West Of Jesus

After spending two years in bed with Lyme disease, Steven Kotler had lost everything: his health, his job, his girl, and, he was beginning to suspect, his mind. Kotler, not a religious man, suddenly found himself drawn to the sport of surfing as if it were the cornerstone of a new faith. Why, he wondered, when there was nothing left to believe in, could he begin to believe in something as unlikely as surfing? What was belief anyway? How did it work in the body, the brain, our culture, and human history? With the help of everyone from rebel surfers to rocket scientists, Kotler undertakes a three-year globetrotting quest. The results are a startling mix of big waves and bigger ideas: a surfer's journey into the biological underpinnings of belief itself.

A new approach to introducing theology As God's self-communication to humans, Jesus is the key to the human search for meaning, argues Thomas West. He therefore introduces the practice of theology through Christology. From the question of personal meaning and self-constitution and their relationship to transcendent meaning and value, he proceeds to discuss the figure and import of Jesus and then the ethical imperative engendered through encounter with him. Fresh and clear, West's book is an invitation to grapple with one's religious commitments, especially in light of recent insights in biblical studies and Continental, feminist, and liberation theologies. This new text will prove an engaging and effective introduction to theological thinking for both undergraduates and Christian adults.

We live in that final time which offers humans the clearest choice in history: the kingdom or the holocaust, Jim Douglass writes. Either end is a lightning east to west: the nuclear holocaust a lightning fire, the kingdom of Reality a lightning spirit. We will choose lightning east to west today as either nuclear fire or the kingdom of God, as either despair and annihilation or transformation through nonviolence. If we look to Jesus and Gandhi, and what they point to, we can hope to choose the lightning fire of nonviolence.

Forty years: that is how many years author Larry West can attest to placing Jesus in the driver's seat of his life while navigating on his own. His new autobiography, Forty Years with Jesus in the Back Seat, presents several stories from Larry's life where God told him to go one way and he went a different way. He accepted Jesus at a young age, but began to drift away from the Lord while working in the family business and pursuing a career as a car salesman. Larry also shares how the Lord took a back seat during his past three marriages; all actions corresponding to his rejection of Christ's call to ministry. However, something changed in Larry and he journeyed back to the Lord of his youth, realizing his need to repent, need for Jesus, and need to encourage other lukewarm Christians to get Jesus in the driver's seat.

A condensed journey through Church history that establishes the Orthodox Church as the Body of Christ, as the Church founded by the Lord Jesus in the first century as evidenced by the New Testament.

Through the years, our understanding of Jesus has been shaped by different cultural influences, and many Christians have forgotten that Jesus was a Jewish man living in a Jewish land, observing Jewish customs, and investing his life into Jewish men and women. Trading the popular, but inaccurate Western perspective of the Bible for the context in which Jesus actually ministered in 2000 years ago, author Robby Gallaty reveals the fascinating Hebraic culture, customs, and nuances many Christians have never experienced or learned about. By uncovering the teaching of the first and second century rabbis and Christian theologians, and highlighting little-known Jewish idioms and traditions, Gallaty takes Christians on a biblical journey to rediscover a forgotten Jesus from a biblical perspective, deepening your relationship with God.

Jesus' teachings have reached across two millenia, inspiring, informing, and uplifting people from all walks of life. In this elegant little volume, a noted religious publisher and biblical student has collected Jesus' key messenges, culled from the Gospels. Organized thematically, Jesus' words speak directly to contemporary lives and convey a man unlike any other man whose life contains a message for all. Engaging and nondoctrinal commentary throughout places the sayings in their historical context and drawn to this simple and beautiful rendering of Jesus' unique--an, even today, unconventional--message for the heart.