Archive for the 'Contemporary Issues' Category
Christopher B. Wolf. Giving Faith a Second Chance: Restarts, Mulligans, & Do-Overs. FaithWalk, 2007. 192 pp.
An appeal to those who have felt betrayed by organized religion to give faith a second chance.
There is a perception by millions that the church doesn’t care about them and is only trying to recruit them to build its numbers. This has left many to feel forsaken by the church and, as a result, a distance from God with no compelling reason to return to the church. In this book a young pastor extends his outstretched hand to those who have left the church, acknowledging their feelings of alienation, to walk with them in their search to find a way back to God.
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Ravi Zacharias. The Grand Weaver: How God Shapes Us Through the Events of Our Lives. Zondervan, 2007. 200 pp.
With inspiring stories and thought-provoking questions, Ravi Zacharias traces the multiple threads of our lives, describing how the unseen hand of God guides our joys, our tragedies, our daily humdrum to weave a pattern of divine providence and meaning.
How differently would we live if we believed that every dimension of our lives—from the happy to the tragic to the mundane—were part of a beautiful and purposeful design in which no thread were wrongly woven? That’s what best-selling author and internationally-known apologist, Ravi Zacharias, explores in The Grand Weaver.
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Christopher Hitchens. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Hachette, 2007. 307 pp.
In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos.
With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.
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R. C. Sproul. A Taste of Heaven: Worship in the Light of Eternity. Reformation Trust, 2006. 173 pp.
Modern Christians have shown their inability to agree on where to look for God’s principles of worship. Neither pop-culture nor the status quo can provide us with satisfactory answers. We need a biblical reason for doing what we do when we worship God.
In A Taste of Heaven, Dr. R. C. Sproul searches the Scriptures, finding timeless principles from the worship practices of the Old Testament to guide worship today. God intends worship to be an unforgettable encounter between Himself and His people—a joyous experience engaging the worshiper’s entire being.
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Kenneth Poppe. Reclaiming Science from Darwinism: A Clear Understanding of Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design. Harvest House, 2006. 320 pp.
Darwinism is a 150-year-old icon that has been propped up by unproven suppositions. The scientific discoveries of the last few decades are now kicking out the props.
Dr. Kenneth Poppe is convinced the icon is ready to topple. Providing extensive scientific evidence of Darwinism’s failures, this career biology instructor uses enlightening analogies and examples to explain the theory’s problems:
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Michael Horton. Too Good to Be True: Finding Hope in a World of Hype. Zondervan, 2006. 192 pp.
The good news that God’s Word proclaims is a recipe to use in times of disaster. That is to say, it comes as a relevant announcement only to those who are in trouble for one reason or another. This book calls for more realism in facing life’s challenges and a richer view of God and his purposes to match them.
In a world of hype, we may buy into the idea that through Jesus, we’ll be healthier and wealthier as well as wiser. So what happens when we become ill, or depressed, or bankrupt? Did we do something wrong? Has God abandoned us?
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Wayne Grudem, Leland Ryken, C. John Collins, Vern Poythress, Bruce Winter. Translating Truth: The Case for Essentially Literal Bible Translation. Crossway, 2005. 160 pp.
Which translation do I choose?
In an age when there is a wide choice of English Bible translations, the issues involved in Bible translating are steadily gaining interest. Consumers often wonder what separates one Bible version from another.
The contributors to this book argue that there are significant differences between literal translations and the alternatives. The task of those who employ an essentially literal Bible translation philosophy is to produce a translation that remains faithful to the original languages, preserving as much of the original form and meaning as possible while still communicating effectively and clearly in the receptors’ languages.
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Timothy Paul Jones. Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus.” IVP, 2007. 175 pp.
“What good does it do to say that the words [of the Bible] are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language? . . . How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired? . . . We have only error-ridden copies, and the vast majority of these are centuries removed from the originals.”
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James Emery White. Serious Times: Making Your Life Matter in an Urgent Day. IVP, 2005. 192 pp.
How can we make our lives matter?
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived in serious times. And, because they chose to live serious lives, they turned the course of history.
As the modern era transitions into postmodern turbulence, we, too, find ourselves in serious times. How can we make a difference in the world around us? How can we be an influence for Christ? Most important, how can we make our lives matter?
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Ray S. Anderson. An Emergent Theology for Emerging Churches. IVP, 2006. 236 pp.
If the emerging church movement is looking for a theology, Ray Anderson offers clear and relevant theological guidance for it in this timely book.
Reaching back through time, Anderson roots an emergent theology in what happened at Antioch, where Saul (Paul) and Barnabas were set apart for a mission to establish churches outside of Jerusalem–among Gentiles who had to be reached in their own cultures. He shows how the Lord Holy Spirit himself revolutionized and inspired how the message of salvation was offered to others, and provided a model to follow.
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