Naming The Powers

'The pages of this book represent the quest of a man intent on discerning the nature of structural evil in light of the biblical evidence. His experience of living for a time in Latin American and witnessing extensive social and political oppression appears to have moved him profoundly. The end result is a book that is a model of the attempt to integrate scholarship with faith.'--Clinton E. Arnold, Catalyst

In this brilliant culmination of his seminal Powers Trilogy, now reissued in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, Walter Wink explores the problem of evil today and how it relates to the New Testament concept of principalities and powers. He asks the question, "How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?" Winner of the Pax Christi Award, the Academy of Parish Clergy Book of the Year, and the Midwest Book Achievement Award for Best Religious Book.

A collection of poems explore the Native American experience at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

In our fast-paced secular world, God and theology are second-class citizens. Money, politics, sports, and science seem better suited to the hard realities of our world. As the church steeple has been eclipsed by the skyscraper as the centerpiece of the urban landscape, so has the divine realm been set aside in favor of more immediate human experience. One sad consequence of this shift is the loss of spiritual and theological bearings, most clearly evident in our inability to understand or speak about such things. If the old way of viewing the universe no longer works, something else has to replace it. The Powers That Be reclaims the divine realm as central to human existence by offering new ways of understanding our world in theological terms. Walter Wink reformulates ancient concepts, such as God and the devil, heaven and hell, angels and demons, principalities and powers, in light of our modern experience. He helps us see heaven and hell, sin and salvation, and the powers that shape our lives as tangible parts of our day-to-day experience, rather than as mysterious phantoms. Based on his reading of the Bible and analysis of the world around him, Wink creates a whole new language for talking about and to God. Equipped with this fresh world view, we can embark on a new relationship with God and our world into the next millennium.

Walter Wink's widely acclaimed trilogy from Fortress Press - Naming the Powers 0-8006-1786-X (1984), Unmasking the Powers 0-8006-1902-1 (1993), and Engaging the Powers 0-8006-2646-X (1992) - has sold over 80,000 copies. The Powers are good; the Powers are fallen; the Powers must be redeemed, says Wink; and the illustrious theologians and ethicists in this volume apply this suggestive analysis to economics, politics and government, war and peace, personal ethics and ecological and social justice.Contributors include: Ray Gingerich, Eastern Mennonite University Ted Grimsrud, Eastern Mennonite University Nancey Murphy, Fuller Theological Seminary Daniel Liechty, Illinois State University Walter Wink, Auburn Theological Seminary Willard M. Swartley, Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary Glen Stassen, Fuller Theological Seminary

Until his death in 2012, Walter Wink was one of the most influential Christian intellectuals of our time. He was a pastor and theologian, a political activist and a writer. He first becme a practitioner of active nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement in Selma Alabama, and continued to seek social justice for all under dictatorships in Chile and the apartheid in South Africa. Always through the lens of Jesus, Wink's life and work demonstrate just how important the need to understand "the Son of the Man" is in today's modern world. Wink shows us that inspiration and insight can come from any source: a Pentecostal Church in Oklahoma, dreams, Buddhist meditation centers, childhood traumas, an empty forest, illness, and the Gospels. Wink's work in social justice and his life as a theologian are inextricably entwined, finding evidence for nonviolent resistance in the Bible and seeing the need for Jesus in daily struggles. "An autobiography of my interest in Jesus, perhaps that is too ambitious," writes Wink. "What I have done here is far less grand. I have simply written down vignettes, or excerpts of my life's story that I find interesting. These autobiographical reflections are in no way exceptional. Everyone has a life story. My story may, at the very least, show why I theologically think the way that I do." Just Jesus is the jubilant autobiography of the man who sought justice in all walks of life, including his own.

The final book of the Bible, Revelation prophesies the ultimate judgement of mankind in a series of allegorical visions, grisly images and numerological predictions. According to these, empires will fall, the "Beast" will be destroyed and Christ will rule a new Jerusalem. With an introduction by Will Self.