Manual For Sojourners

Peter reads the messages originally addressed by God to sojourners in the Old Testament as the same messages God had for the sojourning believers of Peter's generation. No wonder Peter used these same exhortations to instruct first-century believers in the diaspora. For Peter, the Old Testament was their Scripture. For us today, the Old Testament and New Testament are our Scripture. God's messages for the faithful sojourners in the Old Testament and New Testament are the same message he has for sojourners of all generations, including ours.

Peter reads the messages originally addressed by God to sojourners in the Old Testament as the same messages God had for the sojourning believers of Peter’s generation. No wonder Peter used these same exhortations to instruct first-century believers in the diaspora. For Peter, the Old Testament was their Scripture. For us today, the Old Testament and New Testament are our Scripture. God’s messages for the faithful sojourners in the Old Testament and New Testament are the same message he has for sojourners of all generations, including ours.

Sojourners are people who venture far from home to live in a foreign place and culture. They have amazing adventures and experience significant fulfillment, but along with the adventure and fulfillment comes a unique set of stressors, losses, and struggles: struggles in understanding a different culture, a new language, a new identity and in figuring out how to balance many demands with legitimate personal needs. Fatigue is a frequent and understandable result. This workbook is designed to help the new sojourner, or an experienced one, to develop personal skills for managing the stress, mourning the losses, and crafting a lifestyle that leads to sojourner health on every level. Throughout each chapter, psychologically based coping skills are integrated with Scriptural truth and spiritual disciplines to provide a foundation for healthy cross-cultural living and effective relationships that last for the long term.

This work explores the tension in East Asia between the trend towards a convergence of legal practices in the direction of a universal model and a reassertion of local cultural practices. The trend towards convergence arises in part from 'globalisation', from 'rule of law programs' promulgated by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the Asian Development Bank, and from widespread migration in the region, whilst the opposing trend arises in part from moves to resist such 'globalisation'. This book explores a wide range of issues related to this key problem, covering China in particular, where resolving differences in conceptions about the rule of law is a key issue as China begins to integrate itself into the World Trade Organisation regime.

In 1973, nearly a decade before the height of the Moral Majority, a group of progressive activists assembled in a Chicago YMCA to strategize about how to move the nation in a more evangelical direction through political action. When they emerged, the Washington Post predicted that the new evangelical left could "shake both political and religious life in America." The following decades proved the Post both right and wrong—evangelical participation in the political sphere was intensifying, but in the end it was the religious right, not the left, that built a viable movement and mobilized electorally. How did the evangelical right gain a moral monopoly and why were evangelical progressives, who had shown such promise, left behind? In Moral Minority, the first comprehensive history of the evangelical left, David R. Swartz sets out to answer these questions, charting the rise, decline, and political legacy of this forgotten movement. Though vibrant in the late nineteenth century, progressive evangelicals were in eclipse following religious controversies of the early twentieth century, only to reemerge in the 1960s and 1970s. They stood for antiwar, civil rights, and anticonsumer principles, even as they stressed doctrinal and sexual fidelity. Politically progressive and theologically conservative, the evangelical left was also remarkably diverse, encompassing groups such as Sojourners, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Evangelicals for Social Action, and the Association for Public Justice. Swartz chronicles the efforts of evangelical progressives who expanded the concept of morality from the personal to the social and showed the way—organizationally and through political activism—to what would become the much larger and more influential evangelical right. By the 1980s, although they had witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter, the nation's first born-again president, progressive evangelicals found themselves in the political wilderness, riven by identity politics and alienated by a skeptical Democratic Party and a hostile religious right. In the twenty-first century, evangelicals of nearly all political and denominational persuasions view social engagement as a fundamental responsibility of the faithful. This most dramatic of transformations is an important legacy of the evangelical left.