An Unconventional God

Popular author Jack Levison offers a fresh take on the Holy Spirit through a careful reading of every reference to the Spirit in the Gospels. Viewed through the lens of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection, the Spirit shows up at odd times and in odd teachings--in desert sojourns, a strange saying about scorpions and snakes, and puzzling sayings about birth from above and springs from below. Grounded in scholarship, yet accessible and inviting, this companion volume to Levison's A Boundless God analyzes key aspects of Jesus's experience of the Holy Spirit, offering nuggets of insight on every page.

An illustrated children's storybook featuring people of faith who rocked the religious boat on behalf of love and justice.

We get so prescriptive with the spiritual life. We prepackage it, duplicate it, mass-produce it, insist upon it, and brag about it. We make it a formula. As a result, we tend to see God from such a narrow perspective. We box God up and compartmentalize Him into thirty minutes each morning. But in reality, He is waiting for us to realize that He invades all the parts of our days . . . if only we would pay attention. In Looking for God, Nancy Ortberg will inspire you to break away from the bland, formulaic approach to Christianity and embrace the often unexpected, at times unnerving, but always extraordinary power of God’s grace. As you journey with Nancy, you’ll find God in places you have never dreamed of looking, and you’ll experience faith on a deeper level than you have ever imagined possible.

The word rûaḥ (commonly translated as breath, wind, spirit, or Spirit) occurs in the Old Testament 378 times--more frequently than torah, shalom, or Sabbath. In this volume, a popular Old Testament scholar, whose previous books have received wide acclaim, cracks open the challenging and provocative world of the Spirit in the Old Testament, offering readers cogent yet comprehensive insights. Grounded in scholarship yet accessible and inviting, this book unlocks the world of the Spirit, plunging readers into an imaginative realm of fresh senses, sounds, and skills. The book gives readers the opportunity to recapture Israel's tenacious sense of the Spirit's energy as it was expressed by a series of vibrant verbs: blowing, breathing, coming, resting, passing, pouring, filling, cleansing, standing, and guiding. Readers will encounter in these pages all of the Old Testament expressions of the Spirit--passages that will challenge the conventional, confront the commonplace, and transport them to a world of wisdom, work, and wonder.

Passionately nonconformist spiritual reflections from an acclaimed essayist When Nancy Mairs published her "spiritual autobiography" Ordinary Time, Kathleen Norris greeted it in the New York Times Book Review as "a remarkable accomplishment," calling Mairs "a relentlessly physical writer, as fiercely committed to her art as to her spiritual development." Mairs's new book on spirituality describes the alternative brand of Catholic worship that she observes in the American Southwest. Raised Congregationalist in New England, Mairs is a convert to Catholicism. She is also feminist, radical, political activist--and all this in a church that tends to scorn her kind of progressive iconoclasm. A Dynamic God explores why and how Mairs deals with those contradictions and still identifies as Catholic (Zen Catholic, as she sometimes says), and what she finds to love in that tradition. Doctrinally, Mairs parts ways with the mainstream Church with few regrets. The people she worships with celebrate communion in each other's homes without a priest, discuss politics, and defy Church opposition. But the Catholic rituals and imaginative structures that Mairs loves shape her life. In the Latino image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for instance, she finds inspiration for a commitment to social justice. In her unmistakable, vibrant voice, she writes about sin and abundance; understanding vocation in a life circumscribed by multiple sclerosis; and celebrating life. "Early in the book, the author states that her intent is to throw wide the door for the Holy One to enter. She has done that and much more." --Spirituality and Practice "Her book is an eloquent and witty account of aspiritual quest to find the holy within and without." --Tucson Weekly

IN THE BEGINNING WHO? An Unconventional Guide to Understanding and Knowing God gives people information which may influence them to consider the God of the Book to be a pretty nice guy; and therefore decide to give Him a break and get more acquainted with Him - on a personal level. Our generation has been so effectively saturated by electro-tainment, disassembled-logic, flash-speak and hypno-marketing hype that the understanding and knowledge of God has been crowded out. In fact, it is rather reasonable that someone may ignore, avoid, or even downright reject Him as a result of all that stuff. It is also plausible that many may have rejected a god who is not the God revealed to us in the Old and New Covenants. Charles William Hamilton, Jr

The 1960s were a time of explosive religious change. In the Christian churches it was a time of innovation, from the 'new theology' and 'new morality' of Bishop Robinson to the evangelicalism of the Charismatic Movement, and of charismatic leaders, such as Pope John XXIII and Martin Luther King. But it was also a time of rapid social and cultural change when Christianity faced challenges from Eastern religions, from Marxism and feminism, and above all from new 'affluent' lifestyles. Hugh McLeod tells in detail, using oral history, how these movements and conflicts were experienced in England, but because the Sixties were an international phenomenon he also looks at other countries, especially the USA and France. McLeod explains what happened to religion in the 1960s, why it happened, and how the events of that decade shaped the rest of the 20th century.

Duquesne takes up the quest for the historical Jesus, discussing what scholars have concluded that we know about him. He analyzes textual, literary, archaeological and other scholarly findings.