions of a French Atheist by Guillaume Bignon is the [...]
The post Confessions of a French Atheist – Guillaume Bignon appeared first on Life Is Story.
“Who is my neighbor?” That is the question the rich young ruler asked Jesus as a means of justifying himself. And in response, Jesus told the story of a very unlikely person being a very [...]
The post Neighborliness – David Docusen appeared first on Life Is Story.
Everyone has likely had their lives touched by suicide at some point in their lives. Yet, in my personal experience, clergy are often unprepared and unsure how to handle a death in that manner. For [...]
The post The Preacher’s Guide to Suicide – H.C. Johnson appeared first on Life Is Story.
One of my key takeaways from this book, one that is rather tangential to the actual subject matter but crucial to an understanding of modern theology, is just how influential Augustine was and how his [...]
The post Signs of Change: The Bible’s Evolution of Divine Non-Violence – Anthony Bartlett appeared first on Life Is Story.
In an era of megachurches, CEO pastors, and church growth strategies—alongside a consumeristic mentality that has an eye for entertainment—the modern American church has lost its identity as family. I’m in the middle of a [...]
The post Reclaiming the Church Family – Matthew Kimbrough appeared first on Life Is Story.
About eleven years ago, Joe Gibbs—former NFL coach and current NASCAR owner—wrote a book called Game Plan for Life. Sports-themed memoir/devotionals are a popular niche in the Christian market and this one proved to be [...]
The post Game Plan for Loss – Joe Gibbs appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is a reissued publication of B. B. Warfield’s 1912 essay “The Emotional Life of Our Lord.” Now with a foreword by Sinclair Ferguson, this brief book is accessible to a new audience. In [...]
The post The Emotional Life of Our Lord – B. B. Warfield and Sinclair Ferguson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This concise, easy-to-read book is full of great advice for dealing with anxiety and intrusive thoughts. Jason Cusick shares a wealth of information in a way that feels genuine and personal, distilling what he has [...]
The post The Anxiety Field Guide: Healthy Habits for Long-Term Healing – Jason Cusick appeared first on Life Is Story.
This concise book shares practical advice for how Christians can better understand their gifts and use them to bless others. Don Everts encourages Christians to avoid an overly narrow focus on spiritual gifts, and to [...]
The post Discover Your Gifts: Celebrating How God Made You and Everyone You Know – Don Everts appeared first on Life Is Story.
There were only two things I did not like about Project Solomon by Jodi Stuber and Jennifer Marshall Bleakley, and I would say only one is a critique: It was disjointed in some instances. The [...]
The post Project Solomon – Jodi Stuber and Jennifer Marshall Bleakley appeared first on Life Is Story.
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that misrepresented itself so badly through the title and back cover synopsis. Given the lengthy and specific title, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and [...]
The post The Truth and the Beauty – Andrew Klavan appeared first on Life Is Story.
In typical Christian interpretation, if the Gospels had an overarching villain it wouldn’t be the Herods or the Caesars or even the Sanhedrin—it would be The Pharisees. Throughout history, the Pharisees have been much maligned [...]
The post The Pharisees – ed. Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine appeared first on Life Is Story.
John Goldingay has long been a prolific writer and premier First Testament scholar. When he retired from professorship at Fuller Theological Seminary in 2018, he did so with the intention of focusing on writing. Since [...]
The post The Book of Jeremiah (NICOT) – John Goldingay appeared first on Life Is Story.
I read Fight Like Jesus over the course of Holy Week this year. It’s eight chapters—an introduction, then daily chapters from Palm Sunday to a combined Holy Saturday/Easter Sunday—and I read one chapter from the [...]
The post Fight Like Jesus – Jason Porterfield appeared first on Life Is Story.
I don’t remember when I first realized that the interpretation of the Samaritan woman of John 4 that I’d heard my whole life was wrong. I do remember that it was after I had been [...]
The post The Samaritan Woman’s Story: Reconsidering John 4 after #ChurchToo – Caryn Reeder appeared first on Life Is Story.
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, [...]
The post God Behaving Badly – David T. Lamb appeared first on Life Is Story.
We are in the middle of a clergy crisis. I knew that before beginning my doctoral studies on clergy loneliness, mental health, and burnout, but having inundated myself in the literature I’ve become even more [...]
The post The Flourishing Pastor – Tom Nelson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I first read Orthodoxy when I was sixteen. I was extremely impressed with G. K. Chesterton’s precise thinking, writing style, and wit, and the librarian who helped me with my inter-library loan copy was extremely [...]
The post Orthodoxy: With Annotations and Guided Reading by Trevin Wax – G. K. Chesterton and Trevin Wax appeared first on Life Is Story.
As soon as I learned about this book, I knew that I wanted to review it. C.S. Lewis has been my favorite author ever since I was nine, and I have read so many of [...]
The post The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind – Jason M. Baxter appeared first on Life Is Story.
In My Body is Not a Prayer Request, Amy Kenny writes with passion and urgency, challenging ableist norms in the church and in society at large. She shares personal stories about facing both active discrimination [...]
The post My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church – Amy Kenny appeared first on Life Is Story.
A couple of years ago, I left the church I had been working at with the intention of traveling the country and finding what God had next for our family. I had worked at a [...]
The post Disarmed: The Radical Life and Legacy of Michael “MJ” Sharp – Marshall V. King appeared first on Life Is Story.
What will heaven be like? The cultural concept of heaven is usually envisioned as a walled city in the clouds where ethereal figures wear halos and play the harp. That’s…not a very appealing picture. Of [...]
The post The Case for Heaven Young Reader’s Edition – Lee Strobel appeared first on Life Is Story.
Kristin L. Kellen is a counselor and an assistant professor of counseling at a seminary, and she wrote this book for both lay and professional Christian counselors. It is academic but very readable, and is [...]
The post Counseling Women: Biblical Wisdom for Life’s Battles – Kristin L. Kellen appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is full of encouragement for people who struggle to reconcile the joy and the suffering that they experience personally and see in the world around them. Joy Marie Clarkson provides a stirring defense [...]
The post Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life – Joy Marie Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve been told for some time that I needed to read David Bentley Hart. Not knowing quite where to start (though his That All Shall Be Saved is on my shelf), I ended up beginning [...]
The post Tradition and Apocalypse – David Bentley Hart appeared first on Life Is Story.
Becker divides To Be Made Well into three categories: that nature of healing, barriers to healing, and participation in healing. The first part sets the foundation for the type of healing the book is going [...]
The post To Be Made Well – Amy Julia Becker appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2004, Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson released the first edition of The Heart of Racial Justice. Now, eighteen years later, IVP has rereleased the book as part of their Signature Collection. To add [...]
The post The Heart of Racial Justice Bible Study – Brenda Salter McNeil, Rick Richardson, and Steve Tamayo appeared first on Life Is Story.
Soul change leads to social change. That sentence is the driving factor of The Heart of Racial Justice. Cowritten by Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson, this now-classic book provides a model of racial reconciliation [...]
The post The Heart of Racial Justice – Brenda Salter McNeil and Rick Richardson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ever since Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, apologetic via non-theologians have become increasingly in vogue. Strobel used his journalistic experience to investigate the claims of Scripture, treating the life and resurrection of Jesus like [...]
The post Person of Interest – J. Warner Wallace appeared first on Life Is Story.
Before there was Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr, there was Carolyn Custis James. I don’t know what the general reaction to the original 2015 version of Malestrom: How Jesus Dismantles Patriarchy and [...]
The post Malestrom – Carolyn Custis James appeared first on Life Is Story.
Our past matters. We are a product of where we come from. If life is story, then the stories of our ancestors are the prologue that sets the context for our own lives. Some of [...]
The post Translating Your Past – Michelle Van Loon appeared first on Life Is Story.
You’ve probably heard of Rebecca St. James and for KING AND COUNTRY. What you may not know (or at least I didn’t) was that FK&C duo were related to Rebecca and that behind all three [...]
The post Behind the Lights – Helen Smallbone appeared first on Life Is Story.
On the day that I read this book, a man in a gas mask got on the northbound N train in Brooklyn and fired a gun 33 times, injuring 29 people. That was April 12. [...]
The post Collateral Damage – James E. Atwood appeared first on Life Is Story.
“You are young, gifted and black” / We must begin to tell our young / There’s a world waiting for you / Yours is the quest that’s just begun. Nina Simone’s Civil Rights anthem To [...]
The post Young, Gifted, and Black – Sheila Wise Rowe appeared first on Life Is Story.
Peanut Butter and Dragon Wings is a unique, artistic, soulful, and poignant look at parenthood (motherhood, specifically) that offers readers permission to be real about their own needs, shortcomings, struggles, and doubts. Mostly memoir, somewhat [...]
The post Peanut Butter and Dragon Wings: A Mother’s Search for Grace – Shari Zook appeared first on Life Is Story.
Recovering Racists positions every person who is called White as a beneficiary of racism. And already the arguments begin—“Racism exists, but I’m not racist.” “It’s racist to say that all white people are racist.” “I [...]
The post Recovering Racists – Idelette McVicker appeared first on Life Is Story.
The women of Scripture are often overlooked and, even when they are considered, what we’ve been told about them isn’t always correct. Eve is given the title of first sinner, the reason all of this [...]
The post The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible – Mary DeMuth appeared first on Life Is Story.
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins refers to the Old Testament God as a “vindictive bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic racist, an infanticidal, genocidal, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” In other words, [...]
The post The Destruction of the Canaanites – Charlie Trimm appeared first on Life Is Story.
Only Os Guinness could write a book on discovering meaning in life and fully and comprehensively cover the topic in 120 pages. The Great Quest is an invitation to living an examined life. Dr. Guinness [...]
The post The Great Quest – Os Guinness appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this unique, well-argued book, sociologist George Yancey pushes back against the excesses and inherent flaws in colorblindness and antiracism mindsets, arguing that we need to be able to engage in “collaborative conversations” to move [...]
The post Beyond Racial Division: A Unifying Alternative to Colorblindness and Antiracism – George Yancey appeared first on Life Is Story.
Kingdom Race Theology: God’s Answer to Our Racial Crisis is an adapted version of Tony Evans’ larger work, Oneness Embraced. Specifically, the four chapters of this book come from chapters 10, 12, 15, and 16 [...]
The post Kingdom Race Theology – Tony Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s been 45 years since Joni Eareckson Tada’s eponymous memoir, Joni: An Unforgettable Story, was first published by Zondervan in 1976, just seven years after the injury that left her paralyzed from the neck down. [...]
The post Joni: An Unforgettable Story – Joni Eareckson Tada appeared first on Life Is Story.
Growing up, I thought that racism was a thing of the past. Like, I understood it was recent past. My (white) mom talked about how a Black family she babysat for in the late 70s [...]
The post How to Heal Our Racial Divide – Derwin Gray appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ten years ago, John C. Lennox penned a small book called Seven Days that Divide the World, an introductory yet academically robust volume that explored the tension between Scripture and science when it comes to [...]
The post Seven Days that Divide the World – John C. Lennox appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2005, Ted Dekker turned to non-fiction as a means to explore the heart of his writing journey. The Slumber of Christianity is, in many ways, Ted’s real-life version of Jan Jovic’s Dance of the [...]
The post The Slumber of Christianity – Ted Dekker appeared first on Life Is Story.
For years, I’ve longed for a text to use with high-schoolers to introduce them to the Bible. Even if you’ve read the Bible your whole life, or perhaps especially if you’ve read the Bible your [...]
The post Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew About the Bible – Michael Bird appeared first on Life Is Story.
Leadership is changing. Accelerated by the pandemic, the work lives and personal priorities of people around the world have shifted and leadership is trying to catch up. With the “Great Resignation,” you hear stories every [...]
The post The Aspiring Leader’s Guide to the Future – Clay Scroggins appeared first on Life Is Story.
Are You Good with God? is a book that made more sense as a book in pre-Internet times, but in an online age would probably have been better off as a blog post. At about [...]
The post Are You Good With God? – D.A. Horton appeared first on Life Is Story.
Despite this book’s heavy topic, I found it to be a quick and easy read. David E. Clarke writes in a very concise and clear style, and each chapter is brief, well-organized, and to-the-point. Over [...]
The post Enough Is Enough: A Step-by-Step Plan to Leave an Abusive Relationship with God’s Help – David E. Clarke and William G. Clarke appeared first on Life Is Story.
Forgiveness is a difficult and complicated topic, especially since people have so many different definitions for what forgiveness means. Wendy Alsup is clear and biblical, and she is realistic about the differences between forgiveness and [...]
The post I Forgive You: Finding Peace and Moving Forward When Life Really Hurts – Wendy Alsup appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s been 18 years since Sarah Young published Jesus Calling, the bestselling devotional that broke barriers with its simplicity, authenticity, and comforting message. It was a message that was both general enough to apply to [...]
The post Jesus Listens – Sarah Young appeared first on Life Is Story.
Life has seasons. That’s something I’ve been reflecting on recently as I’ve gone through a sort of extended period of transition, following God and figuring out what the next steps in life are. Sometimes I [...]
The post The Six Seasons of Calling – Brian Sanders appeared first on Life Is Story.
Imagine a scene with two children and one child does something to the other that’s intentionally or unintentionally mean or rude. Cuts in line. Takes their toy. Shoves them. You get the idea. We’ve all [...]
The post The 5 Apology Languages – Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas appeared first on Life Is Story.
You’ve not read a marriage book like this one. Choosing Us is less marriage manual and more marriage memoir. It’s the story of Gail Song Bantum and Brian Bantum, the challenges they’ve faced, the lessons [...]
The post Choosing Us – Brian and Gail Song Bantum appeared first on Life Is Story.
Attached to God is the type of book you can’t grasp in one reading. I had a difficult time writing this review because every time I sat down to parse out just how I felt [...]
The post Attached to God – Krispin Mayfield appeared first on Life Is Story.
The times, they are a’ changing. The last couple of years has seen global disruption economically and politically as the world navigated a response to a pandemic that threatened our health and livelihood. The world [...]
The post 10 Leadership Virtues for Disruptive Times – Tom Ziglar appeared first on Life Is Story.
For they preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. – Matt. [...]
The post Heavy Burdens: Seven Ways LGBTQ Christians Experience Harm in the Church – Bridget Eileen Rivera appeared first on Life Is Story.
Right around the time I became a pacifist—thank you to Nonviolence: The Revolutionary Way of Jesus by Preston Sprinkle for that—I began to seek out other, more academic writings on Christian nonviolence and quickly ran [...]
The post A Field Guide to Christian Nonviolence – David Cramer and Myles Werntz appeared first on Life Is Story.
There have been a lot of books about the history of race in the United States. There are several good books that push back against the established whitewashed narrative of history that downplays the atrocities [...]
The post Fortune – Lisa Sharon Harper appeared first on Life Is Story.
“Body-positive” is one of those buzzwords that people use to mean all kinds of things. Jennifer Taylor Wagner focuses her definition on helping women love themselves, let go of anxiety and harsh self-judgment, and pursue [...]
The post Your Good Body: Embracing a Body-Positive Mindset in a Perfection-Focused World – Jennifer Taylor Wagner appeared first on Life Is Story.
Food-related and body-image issues have been particularly controversial in recent years, as many people push back against “diet culture” and other people push back against them for going too far. This book lands somewhere in [...]
The post Food Triggers: Exchanging Unhealthy Patterns for God-Honoring Habits – Amber Lia appeared first on Life Is Story.
This sensitive, compassionate book includes thirty daily readings and reflection prompts for Christian women who are pregnant again after miscarriage or stillbirth. Throughout the book, Jenny Albers shares her personal story, emphasizing the constant sense [...]
The post Courageously Expecting: 30 Days of Encouragement for Pregnancy After Loss – Jenny Albers appeared first on Life Is Story.
When it comes to being lonely, you’re not alone. The Loneliness Epidemic begins with the numbers. 36% adults say they feel lonely sometimes or all the time. 34% of Americans aged 18-35 say they feel [...]
The post The Loneliness Epidemic – Susan Mettes appeared first on Life Is Story.
Life is story. It’s the founding premise of this whole website. The more stories I read and the more people I talk to, the more I’ve realized that my theology, politics, and whole general paradigm [...]
The post Family of Origin, Family of Choice – Katie Hays and Susan Chiasson appeared first on Life Is Story.
As many as one in four women and one in nine men are victims of domestic violence. In all likelihood, you either know someone who has been abused or have experienced it yourself. And unfortunately, [...]
The post Hope for Healing from Domestic Abuse – Karen DeArmond Gardner appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s January and the gyms are full of people trying to get a strong start on their New Year’s resolution: lose weight. Eat healthier, eat less, exercise more, or some combination of the three, weight [...]
The post I’ll Start Again Monday – Lysa TerKeurst appeared first on Life Is Story.
Tony Evans has been a respected voice for decades. His calm demeanor, engaging writing, and quiet wit has made his books accessible, readable, and understandable. In Hope for the Hurting, Evans lends his traditional style [...]
The post Hope for the Hurting – Tony Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
What comes to mind when you hear the world Dwelling? For me, I get this impression of burrowing in, a deep sort of residing, a warm and inviting presence of permanence. For Donna Lane, Dwelling [...]
The post Dwelling – Donna Lane appeared first on Life Is Story.
Jason Thompson is the discipleship pastor at Renovation Church in Simpsonville, South Carolina. Being a pastor was never his goal or part of his academic training, he just followed God’s lead and was given opportunities [...]
The post Worth No Less – Jason Thompson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Shattered, Stirred, and Shaken is a memoir of sorts from Michele McCarthy the explores her growth in faith and reliance on the Holy Spirit. It’s a deeply personal look at McCarthy’s faith journey, the lessons [...]
The post Shattered, Stirred, and Shaken – Michele McCarthy appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Greatest Wave is the latest in a series of Bible studies from Cho Larson, an Arizona-based Christian author and teacher. This particular book focuses on Christ’s righteousness and has thirty different chapters divided into [...]
The post The Greatest Wave – Cho Larson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Unraveling the Lie-Knot is the kind of book that’s not bad, but its lack of audience clarity and amateur formatting present it in a way that makes it less compelling than it actually is. It’s [...]
The post Unraveling the Lie-Knot – Sheryl Giesbrecht Turner appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout Love Me Anyway, Jared C. Wilson writes in an engaging, personal style, sharing stories from his life to help illustrate his messages about love, our struggles to feel or express love, and the perfect [...]
The post Love Me Anyway: How God’s Perfect Love Fills Our Deepest Longing – Jared C. Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is the best book I have read about technology, and I have read a vast number. I first became interested in social commentary about the digital world in 2013, alarmed by rapid changes in [...]
The post Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age – Felicia Wu Song appeared first on Life Is Story.
Just about a year ago (in January 2021), Jemar Tisby released How to Fight Racism, a practical book filled actionable ideas to make real substantive change in one’s community. Now he’s gone back and adapted [...]
The post How To Fight Racism: Young Reader’s Edition – Jemar Tisby appeared first on Life Is Story.
Daniel I. Block is the Gunther H. Knoedler Professor Emeritus of Old Testament at Wheaton College. He has lectured and taught extensively on the Old Testament and covenant theology for many, many years. He’s written [...]
The post Covenant – Daniel Block appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of Billy Graham’s ministry in the 1940s, he instituted what would become known as the “Billy Graham Rule.” The rule was simple: never be alone with a woman. The intentions were good, [...]
The post Together in Ministry – Rob Dixon appeared first on Life Is Story.
I picked up this book because I thought I would disagree with it. I’ve specifically preached, in the past, that God does not get everything God wants and the title of this book is the [...]
The post God Gets Everything God Wants – Katie Hays appeared first on Life Is Story.
It’s a common trope that kids “bounce back” from whatever it is that bothers them. But it’s not so much that kids are adaptable or resilient as much as they often have little agency to [...]
The post Forming Resilient Children – Holly Catterton Allen appeared first on Life Is Story.
We live in a world where we would rather move on from the atrocities of our past, where a common cultural religion tells us to “forgive and forget.” Amid all of that, Miroslav Volf calls [...]
The post The End of Memory – Miroslav Volf appeared first on Life Is Story.
I grew up as a young earth creationist. Ken Ham came and talked to my homeschool group level of young earth creationist. My first Bible was a KJV Defender’s Study Bible with study notes by [...]
The post The Genealogical Adam and Eve – S. Joshua Swamidass appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am a product of evangelicalism. I was born into evangelicalism. Grew up in evangelicalism. Studied in evangelicalism. Ordained in evangelicalism. Taught in evangelicalism. And while the cracks in the foundation had made themselves known [...]
The post Struggling with Evangelicalism – Dan Stringer appeared first on Life Is Story.
Deconstruction. It’s a word I’ve heard over and over again as more and more young people distance themselves from the faith in which they grew up. And many times, what I’m seeing is that deconstruction [...]
The post When Everything’s on Fire: Faith Forged from the Ashes – Brian Zahnd appeared first on Life Is Story.
I don’t think that I really understood the way in which some forms of Christianity and some aspects of culture take a low of the human body until I read this book. It’s something that [...]
The post The Wisdom of Your Body – Hillary McBride appeared first on Life Is Story.
Have you ever felt like the universe cracked? Whether globally, like in the rise of nationalism and racism, or personally like the loss of a friend or family member? We’ve all gone through those times [...]
The post When the Universe Cracks – ed. Angie Ward appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Quest of the Historical Adam is the result of over half a decade of work by theologian and philosopher William Lane Craig to explore the question of human origins and reconcile Scripture with modern [...]
The post In Quest of the Historical Adam – William Lane Craig appeared first on Life Is Story.
Spiritual Leadership was borne out of a series of lectures that J. Oswald Sanders delivered to the leaders of Overseas Missionary Fellowship in 1964 and 1966 as the organization—which had been known as China Inland [...]
The post Spiritual Leadership – J. Oswald Sanders appeared first on Life Is Story.
More so than any book in history, the Bible and its authority has been misused and weaponized to oppress and demean. From that foundation, Black womanist theologian Angela Parker embarks on an exploration of what [...]
The post If God Still Breathes, Why Can’t I? – Angela Parker appeared first on Life Is Story.
For much of church history, the voices of women have been relatively silenced, stifled under cultural patriarchy that dismissed the importance of women in the church and a Christian humility by women who didn’t seek [...]
The post Women in the Mission of the Church – Leanne Dzubinski and Anneke Stasson appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a pastor, I don’t think it is possible for one to preach with authenticity without recognizing the pain the members of one’s members might be going through—or indeed, without recognizing and acknowledging one’s own [...]
The post Preaching to People in Pain – Matthew Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
Christian distrust of science is noticeable in the current pandemic response and climate change, but the root of that distrust—even though the historical rift goes back to the Middle Ages—is the debate between creation and [...]
The post Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark – Janet Kellogg Ray appeared first on Life Is Story.
As postmodernity roils on and Christianity moves out of the cultural limelight, Christians are left with a horrifying reality: they are no longer the “default.” Particularly in America, white Christianity has been the default culture [...]
The post Wisdom from Babylon – Gordon Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
Despite four hundred years of slavery, America as a system—and America as white Christian culture—have never really seriously considered reparations for the enslavement of our Black brothers and sisters. It’s been considered too late (after [...]
The post Reparations – Duke Kwon and Gregory Thompson appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in recent years about emotional, spiritual, and sexual abuse by clergy—and all of it well justified—but a part of the conversation that often goes unspoken are all the [...]
The post Church Abuse of Clergy – Gene Fowler appeared first on Life Is Story.
The world is a rather tense place. From the way we talk about politics to the way we treat service workers, there seems to have been an influx of conflict—and not just disagreements but disagreements [...]
The post The Space Between Us – Betty Pries appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this raw memoir, Philip Yancey shares about his life experiences growing up in an abusive home and a legalistic church environment. The book covers much of his life, going into great detail about his [...]
The post Where the Light Fell: A Memoir – Philip Yancey appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a church leader, one of the most difficult parts of ministry is getting volunteers. The old adage rings true: 20% of the people will do 80% of the work. What I’ve found is not [...]
The post Empower – Jeff Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a young, white evangelical I read every single book on apologetics I could get my hands on. Not only did I read Evidence That Demands a Verdict, I read the books Josh McDowell cited [...]
The post Urban Apologetics – ed. Eric Mason appeared first on Life Is Story.
By and large, the church has not proven itself to be a reliable resource when it comes to the treatment or acre of mental health. Ignorance is often at play—pastors and church members simply aren’t [...]
The post Not Quite Fine – Carlene Hill Byron appeared first on Life Is Story.
Amy Gannett writes in an approachable, conversational style throughout this book, sharing insights into God, the Bible, and Christian theology. This book is great for new believers or Christians who want to learn more about [...]
The post Fix Your Eyes: How Our Study of God Shapes Our Worship of Him – Amy Gannett appeared first on Life Is Story.
Liberation Theology gives us tools with which to recontextualize the scriptures in ways that make sense to the hurting. These meanings which emerge from the scriptures under a liberation lens are neither new nor novel, [...]
The post Child Theology: Diverse Methods and Global Perspectives – Marcia J. Bunge appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Two Cities is two thousand years of political history packed into just under 400 pages. Taking its title from Augustine’s The City of God, where he posits that there are two cities: Rome, which [...]
The post The Two Cities – Andrew Willard Jones appeared first on Life Is Story.
I read a lot of Christian fiction, so when I heard about Daniel Silliman’s Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith, I was immediately intrigued. Silliman selects five books as cultural [...]
The post Reading Evangelicals – Daniel Silliman appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have no other words to describe God Speaks Through Wombs than has a beautiful act of worship from Drew Jackson. Drew is a pastor, poet, and peacemaker from New York City with degrees in [...]
The post God Speaks Through Wombs – Drew Jackson appeared first on Life Is Story.
For many in the Western church, Jesus is a Western construct. We don’t always realize it, because it’s been the case since virtually the Romanization of Christianity with Constantine and evolved as the Europeanization of [...]
The post Jesus of the East – Phuc Luu appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is one of those books you have to take your time working through. Relational Spirituality: A Psychological-Theological Paradigm for Transformation is an intimidating title, but at the heart of its message is simply that [...]
The post Relational Spirituality – Todd and M. Elizabeth Lewis Hall appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 1996, Craig Keener wrote a book called 3 Crucial Questions About the Holy Spirit. Five years later, that content got significantly reworked into the first edition of Gift and Giver: The Holy Spirit for [...]
The post Gift and Giver – Craig Keener appeared first on Life Is Story.
Unlike most pastors I know, I love the Old Testament. And I love the Old Testament because I love stories. (This website is called Life is Story, after all.) But preaching Old Testament narrative isn’t [...]
The post The Art of Preaching Old Testament Narrative – Steven Mathewson appeared first on Life Is Story.
There are approximately a million books on Christian leadership. I know this because I’m a doctoral candidate working on a degree in pastoral leadership and I’ve had to read most of them. The truth is [...]
The post Leadership in Christian Perspective – Justin Irving and Mark Strauss appeared first on Life Is Story.
Early on in the book, Brian Brock writes that the majority of pastors, when asked how their church accommodates individuals with disabilities, respond with some form of “Oh, we don’t have any members with disabilities.” [...]
The post Disability: Living into the Diversity of Christ’s Body – Brian Brock appeared first on Life Is Story.
“I am not my own, but belong with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.” This provocative, well-argued book presents a solid case for why the words [...]
The post You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World – Alan Noble appeared first on Life Is Story.
This timely book, which Sally Clarkson wrote during COVID-19 lockdown, is full of understanding and encouragement for women who feel overwhelmed with life’s suffering. Clarkson shares illustrations from her own life, ranging over multiple decades, [...]
The post Help, I’m Drowning: Weathering the Storms of Life with Grace and Hope – Sally Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this short, accessible philosophical reflection, Gregg Ten Elshof clarifies the meaning of shame and encourages his readers to recognize its value within society. He communicates from the beginning that he does not want to [...]
The post For Shame: Rediscovering the Virtues of a Maligned Emotion – Gregg Ten Elshof appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is one of those cases where you really can judge a book by its cover. When I first saw this book advertised, I was delighted with the guy on the cover giving his friend [...]
The post How Should a Christian Date?: It’s Not as Complicated as You Think – Eric Demeter appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am a horse person. Have been since I sat on a horse as a little girl. My mother recently found a photo of two- or three-year-old me on a pony. There is also a [...]
The post Mini Horse, Mighty Hope – Debbie Garcia-Bengochea and Peggy Frezon appeared first on Life Is Story.
I went into this book with limited knowledge of the Allender Center and its work, but I knew enough to expect that I would find the book insightful, helpful, and deeply ministering. Unfortunately, Redeeming Heartache: [...]
The post Redeeming Heartache: How Past Suffering Reveals Our True Calling – Dan B. Allender and Cathy Loerzel appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book spoke to me deeply because of the author’s sensitivity, honesty, and raw reflections about life and faith. I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book, since it doesn’t have an obvious thesis [...]
The post The God of the Garden: Thoughts on Creation, Culture, and the Kingdom – Andrew Peterson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Daniel Strange builds on work by the twentieth century Dutch pastor and missionary J. H. Bavinck, who studied anthropology and psychology. Bavinck offered insight into the core, universal elements of human experience [...]
The post Making Faith Magnetic: Five Hidden Themes Our Culture Can’t Stop Talking About… And How to Connect Them to Christ – Daniel Strange appeared first on Life Is Story.
This Advent devotional focuses on Matthew’s account of the Nativity story. Sinclair B. Ferguson delves into both the popular and the difficult elements of these historical events, and throughout the book, he provides insight into [...]
The post The Dawn of Redeeming Grace: A Daily Advent Devotional – Sinclair B. Ferguson appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is part memoir and part exposition of Romans 8, as Noe Garcia uses his personal story to illustrate how God rescues us from our sin, gives us a new life, and frees us [...]
The post Repurposed: How God Turns Your Mess into His Message – Noe Garcia appeared first on Life Is Story.
I almost never read women’s devotionals, because I expect them to be fluffy, vaguely uplifting books that I don’t relate to. However, because Ellie Holcomb’s music has been such a blessing to me over the [...]
The post Fighting Words Devotional: 100 Days of Speaking Truth into the Darkness – Ellie Holcomb appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I first learned about this book, I thought it sounded interesting, but then I learned that the specific mental illness that Sarah Clarkson struggles with is OCD. My interest immediately increased a hundredfold, because [...]
The post This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness – Sarah Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’m convinced that everyone loved Rachel Held Evans, even those that hated her. Her winsome personality, passionate living, and way with words; her honesty, vulnerability, and transparency; her poignant insights, deep questions, and unbridled love—so [...]
The post Wholehearted Faith – Rachel Held Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
Last year, Skye Jethani (you might know him from The Holy Post podcast) released a book called What If Jesus Was Serious? It was a light-hearted, colorful, fun discussion of what it means to actually [...]
The post What if Jesus was Serious about Prayer – Skye Jethani appeared first on Life Is Story.
One of the most important lessons that seminary taught me was how critical it is to read Scripture in its appropriate context. Because of the didactic nature of Paul’s letters, they can often be read [...]
The post An Illustrated Guide to the Apostle Paul – Alan S. Bandy appeared first on Life Is Story.
Life is story. Memoir that shifts between personal reflection and theological musing is one of the best sort of stories you can get as the author seeks to connect their story to the larger story [...]
The post No Longer Strangers – Gregory Coles appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ask any addict: recovery is difficult. It requires vigilance. It requires retraining your mind, your body, your habits. It’s not just an acute problem, resolved by one decision to quit or go to rehab or [...]
The post Freedom Starts Today – John Elmore appeared first on Life Is Story.
Early North African Christianity begins by defining what he means by Africa, or as the title puts it, North Africa: He will be dealing with that northernmost region of the African continent while it was under [...]
The post Early North African Christianity – David Eastman appeared first on Life Is Story.
There are a lot of people who are coming to a realization that evangelical Christianity has to be different. More than ever, I am finding people from evangelical backgrounds who are clinging to faith but [...]
The post On Love and Mercy: A Social Justice Devotional – Stephen Mattson appeared first on Life Is Story.
A book like Leaving Silence is difficult to read because it forces readers to face the harm of sexualized violence—and not just as something perpetrated by “the world” but as a recurring theme in the [...]
The post Leaving Silence – Susannah Larry appeared first on Life Is Story.
There is a misconception that practicing non-violence means being a doormat and letting people walk all over you. Along with that is the misconception that pacifists preach a utopist Gospel that sees everyone as a [...]
The post How to Have an Enemy – Melissa Florer-Bixler appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’m writing this review a few days after news reports surfaced of US Border Patrol on horseback, chasing down Haitian refugees at the southern border. With that backdrop, let me simply say that Refuge Reimagined [...]
The post Refuge Reimagined – Mark and Luke Glanville appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Bible says it. I believe it. And that’s good enough for me. This was a common phrase I heard growing up in the Church of Christ—a staunchly evangelical denomination born out of the Restoration [...]
The post Every Leaf, Line, and Letter – ed. Timothy Larsen appeared first on Life Is Story.
Cradling Abundance is an African story of an African Christian who, within her highly patriarchal culture, fought to empower women and resist systemic poverty and injustice. Monique Misenga Ngoie Mukuna is a lay leader in [...]
The post Cradling Abundance – Monique Misenga Ngoie Mukuna & Elsie Tshimunyi McKee appeared first on Life Is Story.
This magnificent biography by Harry Lee Poe covers the middle years of C.S. Lewis’s life. The Making of C. S. Lewis (1918–1945): From Atheist to Apologist is the second book in a planned trilogy, and [...]
The post The Making of C. S. Lewis (1918–1945): From Atheist to Apologist – Harry Lee Poe appeared first on Life Is Story.
I grew up reading World magazine, which Marvin Olasky contributes to and edits, and I appreciate his investigative journalism and opinion pieces. Because I remember him writing some about his frustrations and strained relationship with [...]
The post Lament for a Father: The Journey to Understanding and Forgiveness – Marvin Olasky appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is conversational and easy to read, helping readers consider ways that C.S. Lewis’s perspective and methods could help them in their efforts to have spiritual conversations with friends. Randy Newman shares his own [...]
The post Mere Evangelism: 10 Insights From C.S. Lewis to Help You Share Your Faith – Randy Newman appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is full of compassionate wisdom for mothers and fathers dealing with pregnancy loss, stillbirth, and early infant death. The author, Rachel Lewis, writes with raw emotion and tender compassion, sharing about her own [...]
The post Unexpecting: Real Talk on Pregnancy Loss – Rachel Lewis appeared first on Life Is Story.
Denisse Copeland bases this book on the story of Mary and Martha from Luke 10:38-42. She writes that even though this story can seem discouraging to driven, Type-A women, its true message doesn’t focus on [...]
The post Set Apart: Stop Comparing, Own Your Giftedness, and Rest in Jesus – Denisse Copeland appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this powerful memoir, Blair Linne writes about her experiences with fatherlessness, sharing about how deeply it impacted her to grow up without a dad in the home. As she writes about her childhood, teenage [...]
The post Finding My Father: How the Gospel Heals the Pain of Fatherlessness – Blair Linne appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book opens and closes with powerful illustrations from Doctor Who, so of course I loved it. However, even if someone doesn’t connect with the pop culture references that contrast with or illustrate Christian concepts, [...]
The post Is Christmas Unbelievable? Four Questions Everyone Should Ask About the World’s Most Famous Story – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ruth Chou Simons combines memoir elements with biblical reflection in this book, writing about her lifelong struggle to feel good enough. She weaves in stories from her childhood experiences in an immigrant family, her young [...]
The post When Strivings Cease: Replacing the Gospel of Self-Improvement with the Gospel of Life-Transforming Grace – Ruth Chou Simons appeared first on Life Is Story.
I first heard of John Pavlovitz sometime in 2016 when someone recommended him to me as “another pastor speaking out against the evangelical obsession with Trump.” I clicked the like button Facebook and followed him [...]
The post If God is Love, Don’t Be a Jerk – John Pavlovitz appeared first on Life Is Story.
As the dad of two adopted kids, I have an uncomfortable relationship with the adoption community. There’s a sense of “saviorism” that can permeate the culture and parents can be ignorant or even purposefully dismissive [...]
The post Securely Attached – Mike and Kristin Berry appeared first on Life Is Story.
Freedom: The True Perspective about Women in Ministry caught me with its rather provocative title. Christians have debated the topic for generations and, although I’m solidly convinced that there’s an abundance of evidence for the [...]
The post Freedom: The True Perspective about Women in Ministry – Clement C. Butler appeared first on Life Is Story.
I should begin this review by saying that I’m a pastor, not a psychologist, therapist, or counselor. However, I believe that it is important for clergy to understand mental health because, in their pastoral or [...]
The post Treatment of Childhood Disorders: Evidence-Based Practice in Christian Perspective – Sarah Hall and Kelly Flanagan appeared first on Life Is Story.
For the past few years, I’ve sought an answer to the question of how white peacemakers, zealous for justice but new to the pursuit, could join with minority brothers and sisters in a way that [...]
The post Dear White Peacemakers – Osheta Moore appeared first on Life Is Story.
Christian Egalitarian Leadership is the latest book in the House of Prisca and Aquila series, an eclectic series that focuses mainly on egalitarian issues in theology. The book’s editors are Aída Besançon Spencer, Senior Professor [...]
The post Christian Egalitarian Leadership – ed. Aída Besançon Spencer and William David Spencer appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Adam Ramsey writes about the importance of knowing God through both theory and experience, instead of only prioritizing theological knowledge or emotional response. Throughout the book, he writes about different aspects of [...]
The post Truth on Fire: Gazing at God Until Your Heart Sings – Adam Ramsey appeared first on Life Is Story.
This thought-provoking book tackles the subject of technology in a unique way through its dual authorship. Jason Byassee and Andria Irwin write from their respective experiences as a digital immigrant and a digital native, and [...]
The post Following: Embodied Discipleship in a Digital Age – Jason Byassee and Andria Irwin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book shares brief reflections about how Christians who type as Fives in the Enneagram personality system can move towards a state of emotional and spiritual health in their everyday lives. The daily readings are [...]
The post Forty Days on Being a Five – Morgan Harper Nichols appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I started this book, I didn’t realize that it was by the same Andrew Wilson who wrote God of All Things, another recent release that I greatly enjoyed. Once again, I appreciated this author’s [...]
The post 1 Corinthians For You – Andrew Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I always enjoy books from the Tales that Tell the Truth series, and even though this book focuses on prayer instead of telling a particular Bible story, it is still narrative-driven. Laura Wifler opens the [...]
The post Any Time, Any Place, Any Prayer: A True Story of How You Can Talk With God – Laura Wifler and Catalina Echeverri appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I first became aware of this book, I expected it to be like the gun control threads that I have read on Twitter. The memoir element of the book greatly interested me, but I [...]
The post When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence – Taylor S. Schumann appeared first on Life Is Story.
For twenty years, Joel Rosenberg has had his finger on the pulse of the Middle East. His fiction career began with The Last Jihad where the opening scene depicts terrorists hijacking an airplane—published nine months [...]
The post Enemies and Allies – Joel Rosenberg appeared first on Life Is Story.
Growing up, I don’t think I was never explicitly told that Republicans were Christians and Democrats weren’t, but that was certainly the impression I received as a child of the 1990s. It was something I [...]
The post The Politics of the Cross – Daniel Williams appeared first on Life Is Story.
Our churches have lost a sense of community. The majority of church attenders do so for a couple hours a month and never really invest themselves into the community of the church. At other times, [...]
The post Good Works – Keith Wasserman and Christine Pohl appeared first on Life Is Story.
We are a divided and divisive people. I’m writing this review amid the United States’ tumultuous exit from Afghanistan and the day after an ISIS suicide bomber killed a dozen US military personnel and several [...]
The post I Am Not Your Enemy – Michael McRay appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Coming Race Wars was first published in 1993. It is an indictment on the United States of America that it can be republished nearly thirty years later with minimal adaptation. In many ways, we’ve [...]
The post The Coming Race Wars – William Pannell appeared first on Life Is Story.
Gender identity has become one of the most contentious social issues in contemporary culture. Unfortunately, the conversation that tends to exist about the issue is always in the realm of hyperbolic extreme. They’re conversations that [...]
The post Emerging Gender Identities – Mark Yarhouse and Julia Sadusky appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2013, Sally Gary published a memoir entitled Loves God, Likes Girls. It focused a lot on her early life, her conservative upbringing in the Church of Christ, and the tension she held between reconciling [...]
The post Affirming – Sally Gary appeared first on Life Is Story.
Any time a book promises an “honest look” at anything, especially when it does so on its cover, the reader should immediately be on guard, because non-fiction, especially historical non-fiction, should be defined by its [...]
The post Bullies and Saints – John Dickson appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Gifford Lectures are sponsored by a bequest to several Scottish universities by Adam Lord Gifford in the late 1800s. These lectures are meant to promote the thinking about and study of Natural Theology. Numerous [...]
The post In God’s Image – Michael Welker appeared first on Life Is Story.
People learn in different ways. The typical church experience is geared toward those who learn by listening (to the sermon) and reading (the Bible). That hasn’t always been the case. In the past, when most [...]
The post The Visual Word – Patrick Schreiner and Anthony Benedetto appeared first on Life Is Story.
A few years ago, Ron Sider wrote a book called If Jesus is Lord, which was a thorough and comprehensive examination of the doctrine of nonviolence. The next year, Sider worked that academic book into [...]
The post Speak Your Peace – Ron Sider appeared first on Life Is Story.
Whenever I read a physical copy of a book, I will take pictures of quotes that stood out to me and type them into a document later. As a pastor and public theologian, you never [...]
The post Born Again and Again – Megan Westra appeared first on Life Is Story.
Matt Mikalatos is one of my favorite people that I’ve never met in person. As someone with a lot of online friends, that’s not a categorization I take lightly. His words are constantly gracious, loving, [...]
The post Journey to Love – Matt Mikalatos appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 2013, I moved from rural Indiana—which had a sum total of 26 Asian people in the 2000 census—to Tulsa, Oklahoma to be the youth pastor of an Asian church. My new church had more [...]
The post Becoming All Things – Michelle Ami Reyes appeared first on Life Is Story.
This was a heavy read. It’s a needed weight. Galatians says to carry each other’s burdens and for far too long, the weight of a stolen land has been around the necks of indigenous peoples [...]
The post The Land is Not Empty – Sarah Augustine appeared first on Life Is Story.
Evangelicalism has had a rather odd relationship with the Mormon church throughout its history, ranging from outright castigation as a cult to acceptance within the pantheon of Christian denominations. Despite its growth, and despite its [...]
The post Passport to Heaven – Micah Wilder appeared first on Life Is Story.
This well-written, thoughtful book encourages Christians to think beyond their church’s specific system for group gatherings to recapture a vision of being a “close spiritual family.” Ben Connelly writes from the perspective of a church-planting [...]
The post A Field Guide for Genuine Community: 25 Days and 101 Ways to Move from Façade to Family – Ben Connelly appeared first on Life Is Story.
This quick, easy-to-read book is full of biblical perspectives and practical encouragement for people who struggle with prayer. J.D. Greear writes from his perspective as a pastor, addressing common questions that people ask at both [...]
The post Just Ask: The Joy of Confident, Bold, Patient, Relentless, Shameless, Dependent, Grateful, Powerful, Expectant Prayer – J.D. Greear appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout Holier Than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him, Jackie Hill Perry elevates her readers’ view of God, reminding us what it means for Him to be holy, sacred, transcendent, and set apart [...]
The post Holier Than Thou: How God’s Holiness Helps Us Trust Him – Jackie Hill Perry appeared first on Life Is Story.
Juni Felix encourages trauma sufferers to pursue healing over the long haul, taking tiny, gradual steps towards wellness and spiritual wholeness. Felix is forthright about her own difficult background, but shows the reader how her [...]
The post You Are Worth the Work: Moving Forward from Trauma to Faith – Juni Felix appeared first on Life Is Story.
Walter Brueggemann has long established himself as one of the most thoughtful, reflective scholars in the Christian tradition. There are few people who can make the Old Testament come to life with contemporary application like [...]
The post Delivered Out of Empire – Walter Brueggemann appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Steve Carter encourages his readers to consider the deeper reasons behind why they do what they do. As he points out in the opening chapter, no one wakes up one day and [...]
The post The Thing Beneath the Thing: What’s Hidden Inside (and What God Helps Us Do About It) – Steve Carter appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book’s introduction, Ashley Chestnut shares some of her story of how she first became invested in understanding women’s experiences with sexual sin. This all started within her discipleship circles, as girls that she [...]
The post It’s Not Just You: Freeing Women to Talk about Sexual Sin and Fight It Well – Ashley Chestnut appeared first on Life Is Story.
This timely book features chapters from different Christian women writers, beginning with Hannah Anderson. They all write about a different phrase from the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, exploring how Jesus’s counterintuitive wisdom speaks to our [...]
The post World on Fire: Walking in the Wisdom of Christ When Everyone’s Fighting About Everything – Hannah Anderson and Others appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have read both theoretical and practical Christian books about the body, but I have never before read a book that combines both focuses so well. In this book, Sam Allberry presents a theology of [...]
The post What God Has to Say about Our Bodies: How the Gospel Is Good News for Our Physical Selves – Sam Allberry appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have read many books and articles about body-image issues, and they are often quite fluffy, tending towards shallow reassurance and pulling Bible verses out of their full context to tell the reader how beautiful [...]
The post Breaking Free from Body Shame: Dare to Reclaim What God Has Named Good – Jess Connolly appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, J. Garrett Kell writes that even though most Christians trapped in sexual sin believe that they need greater willpower to overcome their problems, lasting change occurs in relationship to Christ and through [...]
The post Pure in Heart: Sexual Sin and the Promises of God – J. Garrett Kell appeared first on Life Is Story.
Dan Bowman is an author, poet, professor, husband, son, father, Christian…and autistic. While there’s opportunity to misunderstand any one of these appellations, the one most commonly—and even purposely, though often ignorantly—misunderstood is autistic. On the [...]
The post On the Spectrum – Daniel Bowman appeared first on Life Is Story.
Early on in my first long-term pastorate, I had a meeting with a parishioner who lived in the adjoining neighborhood. The overwhelming majority of the church lived outside the neighborhood and the church didn’t have [...]
The post Praying With Our Feet – Lindsey Krinks appeared first on Life Is Story.
Richard Sterns has been a leader for a long time. He’s been the president of Parker Brothers (the board game company). He’s been the CEO of Lenox (a company that makes fine china). But he’s [...]
The post Lead Like It Matters to God – Richard Sterns appeared first on Life Is Story.
Friendship and the Fathers is a unique look into the development of the early church and what it thought and wrote about friendship. Mike Aquilina relies heavily on original writings, bringing them to life through [...]
The post Friendship and the Fathers – Mike Aquilina appeared first on Life Is Story.
Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions is one of the most profound books on leadership that I’ve been privileged to read. Mark Branson and Alan Roxburgh develop a theology of leadership that stands apart as unique [...]
The post Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions – Mark Branson & Alan Roxburgh appeared first on Life Is Story.
The book of Titus is one of Paul’s most personal letters. It’s written to a young pastor on Crete charged with the leadership position of developing the church. As such, it’s a wealth of wisdom [...]
The post Leadership for Growing Churches – Clarence Bouwman appeared first on Life Is Story.
Crafted out of ten cohorts of doctor of ministry students, Leadership in the Way of the Cross is what Sherwood Lengenfelter and his classes learned from telling their own stories of ministry trials and challenges. [...]
The post Leadership in the Way of the Cross – Sherwood Lengenfelter appeared first on Life Is Story.
Martin Luther, the Great Reformer, is one of the most well-known leaders of an era and yet very little has been written specifically on his practical or theoretical outlook on leadership. Luther’s writings and his [...]
The post Luther on Leadership – ed. David Cook appeared first on Life Is Story.
If you’re a part of any Christian organization, I guarantee that you’ve heard of the term “servant leadership.” First coined in the secular sphere by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, servant leadership has become a [...]
The post Friendship Leadership – Matt Messner & Rachel McMurray Branscombe appeared first on Life Is Story.
Oof. In a competition for most provocative title, Lies My Preacher Told Me just might take first place. It’s attention-grabbing (and following the trend of the bestselling Lies My Teacher Told Me), but it’s more [...]
The post Lies My Preacher Told Me – Brent Strawn appeared first on Life Is Story.
Tony Evans has made a name for myself with his preaching, teaching, and writing. He’s been doing it long enough now that when you open a book by him, you pretty much know what you’re [...]
The post U-Turns – Tony Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
I haven’t always been the best on social media. I need to begin this review by admitting that. Ever since about 2015, social media has been divisive. I mean, life has been divisive. Politics have [...]
The post Posting Peace – Douglas Bursch appeared first on Life Is Story.
Sanctification can sometimes be reduced in popular theology to discipleship. Justification is God’s work—we are saved by grace through faith—but sanctification is sometimes perceived as “our part” of salvation. Theologian Don J. Payne tackles that [...]
The post Already Sanctified – Don Payne appeared first on Life Is Story.
This brief book posthumously publishes new reflections from David Powlison about pastoral counseling. The book opens with a foreword from Ed Welch, who writes about his personal connection with the author and the ways that [...]
The post The Pastor as Counselor: The Call for Soul Care – David Powlison and Ed Welch appeared first on Life Is Story.
If you grew up as a Christian in North America or Europe, there’s a good chance that you not only know who evangelicals are, but that you attended a church that prided itself on being [...]
The post Every Leaf, Line, and Letter – Timothy Larsen appeared first on Life Is Story.
This profoundly moving memoir tells the story of Vaneetha Rendall Risner’s life, and how God has been with her in the midst of excruciating loss, physical suffering, and emotional pain. Because of the heavy topics [...]
The post Walking Through Fire: A Memoir of Loss and Redemption – Vaneetha Rendall Risner appeared first on Life Is Story.
This quick, encouraging read is full of hard-won wisdom, engaging humor, and vivid stories. Throughout the book, Justin McRoberts challenges his readers to work towards justice, wholeness, and healing wherever they are, instead of taking [...]
The post It Is What You Make of It: Creating Something Great from What You’ve Been Given – Justin McRoberts appeared first on Life Is Story.
God of All Things features short, essay-like chapters, and each one focuses on a different common object, animal, or experience. Andrew Wilson writes about things like bread, light, donkeys, trumpets, and earthquakes, and he explores [...]
The post God of All Things: Rediscovering the Sacred in an Everyday World – Andrew Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Pastor and author Timothy Keller wrote this book on resurrection hope during 2020, and it shows in the best way possible. He defends the grounds of Christian hope in a way that is immediate and [...]
The post Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter – Timothy Keller appeared first on Life Is Story.
In 1885, Lord Adam Gifford bequeathed a sum of money to four Scottish universities to sponsor a lecture series in the field of natural theology. This field seeks to explore God (theology) through God’s creation [...]
The post In God’s Image: An Anthropology of the Spirit – Michael Welker appeared first on Life Is Story.
Probably the longest and most humbling journey in my Christian faith has been a constant development on how I use my money. I’ve been in the camp of Dave Ramsey “everybody can be a millionaire” [...]
The post Money Matters – R. Paul Stevens & Clive Lim appeared first on Life Is Story.
In my experience, churches put a whole lot more emphasis on justification than sanctification. Getting saved is the priority and takes work, but growing in faith is usually reduced to attend church, tithe, and serve [...]
The post After I Believe – James Emery White appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have watched the past few years as the prevailing cultural expression of American Christianity—white evangelicalism—has absolutely destroyed its credibility and witness. Looking back, I can tell that the cracks had been there for a [...]
The post Radiant Church – Tara Beth Leach appeared first on Life Is Story.
Evangelism has kind of gotten a bad reputation. First, you have the connection to evangelicalism—which is increasingly seen as a polarizing political identity more than a theological one. Then you have all the ways in [...]
The post Tongue-Tied – Sara Shenk appeared first on Life Is Story.
The hardest step on a long journey is the first step. In Start Where You Are, Rashawn Copeland encourages readers to forget about preparations. Don’t wait for the perfect moment. No need to get it [...]
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I have been looking forward to this book for months, and it was just as excellent and helpful as I had hoped. Why Do I Feel Like This?: Understand Your Difficult Emotions and Find Grace [...]
The post Why Do I Feel Like This?: Understand Your Difficult Emotions and Find Grace to Move Through – Peace Amadi appeared first on Life Is Story.
This simple, well-organized book shares Scriptural insight and practical ideas for how Christians can love and invest in the local church. In Love Your Church: 8 Great Things about Being a Church Member, Tony Merida [...]
The post Love Your Church: 8 Great Things about Being a Church Member – Tony Merida appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book, which is by a British pastor, shares insight for Christians who need encouragement to endure as they face personal discouragement and external opposition to their faith. Throughout Faith for Life: Inspiration From The [...]
The post Faith for Life: Inspiration From The Ordinary Heroes Of Hebrews 11 – Richard Coekin appeared first on Life Is Story.
This time last year there were a host of books being released in the new, though limited genre of “pandemic prose.” This is a genre that bears many similarities to theodicy, that is theology dealing [...]
The post We Shall be Changed – Mark D.W. Edington appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Michelle Van Loon shares personal and crowd-sourced insights into how Christians can gain wisdom and live well through their midlife transitions. Years ago, she cofounded a website about midlife, and because of [...]
The post Becoming Sage: Cultivating Meaning, Purpose, and Spirituality in Midlife – Michelle Van Loon appeared first on Life Is Story.
This straightforward, well-written book helps Christians recognize and understand the phenomenon of what Dean Inserra calls “pop Christianity” or the “new prosperity theology.” In this worldview, God exists to help us maximize our lives, fulfill [...]
The post Getting Over Yourself: Trading Believe-in-Yourself Religion for Christ-Centered Christianity – Dean Inserra appeared first on Life Is Story.
Hinge Moments. They’re the key points of opportunity that change our lives—whether we realize it or not. Some hinge moments we see coming years in advance. As a youth pastor, I helped students navigate one [...]
The post Hinge Moments – D. Michael Lindsay appeared first on Life Is Story.
I begin this review with a content warning, but also with the realization that those who need that warning are also those who need this book. Hope Beyond an Empty Cradle deals with child loss [...]
The post Hope Beyond an Empty Cradle – Hallie Scott appeared first on Life Is Story.
When my wife as was a teenager, she served as a Sunday School volunteer for a well-known megachurch. One of the children in her class had special needs and the church—though it is one of [...]
The post Disability and the Church – Lamar Hardwick appeared first on Life Is Story.
Permission to be Black wasn’t written for me, but I learned from it. Writing to Black Americans, A.D. Thomason encourages them to tear off their task, do the hard work of processing their generational trauma, [...]
The post Permission to be Black – AD Thomason appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is a solid guide to basic Christian conflict resolution. Pastor Tony Merida writes with sensitivity to the challenges that many people have experienced over the past year, especially during the COVID-19 lockdown, and [...]
The post Christ-Centered Conflict Resolution: A Guide for Turbulent Times – Tony Merida appeared first on Life Is Story.
Brave by Faith is subtitled God-sized Confidence in a Post-Christian World. The primary theme of Begg’s teaching is that, even as the world grows more secular, we should hold on to our faith because God [...]
The post Brave by Faith – Alistair Begg appeared first on Life Is Story.
Prayer doesn’t always come easy (cue some Christian shouting in the background that praying is just talking to God and that shouldn’t be hard), despite those who would tell you otherwise. Scripture even says that [...]
The post Five Things to Pray for Your Parents – Chelsea Stanley appeared first on Life Is Story.
Seven Reasons to (re)Consider Christianity isn’t the kind of book I thought it would be—and that’s a good thing. Books like this tend to rehash the same things over and over, giving readers a fairly [...]
The post Seven Reasons to Reconsider Christianity – Ben Shaw appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am not the target audience for A Brief Theology of Periods. Yet, the title intrigued me and I’m all for destigmatizing and demystifying the cultural taboos that keep us from being healthy, well-educated, confident, [...]
The post A Brief Theology of Periods – Rachel Jones appeared first on Life Is Story.
Even though I don’t listen to the radio that much anymore (you can thank podcasts, audiobooks, and the lack of a commute for that), the K-LOVE jingle will forever be imprinted in my memory from [...]
The post The Way of the Father – Michael W. Smith appeared first on Life Is Story.
This small book is about a hundred pages long, and shares succinct encouragement for people dealing with anxiety. Helen Thorne writes to an audience of both Christians and seekers, and explains how core Christian beliefs [...]
The post Hope in an Anxious World: 6 Truths for When Things Feel Overwhelming – Helen Thorne appeared first on Life Is Story.
Chris Morphew, a teacher and school chaplain from Australia, has written a series of short books to answer kids’ common questions about Christianity. Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? addresses a question essential to people’s [...]
The post Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? – Chris Morphew appeared first on Life Is Story.
Chris Morphew, a teacher and school chaplain from Australia, has written a series of short books to answer kids’ common questions about Christianity. What Happens When We Die? addresses a question that everyone asks, and [...]
The post What Happens When We Die? – Chris Morphew appeared first on Life Is Story.
Chris Morphew, a teacher and school chaplain from Australia, has written a series of short books to answer kids’ common questions about Christianity. How Do We Know Christianity Is Really True? addresses one of the [...]
The post How Do We Know Christianity Is Really True? – Chris Morphew appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is yet another evangelical book about Daniel, but Alistair Begg explores the biblical narrative in a way that keeps God at the center. Instead of focusing on key parts of the story to highlight [...]
The post Brave by Faith: God-Sized Confidence in a Post-Christian World – Alistair Begg appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Ben Shaw shares reasons why people should reconsider Christianity, or else consider it for the first time. He says that in his conversations, he has found that people often dismiss Christianity because [...]
The post Seven Reasons to (Re)Consider Christianity – Ben Shaw appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book shares brief reflections about how Christians who type as Ones in the Enneagram personality system can move towards a state of emotional and spiritual health in their everyday lives. The daily readings are [...]
The post Forty Days on Being a One – Juanita Campbell Rasmus appeared first on Life Is Story.
Forty Days on Being a Four shares brief reflections about how Christians who type as Fours in the Enneagram personality system can move towards a state of emotional and spiritual health in their everyday lives. The [...]
The post Forty Days on Being a Four – Christine Yi Suh appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this small book, Chelsea Stanley shares short, themed lists of prayer prompts. Each list is based on a particular Scripture passage or book of the Bible, and Stanley organizes each of the five points [...]
The post 5 Things to Pray for Your Parents: Prayers that Change Things for an Older Generation – Chelsea Stanley and Tim Challies appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this refreshingly realistic book, Jimmy and Kristin Scroggins explain why formulaic approaches to parenting almost always end in disappointment and frustration, and they provide an adaptable, big-picture alternative. Instead of promoting a specific formula, [...]
The post Full Circle Parenting: A Guide for Crucial Conversations – Jimmy Scroggins and Kristin Scroggins, with Leslee Bennett appeared first on Life Is Story.
In A Brief Theology of Periods, Rachel Jones shares insight into the role of periods in women’s lives. She acknowledges the widely varying range of experiences that women have based on their ages, life situations, [...]
The post A Brief Theology of Periods (Yes, Really): An Adventure for the Curious Into Bodies, Womanhood, Time, Pain and Purpose–And How to Have a Better Time of the Month – Rachel Jones appeared first on Life Is Story.
Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People is a recent entry in the 9Marks: Building Healthy Churches series. Each of these books introduces the biblical basis for a particular topic, emphasizing the value [...]
The post Corporate Worship: How the Church Gathers as God’s People – Matt Merker appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I was a teenager, I always felt suspicious of any book adapted for teens. Generally, authors watered down the original material, included stereotyped illustrations, and talked down to the reader, assuming that they would [...]
The post 10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity – Rebecca McLaughlin appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, literature professor Leland Ryken joins with writer and speaker Glenda Faye Mathes to encourage Christians to recover healthy reading habits in a digital age. In the first part of the book, they [...]
The post Recovering the Lost Art of Reading: A Quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful – Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes appeared first on Life Is Story.
Faithful Leaders and the Things That Matter Most is just over a hundred pages long, and packs a powerful punch in short form. Rico Tice writes about the importance of rightly defining success in Christian [...]
The post Faithful Leaders and the Things That Matter Most – Rico Tice appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this concise, well-organized guide to Christian hospitality, Carolyn Lacey encourages her readers to step outside of their comfort zones and welcome other people into their homes and lives. She writes about the biblical basis [...]
The post Extraordinary Hospitality (for Ordinary People) – Carolyn Lacey appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Aging with Grace: Flourishing in an Anti-Aging Culture, Sharon W. Betters and Susan Hunt share their personal stories, explore Scripture passages related to flourishing in old age, and engage with biblical narratives about faithful [...]
The post Aging with Grace: Flourishing in an Anti-Aging Culture – Sharon W. Betters and Susan Hunt appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Jen Wilkin explains that even though many people aren’t able to remember all of the Ten Commandments, much less recite them in order, they remain essential to our understanding of right living. [...]
The post Ten Words to Live By: Delighting in and Doing What God Commands – Jen Wilkin appeared first on Life Is Story.
When I think of a good death, there is a phrase and a person who comes to mind. The phrase comes from Scripture, one repeated five times throughout the Old Testament: “old and full of [...]
The post The Art of Dying – Rob Moll appeared first on Life Is Story.
Pastors should be aware that Wilson is Southern Baptist and Gospel-Driven Ministry reflects that background. In the opening pages of Wilson’s introduction to the calling and work of a pastor, he is overtly clear that [...]
The post Gospel-Driven Ministry – Jared C. Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Making of Biblical Womanhood will kill Christian evangelical patriarchy, if we let it. Unfortunately, the very premise of Beth Allison Barr’s incisive work is that we won’t—or, at least, we haven’t—in nearly two thousand [...]
The post The Making of Biblical Womanhood – Beth Allison Barr appeared first on Life Is Story.
Gayle Fisher-Stewart begins her introduction to Preaching Black Lives (Matter) with the not-so-simple question of “What is it to be Black and Christian; to be Black and Episcopalian; to be Black and a member of [...]
The post Preaching Black Lives Matter – ed. Gayle Fisher-Stewart appeared first on Life Is Story.
There is probably no bigger or more contentious discussion in the church today than issues surrounding same-sex sexual behavior and same-sex marriage. This is more than a theological issue. For many, it’s a matter of [...]
The post Marriage, Scripture, and the Church – Darrin Belousek appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is actually two books, joined together in a slipcover. Jamie Ivey wrote one and Aaron Ivey wrote the other. This is a very creative approach to a marriage book, since both spouses are [...]
The post Complement: The Surprising Beauty of Choosing Together Over Separate in Marriage – Aaron Ivey and Jamie Ivey appeared first on Life Is Story.
This beautifully designed hardback book features watercolor art and life reflections from Emily Lex, a popular blogger. In this book, Lex strikes an inviting balance between long-form focus and a series of blog posts, sharing [...]
The post Freely and Lightly: God’s Gracious Invitation to a Life of Quiet Confidence – Emily Lex appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Heart of Anger is insightful, clear, and well-organized, providing deep insight into human anger, God’s righteous anger, and the ways that Christ can change our hearts. The authors provide case studies and examples of [...]
The post The Heart of Anger: How the Bible Transforms Anger in Our Understanding and Experience – Christopher Ash and Steve Midgley appeared first on Life Is Story.
Hebrews for You is a Bible study supplement that’s clear and well-written, with a deep attention to historical context. Michael J. Kruger breaks down this complicated book of the Bible into smaller groups of verses, [...]
The post Hebrews For You – Michael J. Kruger appeared first on Life Is Story.
Like I feel most books of this era will be, Free is tinged with the collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Butcher makes references to it a couple of different times, but only matter-of-factly My [...]
The post Free – J. Kevin Butcher appeared first on Life Is Story.
Unity is something that’s hard to come by in the church. And when you think of this lack of unity, you might immediately jump to differences related to how to do ministry amid the COVID-19 [...]
The post Until Unity – Francis Chan appeared first on Life Is Story.
Tov (טוֹב): to be pleasing or good. Tov is a Hebrew word that absolutely explodes with meaning. While the word tov isn’t employed much within the book, the concepts contained in tov are explored thoroughly. [...]
The post A Church Called Tov – Laura Barringer & Scot McKnight appeared first on Life Is Story.
It was bad timing for this book to arrive when it did. The Atlanta massage shootings occurred on March 16th and this book arrived on my doorstep on March 17th. For a book with a [...]
The post More Than A Battle – Joe Rigney appeared first on Life Is Story.
True Companions: A Book for Everyone about the Relationships That See Us Through is a deep, personal, and introspective book. Kelly Flanagan’s writing is beautiful and insightful, and he shares psychological concepts with clarity and [...]
The post True Companions: A Book for Everyone about the Relationships That See Us Through – Kelly Flanagan appeared first on Life Is Story.
This book is a perfect blend of Scriptural and social reflection, as Brett McCracken describes the world around us, explains how we got here, and provides insight for how Christians can make wise decisions in [...]
The post The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World – Brett McCracken appeared first on Life Is Story.
This short book has simple, easy-to-read chapters that pastor’s wives can fit into their busy schedules. Each chapter is full of encouragement and hope, as Jani Ortlund writes from her decades of experience as a [...]
The post Help! I’m Married to My Pastor: Encouragement for Ministry Wives and Those Who Love Them – Jani Ortlund appeared first on Life Is Story.
In More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust, pastor and author Joe Rigney shares insight into how men can defeat lust and experience healing from their sin. In just [...]
The post More Than a Battle: How to Experience Victory, Freedom, and Healing from Lust – Joe Rigney appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Charitable Writing, two English professors share insight into how Christian writing programs can encourage students to glorify God and love their neighbor through their writing. Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III taught [...]
The post Charitable Writing: Cultivating Virtue Through Our Words – Richard Hughes Gibson and James Edward Beitler III appeared first on Life Is Story.
Trillia Newbell designed this book for children from the ages of eight to twelve, and invites them to consider how they can learn to love people who are different from them. She writes in an [...]
The post Creative God, Colorful Us – Trillia J. Newbell and Chase Williamson appeared first on Life Is Story.
The End of Me is a well-written, insightful book that encourages overwhelmed Christian mothers to find hope and acceptance in the gospel, instead of trying to prove themselves through their own strength. Liz Wann explains [...]
The post The End of Me: Finding Resurrection Life in the Daily Sacrifices of Motherhood – Liz Wann appeared first on Life Is Story.
Forty Days on Being a Nine shares brief reflections about how Christians who type as Nines in the Enneagram personality system can move towards a state of emotional and spiritual health in their everyday lives. [...]
The post Forty Days on Being a Nine – Marlena Graves appeared first on Life Is Story.
The real review of this book will come in six months and in the form of whether or not I have a finished manuscript, but until then, this review will have to do. The Power [...]
The post The Power of Writing It Down – Allison Fallon appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’m writing this review the day after RZIM released an initial report from their investigation that the sexual abuse allegations against the late Ravi Zacharias are truthful. I’m heartbroken. For the victims and their trauma. [...]
The post Prey Tell – Tiffany Bluhm appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep, Tish Harrison Warren shares about how the prayer of Compline encouraged her during the darkest period in her life. This was in [...]
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Chandra Crane adds a significant perspective to current conversations about race, highlighting the experiences of multiethnic and multicultural people. She writes to them directly throughout the book, while also encouraging monoethnic people of different races [...]
The post Mixed Blessing: Embracing the Fullness of Your Multiethnic Identity – Chandra Crane appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Hurting Yet Whole, Liuan Huska shares about her personal experiences with chronic illness, what she has learned from the struggle, and how her bodily pain has clarified her faith and theology. She seamlessly combines [...]
The post Hurting Yet Whole: Reconciling Body and Spirit in Chronic Pain and Illness – Liuan Huska appeared first on Life Is Story.
A few years ago, I led my high school youth group through the Everybody Always video series. We watched the first week’s video and I asked if anyone had questions. A hand shot up immediately: [...]
The post Everybody Always for Kids – Bob Goff appeared first on Life Is Story.
According to a recent CNBC poll, nearly 2/3rd (63%) of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck. More people than ever need financial help and fewer people than ever seem to be in a position to help. Many [...]
The post Faithful in Small Things – Kevin Wiebe appeared first on Life Is Story.
Christian dating books are usually exceptionally cringey, so when I say that JP Pokluda’s Outdated is only moderately cringey, please understand it as a compliment. Seriously, the sex/love/dating books that tend to get popular in [...]
The post Outdated – JP Pokluda appeared first on Life Is Story.
As I continue on my faith journey, I find myself drawing ever closer to the description of “Anabaptist.” I grew up in a Christian Church/Church of Christ, went to college/seminary at a Baptist school, then [...]
The post The Jesus Way: What is the Church – David Fitch appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Jesus Way is a series of short introductory theologies on various foundational topics written by a diverse community of pastors and scholars from the Anabaptist tradition. As I’ve grown in my own faith, I’ve [...]
The post The Jesus Way: What is God’s Mission in the World? – Juan Francisco Martinez & Jamie Pitts appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Jesus Way is a series of short, introductory volumes of Anabaptist theology. I happened upon them by accident, having been introduced to the publisher, Herald Press, through the work of Drew Hart. Whether you’re [...]
The post The Jesus Way: Who Was Jesus? – Nancy Elisabeth Bedford appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Jesus Way is a series of short introductory theologies on various foundational topics written by a diverse community of pastors and scholars from the Anabaptist tradition. As I’ve grown in my own faith, I’ve [...]
The post The Jesus Way: What is God’s Kingdom? – Cesar Garcia appeared first on Life Is Story.
Mister Rogers died on February 27, 2003. His life’s work—Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—debuted in 1968 and had its last show in 2001, both pivotal years in American history. His effect on generations of kids, now adults, [...]
The post The Mister Rogers Effect – Anita Knight Kuhnley appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am a pastor and a gymnastics coach. Over the past several years, I have seen both of these areas explode with revelations of abuse of power. Gymnastics, of course, has been rocked with physical [...]
The post Redeeming Power – Diane Langberg appeared first on Life Is Story.
A 2018 Pew Research survey found that 68% of white evangelical Protestants believe that the United States has no responsibility in accepting refugees. It’s a baffling position, given the repeated instructions in the Old Testament [...]
The post Finding Jesus at the Border – Julia Lambert Fogg appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of When You Don’t Like Your Story, Sharon Jaynes shares her personal story, showing how she overcame shame over her dysfunctional childhood household and came to see that God could use her [...]
The post When You Don’t Like Your Story: What If Your Worst Chapters Could Become Your Greatest Victories? – Sharon Jaynes appeared first on Life Is Story.
Ryan Casey Waller is a pastor and licensed psychotherapist, and in his new book, Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don’t Want to Talk About, he shares his personal story, summarizes information related to mental [...]
The post Depression, Anxiety, and Other Things We Don’t Want to Talk About – Ryan Casey Waller appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Being the Bad Guys, pastor and author Stephen McAlpine explains how Western culture came to view Christianity as repressive and dangerous, rather than simply one option among many others in a pluralistic society. He [...]
The post Being the Bad Guys: How to Live for Jesus in a World That Says You Shouldn’t – Stephen McAlpine appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Sensing God, author Joel Clarkson encourages his readers to join their intellectual knowledge of God with a deeply felt sense of His presence through beautiful and good earthly things. In the first few chapters, [...]
The post Sensing God: Experiencing the Divine in Nature, Food, Music, and Beauty – Joel Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
In An Ocean of Grace, author Tim Chester shares historic Christians’ prayers, poems, and other reflections. He designed this book as a devotional that leads up to Easter, and each day’s reading begins with a [...]
The post An Ocean of Grace: A Journey to Easter with Great Voices from the Past – Tim Chester appeared first on Life Is Story.
Thousands of years and vast cultural barriers separate the modern, Western, first-world reader from the situational and cultural context of Scripture. American Christianity, in particular, has been conditioned through centuries of colonialism and civil religion [...]
The post Misreading Scripture with Individualist Eyes – E. Randolph Richards & Richard James appeared first on Life Is Story.
Reading While Black had been on my radar for quite some time and it’s to my regret that I didn’t pick this one up earlier. While the book is hardly the first to mix exegetical, [...]
The post Reading While Black – Esau McCaulley appeared first on Life Is Story.
One of the problems that I’ve experienced within the local church is the lack of community. Or, even more specifically, the lack of the interior community of the church to engage with the exterior community [...]
The post Uncommon Church – Alvin Sanders appeared first on Life Is Story.
Charles Martin maybe best known for The Mountain Between Us, a story of survival and romance that got turned into a movie with Kate Winslet and Idris Elba in the starring roles. For his whole [...]
The post They Turned the World Upside Down – Charles Martin appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the end of Blessed are the Nones, I was left trying to determine if my feelings of unmet expectations were legitimate. It’s always difficult to criticize someone else’s story. It’s not like fiction. You [...]
The post Blessed are the Nones – Stina Kielsmeier-Cook appeared first on Life Is Story.
As a pastor I often receive any number of unsolicited books in the church office addressed to myself. Often these are missives warning against the secularization of theology or explaining why it is we have [...]
The post A Republic Under Assault – Tim Fitton appeared first on Life Is Story.
Over the past few years, I have appreciated Kaitlyn Schiess’s unique voice as a young, seminary-educated woman who is devoted to the essentials of an orthodox faith while also pushing back against false narratives that [...]
The post The Liturgy of Politics: Spiritual Formation for the Sake of Our Neighbor – Kaitlyn Schiess appeared first on Life Is Story.
Darryl Strawberry was living the dream. The first overall MLB draft pick in 1980, Strawberry quickly moved through the ranks to become a fan-favorite perennial all-star whose career track was compared to Hank Aaron. But [...]
The post Turn Your Season Around appeared first on Life Is Story.
How to Fight Racism should be required study for the white evangelical church. Jemar Tisby writes with razor-sharp clarity and precision, defining each and every one of his terms in exacting manner. Tisby doesn’t just [...]
The post How to Fight Racism – Jemar Tisby appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am a pessimist. I freely admit it. It’s difficult to not be a pessimist (in my opinion) in this day and age. Thanksgiving doesn’t come naturally for me. (Obligatory note that Thanksgiving was instituted [...]
The post The Grumbler’s Guide to Giving Thanks – Dustin Crowe appeared first on Life Is Story.
It is likely that, in some way, your life has been touched by suicide. For some, it was a family member. For others, a friend or a family member’s friend. And we can all recite [...]
The post I Understand – Vonnie Woodrick appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Kingdom Encounters, Tony Evans leads readers on a journey to seek God beneath the superficial and to develop a real, substantial, experiential relationship with their Creator. Too often, our Christian faith lives in the [...]
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I have to admit, I wasn’t quite sold on A Christmas Carol-themed Advent books. As the tradition of Advent as become more popular outside of liturgical denominations and contexts, Advent devotionals have become sought-after ways [...]
The post Keeping Christmas – Allison Pittman appeared first on Life Is Story.
The majority of Christians live in the shadows. Not that they’re “secret” Christians. Not that they don’t want to be outed as Christian. Not that they blend in with the world so much that you [...]
The post Shadow Christians – Jeff Iorg appeared first on Life Is Story.
Divorce. It’s a devastating word, particularly within the church. Divorce can bring shame or guilt. It brings stress and anxiety. It’s a cause for grief and sadness. A relationship that should never have been broken [...]
The post Whole – Vicki Losson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Back in March, the very same week that the world went into lockdown amid efforts to curtail COVID, I read through an advance copy of Max Lucado’s book You Are Never Alone. That book took [...]
The post Begin Again – Max Lucado appeared first on Life Is Story.
If I had to provide a review of Liberation is Here and convince you read Nikole Lim’s powerfully visual and poetic story of seeking justice and finding hope amid the world’s brokenness, it would be [...]
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Sex/Love/Dating books are always a bestseller in Christian markets, not because the people buying them are reading them, but because they’re giving them to their children/youth group hoping that a book will replace the difficult [...]
The post Chasing Love – Sean McDowell appeared first on Life Is Story.
After pastor and author Mel Lawrenz lost his beloved adult daughter to a traumatic medical event, he began to post some of his reflections about grief on Facebook. The reception there led him to contemplate [...]
The post A Chronicle of Grief: Finding Life After Traumatic Loss – Mel Lawrenz appeared first on Life Is Story.
Companions in the Darkness shares biographical sketches of seven different faithful Christians who endured long and recurrent periods of depression. The author, Diana Gruver, has struggled with depression herself, but even though she occasionally mentions general [...]
The post Companions in the Darkness: Seven Saints Who Struggled with Depression and Doubt – Diana Gruver appeared first on Life Is Story.
This incredibly thorough book addresses the topic of domestic abuse from a biblical lens, helping Christians understand the dynamics of abuse so that they can help women who are suffering in oppressive marriages. Darby A. [...]
The post Is It Abuse?: A Biblical Guide to Identifying Domestic Abuse and Helping Victims – Darby A. Strickland appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Awaking Wonder, homeschool education pioneer Sally Clarkson shares wisdom for parents who want to create a secure, wonder-filled home environment for their children. She emphasizes the importance of cultivating children’s sense of wonder, and [...]
The post Awaking Wonder: Opening Your Child’s Heart to the Beauty of Learning – Sally Clarkson appeared first on Life Is Story.
I have greatly enjoyed Russell Moore’s work for years, and this book was no exception. Like his other books, The Courage to Stand: Facing Your Fear without Losing Your Soul is vivid, biblical, and counter-cultural. [...]
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In Rethink Your Self, Trevin Wax explores different philosophies for self-definition, encouraging his readers to reflect on cultural ideas about being “true to yourself” instead of building their lives on culturally absorbed philosophies that they [...]
The post Rethink Your Self: The Power of Looking Up Before Looking In – Trevin Wax appeared first on Life Is Story.
New Morning Mercies has been a Paul David Tripp classic since it was first published in 2014. In his inimitable style, Tripp leads readers in short, easily-digested devotionals that are meant simply to refocus readers [...]
The post Forty Days of Grace & Faith – Paul David Tripp appeared first on Life Is Story.
Get ready for a marriage book unlike anything you’ve seen before. An Impossible Marriage is the story of Laurie and Matt Krieg and their experiences dealing with past sexual trauma, pornography addiction, and mixed-orientations within [...]
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In this short, simple book, J.D. Greear explains who Jesus is, using the titles prophesied by Isaiah to show how Jesus is our wonderful counselor, mighty God, prince of peace, and everlasting father. Greear writes [...]
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In Ruth For You: Revealing God’s Kindness and Care, pastor and author Tony Merida explores the book of Ruth through expository teaching. He goes through the biblical book from beginning to end, and also includes [...]
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In If Only, Jennie Pollock encourages Christians to find contentment within their hard circumstances, knowing that God is with them, loves them, and has their good in mind. To illustrate this, she shares her personal [...]
The post If Only: Finding Contentment in the Face of Lack and Longing – Jennie Pollock appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Sacred Overlap challenges the tribal mindsets in our culture, helping Christians see the importance of being a “both/and” people, instead of grabbing hold of one particular idea and making it mutually exclusive. J.R. Briggs does [...]
The post The Sacred Overlap: Learning to Live Faithfully in the Space Between – J.R. Briggs appeared first on Life Is Story.
Talking Back to Purity Culture involves so many loaded topics that it is hard for me to know where to begin. I have an immense respect for Rachel Joy Welcher just for taking on the [...]
The post Talking Back to Purity Culture: Rediscovering Faithful Christian Sexuality – Rachel Joy Welcher appeared first on Life Is Story.
Who Will Be a Witness? is one of those books I’ll come back to time and time again. Deeply theological yet deeply practical, Drew Hart offers an outright manifesto of the church’s need to be [...]
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I have to admit that I wasn’t sure about White Lies. I had the same feeling when I read through White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo? With so many people of color—Jemar Tisby, Brenda Salter McNeil, [...]
The post White Lies – Daniel Hill appeared first on Life Is Story.
Diane Langberg is a psychologist with decades of counseling experience. In her latest book, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church, she presents a strong call for Christians to reevaluate their understanding of [...]
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Earlier this year, I reviewed another Barnabas Piper book, and I enjoyed it so much that as soon as I learned about this book, I knew that I wanted to read it too. Once again, [...]
The post Hoping for Happiness: Turning Life’s Most Elusive Feeling into Lasting Reality – Barnabas Piper appeared first on Life Is Story.
In The Christmas We Didn’t Expect, David Mathis shares twenty-four short devotions reflecting on the birth of Christ and what it means for us. Even though I read this book in October for the purposes [...]
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Many years ago, Stacy Henagan lost her one-year-old daughter to a brain tumor after bouts of aggressive treatment. She and her husband had earnestly prayed for a miracle, but despite their pleas and continual prayer [...]
The post Breathe Again: Choosing to Believe There’s More When Life Has Left You Broken – Stacy Henagan appeared first on Life Is Story.
Brave Heroes and Bold Defenders is a sequel to Shirley Raye Redmond’s previous book about Christian women. In this collection, she shows how Christian men of different nationalities, races, and walks of life have honored God [...]
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In Disconnected, Thomas Kersting shares research data and anecdotes to show how negatively smartphones are affecting children’s mental health, social skills, and emotional development. His work as a psychotherapist has given him the opportunity to [...]
The post Disconnected: How to Protect Your Kids from the Harmful Effects of Device Dependency – Thomas Kersting appeared first on Life Is Story.
Motherhood without all the Rules is full of wisdom and encouragement for Christians moms who are struggling with comparison, judgment, and a sense of defeat. Maggie Combs pushes back against unhealthy standards in secular culture [...]
The post Motherhood Without All the Rules: Trading Stressful Standards for Gospel Truths – Maggie Combs appeared first on Life Is Story.
Courageous World Changers is a children’s level look at fifty different Christian women and their witness. Using appealing illustrations and quick, one-page biographies, Shirley Raye Redmond succinctly covers a significant amount of information about a [...]
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I grew up in a tradition that valued the intellectual aspect of Christianity. I was (and am) very truth-oriented in my approach to Christianity, something that has led to a keen interest in apologetics. But [...]
The post Love Matters More – Jared Byas appeared first on Life Is Story.
If you understand the Church, then you know that it comes in many different forms. You have the ritual and tradition and see/smell/taste physicality of high church denominations like Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. You have [...]
The post Gary Thomas – Sacred Pathways appeared first on Life Is Story.
I went into Alisa Childers’ Another Gospel not knowing how I’d feel about it. In many ways, here journey mirrors mine. Grew up deeply entrenched in conservative evangelicalism. Lived in a conservative, white bubble. And [...]
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My first interaction with the refugee crisis came in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where our local jail was being used as an ICE detention facility. Over a dozen asylees were released near midnight with only their clothes [...]
The post The House that Love Built – Sarah Jackson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Becoming Elisabeth Elliot is an authorized biography full of details from Elisabeth Elliot’s journals and diaries. I learned a lot of new information about her life, personality, relationships, and missions work, and have a whole [...]
The post Becoming Elisabeth Elliot – Ellen Vaughn appeared first on Life Is Story.
As the Enneagram has surged in popularity, so have the books that utilize it. In The Enneagram for Spiritual Formation, AJ Sherrill writes with a realistic view of the Enneagram, supporting it as a tool [...]
The post The Enneagram for Spiritual Formation: How Knowing Ourselves Can Make Us More Like Jesus – AJ Sherrill appeared first on Life Is Story.
Alisha Illian urges Christian women to stop trying to measure up to the world’s demands. She pushes back against the self-help industry that profits off women’s insecurities by telling them to work harder, wash their [...]
The post Chasing Perfect: Peace and Purpose in the Exhausting Pursuit of Something Better – Alisha Illian appeared first on Life Is Story.
In a Boat in the Middle of a Lake is a story of finding stability in Christ amid unrest. And if that isn’t a needed theme in 2020, I don’t know what is. Heartache and [...]
The post In a Boat in the Middle of a Lake – Patrick & Ruth Schwenk appeared first on Life Is Story.
The book of Proverbs is a difficult book around which to fashion a cohesive commentary. Like most ANE wisdom literature, Proverbs is a compilation of sayings that are loosely connected and function as statement of [...]
The post Proverbs for You – Kathleen Nielson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Where is God in all the Suffering? It’s a question both easy and difficult to answer. The easy answer, the typical answer, comes in the line from that old Footprints poem “It was then that [...]
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So…I’m not quite sure what to do with this book. John Lennox is a bona fide genius (PhD, DPhil, DSc, Professor Emeritus at Oxford). He’s the intellectual that comes out to dispute Dawkins, Harris, and [...]
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We all have hidden hurts. They’re the losses that we’ve buried deep within ourselves. The childhood traumas that we’ve consciously forgotten. The pent-up anger and frustration of some unmet expectations. Jon Chasteen uses the imagery [...]
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We live in a busy world. Even as technology has made our lives more productive, we’ve continued to push ourselves past normal limits in a way completely derogatory to our mental health. To push back [...]
The post Deeper Still – Linda Allcock appeared first on Life Is Story.
Experiencing a miscarriage can be one of the loneliest experiences a mother can go through. Even if the grief is shared—with friends, family, or the father—the loss for the mother is tangible in a way [...]
The post Held: 31 Biblical Reflections on God’s Comfort and Care in the Sorrow of Miscarriage appeared first on Life Is Story.
Dear White Christians is one of those books that it took me a while to get through. (My apologies to Eerdmans, who is probably convinced I forgot all about them.) In the wake of George [...]
The post Dear White Christians – Jennifer Harvey appeared first on Life Is Story.
Dr. Brenda, when are you going to talk about justice? That was the question that altered Brenda Salter McNeil’s entire paradigm of racial reconciliation. It has been her life’s pursuit for three decades. She had [...]
The post Becoming Brave – Brenda Salter McNeil appeared first on Life Is Story.
Adam Mabry begins this book with an anecdote about church members from opposite ends of the political spectrum who separately criticized him for the same sermon, incensed that he had not taken their side. He [...]
The post Stop Taking Sides: How Holding Truths in Tension Saves Us from Anxiety and Outrage – Adam Mabry appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Amy Orr-Ewing shares personal stories and theological insights, exploring the ever-difficult question of why a loving God would allow suffering, and where He is in the midst of it. She does not [...]
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In this gentle, life-affirming book, Abbey Wedgeworth shares biblical comfort and hope with other mothers who have experienced miscarriage. Wedgeworth designed Held as a devotional, organizing it around Psalm 139 and going through that chapter verse by [...]
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When I was a teenager, I attended some church youth retreats that emphasized memorizing and meditating on Scripture. I was the type of nerd who thought that this was a wonderful experience, and even though [...]
The post Deeper Still: Finding Clear Minds and Full Hearts through Biblical Meditation – Linda Allcock appeared first on Life Is Story.
There’s something comforting and familiar about a Max Lucado book. I’ve read enough that I can hear his voice and intonation in the pages. He has his distinct style down to absolute perfection. You know [...]
The post You Are Never Alone – Max Lucado appeared first on Life Is Story.
C.S. Lewis is my favorite writer and historical figure, and I love Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery novels and Christian nonfiction. As soon as I learned that this book existed, I knew that I wanted to [...]
The post Dorothy and Jack: The Transforming Friendship of Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis – Gina Dalfonzo appeared first on Life Is Story.
Christians can no longer assume that the people around them share their basic assumptions and interpretive frameworks for life, and theologian Joshua D. Chatraw encourages us to change our views of apologetic conversations to fit [...]
The post Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age – Joshua D. Chatraw appeared first on Life Is Story.
Kim Erickson’s oldest son died when he was three years old, and in the wake of that loss, she came to know God for the first time. In this book, she shares her personal testimony, [...]
The post Surviving Sorrow: A Mother’s Guide to Living with Loss – Kim Erickson appeared first on Life Is Story.
When the 2016 presidential election kicked off, I was cautiously optimistic. After having slowly grown to appreciate some aspects of Obama’s presidency, while being critical of others, I thought that both parties had an opportunity [...]
The post The Spiritual Danger of Donald Trump – ed. Ron Sider appeared first on Life Is Story.
Emo Philips was kind of a weird, surreal type of comedian in the 1970s and 80s. He was famous for his use of paraprosdokians—a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence, [...]
The post When Doctrine Divides the People of God – Rhyne Putman appeared first on Life Is Story.
It has existed since long before 2016, though that’s when it began to come into full focus for most people. The great American experiment seemed to have lost its way, lost its soul. Not just [...]
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If you’ve ever opened a Bible for any length of time, chances are that you’ve come across some weird stuff. Not weird stuff like this is my body, broken for you or weird like a [...]
The post Murder-Bears, Moonshine, and Mayhem – Luke Harrington appeared first on Life Is Story.
As COVID-19—the sociopolitical and economic arguments—continues to ravage, philosophers and theologians have also continued to pick up their pens and write their responses to a pandemic unlike anything any of us have seen. As these [...]
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I’ve always been a “writing pastor.” In my early years, I stuck woodenly to my full manuscript. In later years, I learned to deviate from and return to the script with ease, as the situation [...]
The post Writing for Life and Ministry – Brandon O’Brien appeared first on Life Is Story.
Scott Sauls’ A Gentle Answer sets out intending to explore how we can live in a way that refuses to live into what he names as a culture where hate has become “an asset.” He [...]
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In this gentle, life-affirming book, Gary Chapman and Candy McVicar provide guidance for parents who are grieving the loss of a baby. The authors primarily focus on miscarriage, stillbirth, and early infant death, but they [...]
The post Holding on to Love After You’ve Lost a Baby: The 5 Love Languages for Grieving Parents – Gary Chapman and Candy McVicar appeared first on Life Is Story.
Marilyn Vancil explains the Enneagram personality system in reference to Scripture, focusing on God’s commands for us to take off the old self and put on the new. She explains that when someone understands their [...]
The post Self to Lose, Self to Find: Using the Enneagram to Uncover Your True, God-Gifted Self – Marilyn Vancil appeared first on Life Is Story.
In A Way with Words, pastor, writer, and communications leader Daniel Darling leverages his background and skills to address the urgent topic of how Christians can engage online in a way that supports the common [...]
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In this deeply personal book, Katie Westenberg shares about her experience facing fear during a high-risk pregnancy that ended with a stillbirth. She pulls no punches in exploring the depths of pain and suffering that [...]
The post I Choose Brave: Embracing Holy Courage and Understanding Godly Fear – Katie Westenberg appeared first on Life Is Story.
Is Jesus Truly God? This is possibly the most important question that could ever be asked. Indeed, the whole of the Christian faith hinges upon how this question is answered. Every other religion as their [...]
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Can you love God and enjoy this world? It’s a question that most Christians, at some level, either feel guilty about or struggle with. Prosperity theology would respond with an unabashed yes, that God wants [...]
The post Strangely Bright – Joe Rigney appeared first on Life Is Story.
God created the family before he created the church. That line, which I first heard from Ravi Zacharias, became a guide for my time in youth ministry. The family is the central place of learning, [...]
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Religion and politics are two subjects you’re not supposed to talk about at the dinner table. Over the past few years, how those two subjects intersect and overlap has been pushed center-stage into the forum [...]
The post The Bible and the Ballot – Tremper Longman III appeared first on Life Is Story.
Most children’s devotionals I’ve read are either too guided. The correct answers are telegraphed to the student to the point of absurdity. No real thought has to be given and, therefore, nothing is ever really [...]
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I pretty much checked out of this book after chapter one. With a title like Pandemics, Plagues, and Natural Disasters, you’d think Erwin W. Lutzer’s introductory chapter “The Crisis That Changed Everything” would focus on [...]
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Two months ago, my wife and I pulled the trigger on a move we’d been planning for over two years. I had moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, seven years prior, taking on the positions of pastor [...]
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What comes to mind when you hear the term The Good Life? What is it that makes a life good? Family, friends, financial success? Is it having a job you love or enough free time [...]
The post The Good Life – Derwin Gray appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this deeply personal memoir, pastor’s wife Jennie Lusko shares hard-won wisdom about enduring through unimaginable hardship to still flourish in relationships and grow in Christ. In December 2012, her five-year-old daughter, Lenya, died in [...]
The post The Fight to Flourish: Engaging in the Struggle to Cultivate the Life You Were Born to Live – Jennie Lusko appeared first on Life Is Story.
According to the woman who wrote the foreword for Be Kind to Yourself, self-kindness is “an idea we hear very little about these days.” I laughed out loud when I read this, because from my [...]
The post Be Kind to Yourself: Releasing Frustrations and Embracing Joy – Cindy Bunch appeared first on Life Is Story.
In The Gathering Storm, R. Albert Mohler Jr attempts to expose the “storms” raging between secularism and Western Christianity, ultimately though Mohler can’t help but end by telling you exactly who you should vote for [...]
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Christian books written from a sports background have always been a staple in Christian non-fiction, usually offered as the hook to get men to step inside the Christian book section, which is often overwhelmingly—for both [...]
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I so desperately want David Platt to write a book called Plattitudes. It’d be a collection of quotes on distinctly David Platt themes: radical obedience, discipleship, anti-materialism, justice, missions work, and so on. Unfortunately for [...]
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In Living for What Really Matters, Teresa Swanstrom Anderson guides women through Philippians, drawing on both Scripture and external sources to provide spiritual, social, and political context for Paul’s writing. She provides guidance on how to [...]
The post Living for What Really Matters: 7 Weeks in the Book of Philippians – Teresa Swanstrom Anderson appeared first on Life Is Story.
From the title alone, I knew that Rediscipling the White Church: From Cheap Diversity to True Solidarity would be something I needed to read carefully and consider deeply. I grew up in a rural midwestern [...]
The post Rediscipling the White Church – David Swanson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Letters to a Young Congregation is the companion book to Letters to a Young Pastor. Where the latter was written by Eugene Peterson to his son, Eric, this is written from Eric to his congregation. [...]
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Letter-writing is a lost art. In the age of emails and voice-to-text, it should be easier than ever, but, as a society, we’ve by-and-large put such conversations to the side and focused on more disposable [...]
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In Weep with Me: How Lament Opens a Door for Racial Reconciliation, white pastor Mark Vroegop shares what he has learned from his church about how to have conversations across lines of difference without suspicion [...]
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The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help In The Pastor’s Kid: What it’s Like and How to Help, Barnabas Piper helps PKs, pastors, and church communities take an honest, hard look at [...]
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Glenna Marshall opens with an analogy about her failed garden, explaining that just like her withered tomatoes, our spiritual lives require constant cultivation in order to flourish. She challenges women to seek “everyday faithfulness,” explaining [...]
The post Everyday Faithfulness: The Beauty of Ordinary Perseverance in a Demanding World – Glenna Marshall appeared first on Life Is Story.
I write a lot. Book reviews. Ministry materials. Emails. I’ve written professionally in the past: a published book of Bible stories, a venture with NYT bestselling author Ted Dekker, and an upcoming novella. But when [...]
The post Your Story Matters – Leslie Leyland Fields appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, Sarah and Jeff Walton share their hard-won wisdom about how to sustain a healthy marriage in the midst of life’s storms. Throughout their years together, they have faced chronic illness, financial troubles, [...]
The post Together Through the Storms: Biblical Encouragements for Your Marriage When Life Hurts – Sarah Walton and Jeff Walton appeared first on Life Is Story.
At the beginning of this book, Melissa B. Kruger addresses the general topic of mentoring, explaining what it can look like for different women in different life stages. She clears away misconceptions, establishes a biblical [...]
The post Growing Together: Taking Mentoring Beyond Small Talk and Prayer Requests – Melissa B. Kruger appeared first on Life Is Story.
In This Life We Share: 52 Reflections on Journeying Well with God and Others, Maggie Wallem Rowe encourages her readers with personal stories and Scriptural reflections. As an older woman, she is fulfilling her calling [...]
The post This Life We Share: 52 Reflections on Journeying Well with God and Others – Maggie Wallem Rowe appeared first on Life Is Story.
A week after I signed up to be on the Dream Big launch team, my wife and I quit our jobs and moved across the country to pursue an adventure. Her job would allow her [...]
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The Life Essentials Interactive Study Bible is the result of a lifetime of study and well over a decade of work. Originally published in 2011 after seven years of work, Dr. Getz’s text and video [...]
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This is going to be a rather rambling review. I picked up The Myth of the American Dream on the basis of the title alone. My whole early adulthood has been spent deconstructing my distinctly [...]
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It was a struggle to write this review because, in truth, Russell Moore is one of the few people within the SBC and evangelicalism in general that I still admire. Not always agree with, but [...]
The post The Storm-Tossed Family – Russell Moore appeared first on Life Is Story.
As you might guess by the title, Mother to Son: Letters to a Black Boy on Identity and Hope, I—a white male—am not exactly the target demographic for this book. But, in another sense, I’m [...]
The post Mother to Son – Jasmine Holmes appeared first on Life Is Story.
The Cross in Four Words is a simple, compact volume of just 91 pages meant to introduce readers to the core of the Gospel message. Kevin DeYoung, Richard Coekin, and Yannick Christie-Wahab come together for [...]
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The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love and Learning, Worship and Work is an attractively designed collection of short, photo-illustrated essays. The author, Steven Garber, shares personal anecdotes related to his upbringing, other experiences, and [...]
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In Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age, Jay Y. Kim shares a unique and helpful perspective on digital culture and Christianity, arguing that when churches adopt technology [...]
The post Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age – Jay Y. Kim appeared first on Life Is Story.
“They’re like those Christian Y2K books that came out in 1999, but this time it’s actually based on a real thing.” – That’s becoming my go-to tagline for anyone asking me why I’m reading so [...]
The post 5 Things to Pray in a Global Crisis – Rachel Jones appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Stop Calling Me Beautiful: Finding Soul-Deep Strength in a Skin-Deep World, popular Christian blogger Phylicia Masonheimer encourages women to dig deep into Scripture and move past “pink fluff” in their relationships with God. She [...]
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“Suffering is coming to the edge of ourselves, to the place where we viscerally feel the truth that being human is being limited. All pain triggers a reminder, deeper than thought, buzzing through blood and [...]
The post This Too Shall Last: Finding Grace When Suffering Lingers – K.J. Ramsey appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Enough About Me: Find Lasting Joy in the Age of Self, Jen Oshman dismantles the false promises and burdensome demands of the self-help movement, encouraging women to find joy and rest in Christ. At [...]
The post Enough about Me: Find Lasting Joy in the Age of Self – Jen Oshman appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is a difficult book to review. Even though Aimee Byrd’s analysis is worth reading and thinking through, this book is a mixed bag from most denominational standpoints and biblical convictions. Also, the provocative title, [...]
The post Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: How the Church Needs to Rediscover Her Purpose – Aimee Byrd appeared first on Life Is Story.
In Saints and Scoundrels in the Story of Jesus, Nancy Guthrie explores Jesus’s life and ministry from the perspective of the different people he interacted with. The chapters have titles like “the family,” “the hypocrites,” [...]
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Anjuli Paschall encourages women to stay within the mess of their everyday lives instead of seeking shortcuts to wholeness, and since the COVID-19 shutdown requires us to literally “stay” right now, her advice on vulnerability [...]
The post Stay: Discovering Grace, Freedom, and Wholeness Where You Never Imagined Looking – Anjuli Paschall appeared first on Life Is Story.
In the introduction of this beautifully designed book, Barbara Rainey explains that during a recent period of suffering in her life, she began to write honest prayers in the spirit of the psalms, expressing her [...]
The post My Heart, Ever His: Prayers for Women – Barbara Rainey appeared first on Life Is Story.
I owe a lot to Ravi Zacharias. It was his books—Jesus Among Other Gods, first and foremost—that kindled an interest in apologetics that continue to this day. As a teenager, I spent hours on a [...]
The post Seeing Jesus from the East – Ravi Zacharias & Abdu Murray appeared first on Life Is Story.
For those of you reading this in the distant future, somehow unaware of “these unprecedented times” (which, in truth, are very precedented, just not to this generation), the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the world. [...]
The post Virus as a Summons to Faith – Walter Brueggemann appeared first on Life Is Story.
John Piper, over the course of his long career, has become an increasingly polarized figure within evangelical Christianity. I’ve long enjoyed Piper in many areas (his evisceration of the Prosperity Gospel for one) while respecting, [...]
The post Coronavirus and Christ – John Piper appeared first on Life Is Story.
Just recently, I posted a Facebook status offering some pastoral suggestion of how to handle the incoming government stimulus check. (For those of you reading this in the far future, a pandemic has shut down [...]
The post Kingdom Stewardship – Tony Evans appeared first on Life Is Story.
In In Want + Plenty, licensed professional counselor Meredith McDaniel writes about the Exodus story and about how God provided for the Israelites even when they were impatient, bitter, and didn’t know what to do [...]
The post In Want + Plenty: Waking Up to God’s Provision in a Land of Longing – Meredith McDaniel appeared first on Life Is Story.
The only criticism I have for You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies About Work, Life, and Love is that shortening the title gives you absolutely the wrong impression. But maybe that’s the [...]
The post You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies – Daniel Im appeared first on Life Is Story.
There is perhaps no bigger social and relational issue in the church right now than LGBTQ+ issues. It is imperative that our churches—pastors and laypeople—be able to define their theology of sexuality and gender identity, [...]
The post Gay Girl, Good God – Jackie Hill Perry appeared first on Life Is Story.
Shared humor is pretty much the foundation of my relationship with my wife. That’s not a joke. In 2010, three years before we were married, we both attended a Ted Dekker event where she one [...]
The post A Love That Laughs – Ted Cunningham appeared first on Life Is Story.
Why does God care who I sleep with? It’s a valid question. There are so many other big issues—war, poverty, famine, environmental disasters—why does God care so strongly about this personal and seemingly insignificant (on [...]
The post Why Does God Care Who I Sleep With? – Sam Allberry appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, British pastor Matt Fuller explores what it means to “Be True to Yourself.” He explains that even though people sometimes use this phrase to applaud integrity, those who resist peer pressure and [...]
The post Be True to Yourself: Why it doesn’t mean what you think it does (and how that can make you happy) – Matt Fuller appeared first on Life Is Story.
Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women provides a thorough Scriptural background for understanding how God values women. The first ten chapters address women’s worth throughout creation, the fall, the promise, Israel’s history, and the life, ministry, [...]
The post Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women – Elyse M. Fitzpatrick and Eric Schumacher appeared first on Life Is Story.
“Just as there’s death and life in the power of the tongue, there is death and life in the power of the touch.” In Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in [...]
The post Handle with Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry – Lore Ferguson Wilbert appeared first on Life Is Story.
There is perhaps no bigger social and relational issue in the church right now than LGBTQ+ issues. It is imperative that our churches—pastors and laypeople—be able to define their theology of sexuality and gender identity, [...]
The post Born Again This Way – Rachel Gilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Last words hold importance in culture throughout human history. They are the dying person’s final impartation to the recipient. One last declaration. One last admonition. One last request. One final articulated thought. Almost as long [...]
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The Talking Points series is a collection of short books designed to help Christians think and talk about today’s hot button issues. Coming from a mostly conservative perspective, the series is meant to help educate [...]
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Such a small book for such a big question. Do Miracles Happen Today? In a palm-sized book of about ninety pages, Tim Chester—pastor of Grace Church in Boroughbridge, UK—provides a brief apologetic for the presence [...]
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Sometimes the stories of missionaries come across to us “average Christians” as superheroic legends. It’s so great that they’re able to do that, but I never could. We gape in awe as they tell their [...]
The post The Insanity of Sacrifice – Nik Ripken appeared first on Life Is Story.
In this book, a megachurch pastor shares what he learned after a period of major personal, social, and spiritual burnout. At the beginning, Comer explains the history of American consumerism and overwork, explaining how our [...]
The post The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive in the Chaos of the Modern World – John Mark Comer appeared first on Life Is Story.
Memoirs are generally written by famous people, something Josh Roggie is decidedly not. (Sorry, Josh. Maybe someday?) But that lends a unique—or perhaps a better word is unconventional—aspect to his story. Shame: An Unconventional Memoir [...]
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Andrew Peterson is a singer-songwriter and author with a passion for helping fellow Christian artists glorify God with their talents. In Adorning the Dark, which is part memoir and part reflection on creative work, Peterson [...]
The post Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making – Andrew Peterson appeared first on Life Is Story.
Jonah is one of the most famous and misunderstand books of the Old Testament. Sunday School teachers paint it as a crazy-but-true Bible story meant for kids™. Critical scholars discount the whole thing as a [...]
The post Jonah (Gospel-Centered Life in the Bible) – Iain Duguid appeared first on Life Is Story.
I read this book immediately before embarking on 21 days of work without a day off. Bad choice. Or good choice. Probably good choice. As a bivocational pastor that also coaches gymnastics, the competition season [...]
The post Take the Day Off – Robert Morris appeared first on Life Is Story.
You would think that at the age of almost-one hundred, Betty White would be slowing down a bit. Enjoying retirement. Finally stepping out of the spotlight after a lifetime in the television business. (Literally, she [...]
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In February 2019, I embarked on a Facebook project to highlight a different African-American pastor or spiritual leader each day of the month. I subdivided the centuries into weeks, beginning in the 18th century, leaving [...]
The post Born For This – Bebe Winans appeared first on Life Is Story.
Westboro. I probably don’t even have to finish the church’s name for the images of protestors carrying signs with slurs to march through your mind’s eye. For thirty years, Westboro Baptist Church, under the leadership [...]
The post Unfollow: Loving and Leaving Westboro – Megan Phelps-Roper appeared first on Life Is Story.
Advent is a time of thoughtfulness, reflection, and renewal. It’s also a crazy and stressful time of travel, extended family, financial burdens, and every performance/recital/concert known to man. (Oh, and finals, if you’re still in [...]
The post The Gift – Glen Scrivener appeared first on Life Is Story.
In November 2018, just over a year ago, my family and I went through a disrupted adoption. We were four weeks away from moving, from my wife taking a job that would have us traveling [...]
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Features include: Hundreds of verses illustrated in ready-to-color line art Thicker white paper for enduring note-taking Lined, wide margins for notes, reflections and art Complete text of the accurate, readable and clear New International Version [...]
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In February 2019, I chose to celebrate Black History Month by highlighting an African-American pastor or religious figure every day on my Facebook page. It was an incredible experience for me to dive into the [...]
The post His Testimonies, My Heritage: Women of Color on the Word of God appeared first on Life Is Story.
I must begin this review with a confession that the existence of this books makes me a bit jealous. Here I am, a thirty-year-old seminary trained pastor with exactly zero devotionals published and yet here’s [...]
The post Above All Else – Chelsea Crockett appeared first on Life Is Story.
The old adage is true: It’s not about what you know, it’s who you know. And that used to frustrate me to an extent. Why could someone less knowledgeable, less competent, less passionate get an [...]
The post The Proximity Principle – Ken Coleman appeared first on Life Is Story.
This is not a book anyone should have to read. This decades-long memoir of sexual abuse by a man in power and the justification, equivocations, and cover-ups that only just barely ends with justice (though, [...]
The post What is A Girl Worth? – Rachael Denhollander appeared first on Life Is Story.
It took a whole recession to keep me from student loan debt. I was a middle-class kid from a small town who never really thought much about college. You go, you pay as much as [...]
The post Debt-Free Degree – Anthony O’Neal appeared first on Life Is Story.
I am redeemed, You set me free So I’ll shake off theses heavy chains And wipe away every stain now I’m not who I used to be – Redeemed, Big Daddy Weave – Big Daddy [...]
The post I am Redeemed – Mike Weaver appeared first on Life Is Story.
Anytime a pastor talks about money, the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just a bit. It’s always a bit uncomfortable. The televangelists of yesteryear, with their emphasis on giving and their [...]
The post Daily Readings from Beyond Blessed – Robert Morris appeared first on Life Is Story.
Twenty-five years ago, Francine Rivers penned a short, little Christmas novella called The Shoe Box. Simple, poignant, and powerful, that story has been a Christmas favorite for a generation. This new edition includes an Advent [...]
The post The Shoe Box (25th Anniversary Edition) | Francine Rivers appeared first on Life Is Story.
Right now, there are 123,000 children awaiting adoption in the United States alone. There were 270,000 new instances of children being placed into foster care. And yet there were only 59,400 adoptions. There is a [...]
The post Called to Care: Opening Your Heart to Vulnerable Children | Bill Blacquiere with Kris Faasse appeared first on Life Is Story.
Over a decade after the original Five Love Languages book was released, Dr. Gary Chapman found that an increasing number of people were reading the book not for marriage advice but for relationship advice in [...]
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Twenty years after Dr. Gary Chapman published The Five Love Languages, building on the success of expanding the series to singles, teens, and children, Dr. Chapman teamed up with Dr. Paul White (author of A [...]
The post The 5 Languages of Appreciation in the Workplace – Gary Chapman & Paul White appeared first on Life Is Story.
All the way back in 1992, Dr. Gary Chapman penned his first book—the culmination of a couple decades of research and experience—that has absolutely revolutionized the field of marriage counseling. The Five Love Languages posited [...]
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And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting [...]
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Every once in a while you get a hold of one of those rare, precious out of print books. This is one of those. Norm Geisler is more than well-known in the field Christian academia. [...]
The post Cosmos: Carl Sagan’s Religion – Norman Geisler appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve recently begun listening to audiobooks in my downtime, and have chosen memoirs and biographies as a good audiobook format. Non-fiction, I found to be too technical and uninteresting in audio format. Fiction was too [...]
The post A Father First – Dwyane Wade appeared first on Life Is Story.
On April 2nd 1865, Confederate forces suffered a crushing defeat as the Union army took Richmond, Virginia—the Confederate capital. General Robert E. Lee sent an urgent telegram to President Jefferson Davis: “I think it is [...]
The post A Sin by Any Other Name – Robert W. Lee appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ve been a Travis Thrasher fan for a long time and have followed him in and out of genres—horror, love story, novelization, adventure, suspense, whatever. He has a way of making stories come to life [...]
The post Never Let Go – Mac and Mary Owen with Travis Thrasher appeared first on Life Is Story.
As someone who has long cast a wary eye on Joyce Meyer’s ministry, I came to these two devotionals with a rather critical eye. Meyer edges toward the prosperity gospel in some of her teaching [...]
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Temptation. It surrounds us. Calls out to us. Makes the unthinkable seem reasonable. Burrows into our hearts and souls and threatens to destroy us unless we deal with it. Denying God, transgressing his moral law, [...]
The post Flirting with the Forbidden – Steven James appeared first on Life Is Story.
Turn on the news. Panic and chaos abound. All the popular novels? They’re of a dystopian future. Listen to the televangelists. The world is ending! (sometimes accompanied by a specific date.) Everything is getting worse. [...]
The post Unshakable Hope | Max Lucado appeared first on Life Is Story.
Max Lucado, senior pastor of Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, writes once again with such profundity in simplicity that it amazes me. Within this small book, he unfolds and answers the complex spiritual question [...]
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Chasing God | Roger Huang Roger Huang’s journey really began that fateful day in 1983 when his car broke down in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. Huang had already lived an adventurous life up [...]
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All the Places to Go | John Ortberg For reasons obvious, it’s become a popular trend to gift a graduate with a copy of Dr. Seuss’s classic Oh the Places You’ll Go! The book, for [...]
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Coming Back Stronger | Drew Brees This is the story about how the Saints – the team who won it all – almost never was. This is story about how Drew Brees – Super Bowl [...]
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