A Theology Of The Ordinary

Radical. Crazy. Transformative and restless. Every word we read these days seems to suggest there’s a “next-best-thing,” if only we would change our comfortable, compromising lives. In fact, the greatest fear most Christians have is boredom—the sense that they are missing out on the radical life Jesus promised. One thing is certain. No one wants to be “ordinary.” Yet pastor and author Michael Horton believes that our attempts to measure our spiritual growth by our experiences, constantly seeking after the next big breakthrough, have left many Christians disillusioned and disappointed. There’s nothing wrong with an energetic faith; the danger is that we can burn ourselves out on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. What’s needed is not another program or a fresh approach to spiritual growth; it’s a renewed appreciation for the commonplace. Far from a call to low expectations and passivity, Horton invites readers to recover their sense of joy in the ordinary. He provides a guide to a sustainable discipleship that happens over the long haul—not a quick fix that leaves readers empty with unfulfilled promises. Convicting and ultimately empowering, Ordinary is not a call to do less; it’s an invitation to experience the elusive joy of the ordinary Christian life.

Christianity Today Book of the Year In the overlooked moments and routines of our day, we can become aware of God's presence in surprising ways. How do we embrace the sacred in the ordinary and the ordinary in the sacred? Framed around one typical day, this book explores life through the lens of liturgy—small practices and habits that form us. In each chapter, Tish Harrison Warren considers a common daily experience—making the bed, brushing her teeth, losing her keys. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday. Each activity is related to a spiritual practice as well as an aspect of our Sunday worship. Come and discover the holiness of your every day.

D. A. Carson's father was a pioneering church-planter and pastor in Quebec. But still, an ordinary pastor-except that he ministered during the decades that brought French Canada from the brutal challenges of persecution and imprisonment for Baptist ministers to spectacular growth and revival in the 1970s. It is a story, and an era, that few in the English-speaking world know anything about. But through Tom Carson's journals and written prayers, and the narrative and historical background supplied by his son, readers will be given a firsthand account of not only this trying time in North American church history, but of one pastor's life and times, dreams and disappointments. With words that will ring true for every person who has devoted themselves to the Lord's work, this unique book serves to remind readers that though the sacrifices of serving God are great, the sweetness of living a faithful, obedient life is greater still.

Women who want God to be more than superficially in their lives can rise above the world's expectations by becoming housewife theologians finding true meaning and true worship everyday. Great for journaling and for group discussion.

Recipient of the 1999 Christian Book of the Year award in Australia, "Seeing God in the Ordinary" is an appeal to recover the place of the imagination in the Christian life, to rediscover the use of metaphor in a prose-flattened world, to see God in the ordinary. By a careful examination of film, literature, and other aspects of contemporary culture" as well as the Gospels" the author argues for a robust faith that embraces human experience in all its forms, that is open to the intuitive, and that has the capacity to fill us with wonder and astonishment. This book helps us to hear God not so much in the whirlwind but in the still, small voice of the ordinary, everyday moments of our lives. " Ken Gire, author of "Windows of the Soul, Moments with the Savior," and "The Reflective Life" In the midst of the current flood of books on Christian spirituality, Frost explores the way in which the great themes of Christian faith are signaled and traced by specific reference points in culture. The outcome is a book not for a quick read, but for a slow, delighted pondering. Frost s particular interest is in artistic expression in poetry, film, and narrative that opens the reader and ponderer to freshness. Who would have thought that Kafka, Keets, and Harvey Keitel could show up together, but they do here. Frost has produced a probe of a world not-yet-holy, but being made so by the presence of God s holiness in the day-to-dayness of our lives. A suggestive read! " Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary, author of "Finally Comes the Poet" and "The Psalms and the Life of Faith"

Theology is not just for theologians. In our everyday lives, says Bruce Shelley, theology is nothing more than the beliefs Christians use to describe truth. It's necessary, important and accessible to all of us. To prove his point, the popular author of Christian History in Plain Language lays out the basic beliefs of our faith in an appealing, conversational style. "Throughout these chapters," Shelley says, "I have tried to imagine a long walk with a friend, new Christian or non-Christian, who jas just asked me, 'What do you mean by the Christian faith?' " Here is the answer, including the Garden and the Fall, the cross, God the Trinity and the mystery of suffering in our world. At the end of this "walk," you will know for certain: This is an extraordinary book for ordinary people.

Marilynne Robinson, Theologian of the Ordinary posits that Robinson's widely celebrated novels and essays are best understood as emerging from a foundational theology that has 'the Ordinary' as its source. Reading Robinson's published work, and drawing on an original interview with Robinson, Andrew Cunning constructs an authentically Robinsonian theology that is at once distinctly American and conversant with contemporary continental philosophy of religion. This book demonstrates that the Ordinary is the source of Robinson's writing and, as a phenomenon that opens onto a surplus of meaning, is where Robinson's notion of transcendence emerges. Robinson's theology is one centered on the material reality of the world and on the subjective nature of one's encounter with oneself and the physical stuff of existence. Arguing that the Ordinary demands an artistic response, this book reads Robinson's fiction as her theological response to the surplus of meaning in ordinary experience. Under the themes of grace, language, time and self, Cunning locates the ordinary, everyday grounding of Robinson's metaphysics.