Academic 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Story of Kullervo is the second of three non-Middle-Earth JRR Tolkien tales to receive a literary overview from noted Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger. Flieger had written several books about Tolkien and Tolkien’s legendarium, including [...]
The post The Story of Kullervo – JRR Tolkien (ed. Verlyn Flieger) appeared first on Life Is Story.
Before Tolkien was the Master of Middle-Earth, he was a humble academic specializing in medieval English literature and philology. The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun comes from this non-Middle-Earth academic side of Tolkien merging with [...]
The post The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun – JRR Tolkien (ed. Verlyn Flieger) appeared first on Life Is Story.
As I read through Leading Christian Communities, the thought I kept coming back to was that the content seemed better placed in a magazine or blog. After finishing the book, I did some research and, [...]
The post Leading Christian Communities – C. Kavin Rowe 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For new believers, the sheer number of Bible options can be overwhelming. Not only are there innumerable translations, but there are also a wide array of study Bibles for every demographic. A search on Christianbook.com [...]
The post The Second Testament – Scot McKnight 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
There are a lot of books on how to do church. And a lot of ways that the word “do” gets defined. Some books are about ecclesiology, some books are about marketing, some books are [...]
The post Adaptive Church – Dustin Benac 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 Book of Ruth (NICOT) – Peter H. W. Lau 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 Book of Deuternomy (NICOT) – Bill T. Arnold 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 Book of Numbers Second Edition (NICOT) – Timothy R. Ashley 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I grew up in a majority white, rural small town in Indiana. When I graduated from seminary, I took a youth pastor position at a primarily Asian-American church that had more Asian-Americans in the church [...]
The post Doing Asian American Theology – Daniel D. Lee appeared first on Life Is Story.
I picked up The Wonders of Creation the week after having visited Oxford. After spending the weekend running around to behold all the haunts of Tolkien and Lewis, it felt only natural to retreat with [...]
The post The Wonders of Creation – Kristen Page 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.
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.
Christian denominations vary widely about whom they will baptize and under what conditions they will baptize them. (Also in who can perform baptisms, how they should be performed, when they should be performed, the significance [...]
The post Becoming the Baptized Body – Sarah Jean Barton 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jessica Hooten Wilson challenges common misconceptions about reading fiction, arguing that even though many Christians prioritize nonfiction reading and think of stories as frivolous, reading about literary characters can spur us on to greater holiness [...]
The post The Scandal of Holiness: Renewing Your Imagination in the Company of Literary Saints – Jessica Hooten Wilson appeared first on Life Is Story.
From the beginning of the evangelical movement, the New International Commentaries have served as a premier academic resource for evangelical Bible scholars, theologians, and clergy. After an initial focus on the New Testament, the first [...]
The post The Book of Lamentations (NICOT) – John Goldingay appeared first on Life Is Story.
With evangelicalism fracturing and defined more by its politics and culture than its theological underpinnings, Denver Seminary president Mark Young surveys evangelicalism’s past to draw readers into the hope of a revitalized future. As a [...]
The post The Hope of the Gospel: Theological Education and the Next Evangelicalism – Mark S. Young appeared first on Life Is Story.
The First Nations Version is a New Testament paraphrase that retells the story of Jesus and the early church using First Nations cultural and linguistic thought patterns in order to make Scripture come alive to [...]
The post First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament 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.
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.
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.
Have you ever listened in on a conversation with two people who were definitely smarter than you? Like, you were smart enough to follow the conversation and understand most of what was being said, but [...]
The post Five Things Theologians Wish Biblical Scholars Knew – Hans Boersma appeared first on Life Is Story.
Have you ever listened in on a conversation with two people who were definitely smarter than you? Like, you were smart enough to follow the conversation and understand most of what was being said, but [...]
The post Five Things Biblical Scholars Wish Theologians Knew – Scot McKnight 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.
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.
For years, Mark Yarhouse has been the leading conservative evangelical scholar for LGBTQ+ issues. While he does not describe himself as affirming theologically, his practical academic understanding of sexual identity has led him to a [...]
The post Listening to Sexual Minorities – Mark Yarhouse with Janet Dean, Stephen Stratton, and Michael Lastoria 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.
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.
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.
It is no longer a secret that the face of Christianity is changing. It is getting browner, gayer, and more feminine. In light of this long overdue development, one must ask, what is the value [...]
The post Queering Wesley, Queering the Church – Keegan Osinski 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.
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.
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 [...]
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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.” [...]
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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.
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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.
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 [...]
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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.
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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.
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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.
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.
For longer than I’ve been alive, sexual orientation and gender identity have been at the forefront of the so-called “culture wars” and been a hot-button issue within religious and political circles. Many on the conservative [...]
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I’m writing this review the day after reports that Beth Moore is formerly leaving the Southern Baptist Convention. That’s a relevant fact because, for decades, Moore has been the SBC’s most prominent female leader. In [...]
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Finding a new Bible can be overwhelming. There are dozens of translations, with and without study notes, with and without commentary, and the list goes on. What makes the Love God Greatly Bible stand out? [...]
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Even though I am a lifelong C.S. Lewis fan, I was not aware of his published narrative poem, Dymer, until I started reading his collected journals from the 1920s. He wrote regularly then about how [...]
The post Splendour in the Dark: C. S. Lewis’s Dymer in His Life and Work – Jerry Root appeared first on Life Is Story.
Throughout this book, Quentin J. Schultze shares advice for how Christians can steward their words in a way that serves others. Although most of the advice is fairly basic, he offers a strong theological perspective [...]
The post Communicating with Grace and Virtue: Learning to Listen, Speak, Text, and Interact as a Christian – Quentin J. Schultze appeared first on Life Is Story.
One of the things that I’ve become more aware of in the past few years is that diversity and assimilation are not substitutes. Too many primarily white evangelical churches long for diversity, but what they [...]
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God on the Brain is a heavy read. Of course, the subtitle: What Cognitive Science Does (and Does Not) Tell Us about Faith, Human Nature, and the Divine could have told you that. As humans [...]
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Every church that I’ve ever worked in has struggled with its educational ministry. There’s a loose idea that we should be teaching, a general idea of how to teach, but rarely anything that coheres into [...]
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I was ten years old when I first read Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. It was my first attempt to parse an academic work. I probably didn’t understand a lot of it. [...]
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In this academic work, pastor and professor Glenn Packiam explores contemporary worship through the dual lenses of theology and sociology. He seeks to understand the reality of Christian hope through Scripture, but he also investigates [...]
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This book elevates friendship as the definitive human relationship experience. Victor Lee Austin pushes back against common secular and Christian assumptions about human nature, arguing that even though sexual love is deeply important, it is [...]
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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.
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.
The topic of the Holy Spirit can often be overwhelming. Churches and denominational traditions seem to either place the Spirit in a place of great prominence or very nearly downplay the Spirit into nonexistence, at [...]
The post The Holy Spirit (Theology for the People of God) – Gregg Allison & Andreas Kostenberger appeared first on Life Is Story.
It tends to happen every time there’s a mass shooting. Las Vegas Orlando Virginia Tech Sandy Hook El Paso Columbine (the list could go on) Reaction to these senseless deaths is swift (thoughts and prayers) [...]
The post God and Guns in America – Michael Austin appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’ll never forget the evening that my family volunteered to drive just-released refugees to the airport. Our local county jail in Oklahoma was being leased as an ICE detainment center. Asylum seekers were detained at [...]
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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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As a pastor and public theologian, one of my pet peeves in Christian culture is the moralistic way in which the Old Testament is often taught. Whether in children’s Sunday School classes or from the [...]
The post Urban Legends of the Old Testament – David Croteau & Gary Yates appeared first on Life Is Story.
I’m not exactly a Greek scholar. Languages were never my forte and I’ve been quite content in my ministry to leave the job of parsing the Greek to people more qualified. Besides, every time I [...]
The post 2 Corinthians (B&H Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament) – Colin Kruse appeared first on Life Is Story.