Telling The Whole Story

While commentaries continue to be published on the book of Revelation, few, if any, attempt to interpret the Apocalypse in light of the political, historical, and cultural setting of John's original audience. The purpose of Seven Congregations in a Roman Crucible is to provide fresh and illuminating exegesis of Revelation that takes seriously ancient literary and archaeological evidences. This book seeks to bring the reader into the world of John's Apocalypse with pictures of numerous sites and artifacts from the first and early second centuries AD. Moreover, the book also attempts to interpret John and his message through the lens of the Jewish prophetic tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, and other pertinent Second Temple works. Thus John stands in the prophetic heritage of Israel in his attempt to challenge, threaten, admonish, and praise the seven churches of Roman Asia whose members are suffering at the hands of the idolatrous Graeco-Roman culture in which they reside.

Telling the Whole Story is both a book about preaching and reading the narratives of the Hebrew Bible. John C. Holbert (PhD in Hebrew Bible) was a longtime teacher of preaching and Hebrew Bible at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, having retired in 2012 after thirty-three years. In this volume he combines his two skills of careful narrative reading and imaginative story preaching to offer the first comprehensive look at this particular kind of sermon proclamation. The reader will also find here an introduction to the long history of story preaching in the history of the church, as well as a primer both in ways to read the narratives more effectively and ways to preach several varieties of story sermons. At the heart of this book four narratives from the Hebrew Bible are exegeted and are accompanied by four story sermons based on those texts: Genesis 2-3; 1 Samuel 15; Judges 4; and Jonah. The goal of the book is to help preachers who are looking for effective ways to proclaim the gospel using narrative texts from the Hebrew Bible to allow the rich stories of the texts to sound their ancient truth to the modern world

With the many models of worship available, choosing a style to worship God can be a bit overwhelming. Is it better to go with traditional or contemporary models? Christians may find themselves asking how early believers worshiped and whether they can provide insight into how we should praise God today. Rooted in historical models and patristic church studies, Ancient-Future Worship examines how early Christian worship models can be applied to the postmodern church. Pastors and church leaders, as well as younger evangelical and emerging church groups, will find this last book in the respected Ancient-Future series an invaluable resource for authentic worship.

America is at a pivotal crossroads. The soul of our nation is at stake and in peril. A new public narrative is needed to unite Americans around common values and to counter the increasing discord and acrimony in our politics and culture. The process of healing and creating a more perfect union in our nation must start now. The moral vision of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Beloved Community, which animated and galvanized the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, provides a hopeful way forward. In A More Perfect Union, Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, reimagines a contemporary version of the Beloved Community that will inspire and unite Americans across generations, geographic and class divides, racial and gender differences, faith traditions, and ideological leanings. In the Beloved Community, neither privilege nor punishment is tied to race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or economic status, and everyone is able to realize their full potential and thrive. Building the Beloved Community requires living out a series of commitments, such as true equality, radical welcome, transformational interdependence, E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one"), environmental stewardship, nonviolence, and economic equity. By building the Beloved Community we unify the country around a shared moral vision that transcends ideology and partisanship, tapping into our most sacred civic and religious values, enabling our nation to live up to its best ideals and realize a more perfect union.

Sometimes as parents and leaders, we get so caught up in the day-to-day activities that we do to carry out our jobs, we don't see some of the places that are broken in our own lives. We often miss those spots where we need to take a closer look at ourselves. We wear masks and phony smiles, and attempt to portray that all is good when in reality... we're dying on the inside and don't know how to fix what's wrong. And worse... sometimes we don't even know what's "really" wrong until a truth is exposed.