Böcker utgivna av Augsburg Fortress Publishers

With simple text, bright art and a padded cover, the Frolic First Bible presents 20 Bible stories in a short and easy to read format that beginner readers can understand. The Frolic First Bible introduces toddlers to the Bible using age-appropriate language, diverse skin tones and a biblical conclusion for each story.

Seeing the contours of Christian thought about ChristThroughout the two-thousand-year span of Christian history, believers in Jesus have sought to articulate their faith and their understanding of how God works in the world. How do we, as we examine the vast and varied output of those who came before us, understand the unity and the diversity of their thinking? How do we make sense of our own thought in light of theirs? The Christian Understandings series offers to help.In this insightful volume, David H. Jensen offers an engaging tour through more than two millennia of thought on Christ. Starting with the New Testament and moving forward, Jensen outlines the myriad beliefs, developments, and questions encompassing the attempts to understand Christianity's most central--and most mysterious--figure. From the patristic portrayals to medieval Christology, from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, and into the twentieth century and beyond, Jensen presents a helpful and needed guide.

If you're religious about your coffee, you're in holy company.If you like your coffee with a bit of inspiration, a hint of humor, and a dose of insight, you'll enjoy pouring a mug full of java and curling up with Holy Grounds. Popular author and avid coffee drinker Tim Schenck brews just the right blend of the personal and historical as he explores the sometimes amusing and often profound intersection between faith and coffee.From the coffee bean's discovery by ninth-century Ethiopian Muslims to being condemned as "Satan's drink" by medieval Christians, to becoming an integral part of Passover in America, coffee has fueled prayer and shaped religious culture for generations.In Holy Grounds, Schenck explores the relationship between coffee and religion, moving from faith-based legends that have become entwined with the history of coffee to personal narrative. He takes readers on a journey through coffee farms in Central America, a pilgrimage to Seattle, coffeehouses in Rome, and a monastic community in Pennsylvania.Along the way, he examines the power of ritual, mocks bad church coffee, introduces readers to the patron saint of coffee, wonders about ethical considerations for today's faith-based coffee lovers, and explores lessons people of faith should learn from coffeehouse culture about building healthy, authentic community.

The stories of Scripture are for everyone. No exceptions.Emmy Kegler has a complicated relationship with the Bible. As a queer woman who grew up in both conservative Evangelical and progressive Protestant churches, she knows too well how Scripture can be used to wound and exclude. And yet, the stories of Scripture continue to captivate and inspire her--both as a person of faith and as a pastor to a congregation. So she set out to fall in love with the Bible, wrestling with the stories inside, where she met a God who continues to seek us out--appearing again and again as a voice, a presence, and a promise.Whenever we are pushed to the edges, our voices silenced, or our stories dismissed, God goes out after us--seeking us until we are found again. And God is seeking out those whose voices we too quickly silence and dismiss, too. Because God's story is a story of welcome and acceptance for everyone--no exceptions.Kegler shows us that even when we feel like lost and dusty coins--rusted from others' indifference, misspent and misused--God picks up a broom and sweeps every corner of creation to find us.

Identifying 10 stages of grief, this edition offers valuable insights on the emotional and physical responses people may experience during the natural process of grieving. Reflection questions help readers explore their own experience with each stage.

In this follow-up to the award-winning "Maybe God Is Like That Too, " a young girl wonders how to be a good neighbor to the dozens of people in her apartment building, the people on the street, and the other kids at the park. Full color.

"With both nuance and balance, this text provides broad coverage of various forms of Jainism and Sikhism with an arresting layout with rich colors. It offers both historical overviews and modern perspectives on Jain and Sikh beliefs and practices. The user-friendly content is enhanced by charts of religious festivals, historic timelines, updated maps, and a useful glossary."--

Five-year-old Charley gets teased for daydreaming and drawing more than his friends, but when he meets Emma, who is physically different, he needs help remembering that being different is okay.

South Asians make up one of the largest diasporas in the world and Christians form a relatively large share of it. Christians from the Indian subcontinent have successfully transplanted themselves all over the globe, and many from different faith backgrounds have embraced Christianity at overseas locations.This volume includes biblical reflections on diasporic life, charts the historical and geographical spread of South Asian Christianity, and closes with a call to missional living in diaspora. It analyzes how migrants revive Christianity in adopted host nations and ancestral homelands.This book portrays the fascinating saga of Christians of South Asian origin who have pitched their tents in the furthest corners of the globe and showcases triumphs and challenges of scattered communities. It presents the contemporary religious experiences from a plethora of discrete perspectives. It deals with issues such as community history, struggles of identity and belonging, linkage of religious and cultural traditions, preservation and adaptation of faith practices, ties between ancestral homeland and host nation, and diasporic moral dilemmas in diaspora. This book argues that human scattering amplifies diversity within Christianity and for the need for hetrogeneous unity amidst great diversities.

Intersectional Theology: An Introductory Guide offers a pathway for reflective Christians, pastors, and theologians to apply the concepts and questions of intersectionality to theology. Intersectionality is a tool for analysis, developed primarily by black feminists, to examine the causes and consequences of converging social identities (gender, race, class, sexual identity, age, ability, nation, religion) within interlocking systems of power and privilege (sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, ableism, ageism, nativism) and to foster engaged, activist work toward social justice. Applied to theology, intersectionality demands attention to the Christian thinker's own identities and location within systems of power and the value of deep consideration of complementary, competing, and even conflicting points of view that arise from the experiences and understandings of diverse people.This book provides an overview of theories of intersectionality and suggests questions of intersectionality for theology, challenging readers to imagine an intersectional church, a practice of welcome and inclusion rooted in an ecclesiology that embraces difference and centers social justice.Rather than providing a developed systematic theology, Intersectional Theology encourages readers to apply its method in their own theologizing to expand their own thinking and add their experiences to a larger theology that moves us all toward the kin-dom of God.

Renowned pastor-theologian Gregory A. Boyd tackles the Bible's biggest dilemma.The Old Testament God of wrath and violence versus the New Testament God of love and peace-it's a difference that has troubled Christians since the first century.

"A remarkable, accessible, winsome guide to the complexity of the Old Testament for any reader who does not know where to begin. This book will be a rich resource for study gorups that want to grow and are at ease with irreverence." - Walter Brueggemann - Back cover.

Riding the age wave with graceIn this inspiring book, Roland D. Martinson draws on the folk wisdom and experience of over fifty persons between the ages of sixty-two and ninety-seven. He puts this wisdom in conversation with scriptural and theological understandings of elders in the last third of life and sets forth perspectives on aging for individuals, groups, civic organizations, and congregations to utilize in developing a vital, resilient, and productive quality of life for elders.The book explores some current age-wave numbers and explores elderhood in relation to Scripture, theology, and the wisdom of "pioneers and pathfinders." Practical direction is given for conversation and action based on exploring elder identity, presence, partnerships, passions, purpose, powers, and promise.Martinson lays out a process for helping communities, including faith communities, become "vital aging centers" where elders are called to look honestly and hopefully at life's third chapter and to make it a time of discovery, adventure, and capacity. The volume will help congregations better serve the needs of elders and integrate elder wisdom and capacity in their mission and ministry.

Shoki Coe was among the first to speak of "contextualization" in theology. Coe argued that theology is not a reiteration of past formulas or doctrines but a response to the self-disclosing initiative of the living God in history and human experience. Yet he remains little known outside his native Taiwan. Wresting with God in Context introduces Coe's work and social vision and evaluates his contributions to the field of missiology and ecclesiology. Eager to offer a creative and critical witness to Christian faith, Coe worked tirelessly to liberate theology from its Western captivity and shaped a generation of theological reflection on God, culture, and history. For thousands of students and church members around the world, Shoki Coe was the spiritual father that guided their contextual theological pursuit to the living reality of God. In order to reflect on his legacy, the chapters in this volume--including original essays from Stephen Bevans, Dwight Hopkins, and Enrique Dussel--tackle the critical, methodological issues related to doing theology, reading the Scriptures, and being the church.

MLK and the Practice of SpiritualityThe scholarship on Martin Luther King Jr. is seriously lacking in terms of richly nuanced and revelatory treatments of his spirituality and spiritual life. This book addresses this neglect by focusing on King's life as a paradigm of a deep, vital, engaging, balanced, and contagious spirituality. It shows that the essence of the person King was lies in the quality of his own spiritual journey and how that translated into not only a personal devotional life of prayer, meditation, and fasting but also a public ministry that involved the uplift and empowerment of humanity. Much attention is devoted to King's spiritual leadership, to his sense of the civil rights movement as "a spiritual movement," and to his efforts to rescue humanity from what he termed a perpetual "death of the spirit." Readers encounter a figure who took seriously the personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical aspects of the Christian faith, thereby figuring prominently in recasting the very definition of spirituality in his time. King's "holistic spirituality" is presented here with a clarity and power fresh for our own generation.

Visser 't Hooft and the Shaping of Ecumenical TheologyVisser 't Hooft is, perhaps, the most distinguished figure in the modern ecumenical movement, emerging in the postwar decades as a pivotal figure. Under his leadership, the World Council of Churches was officially constituted in 1948 by 147 Protestant and Orthodox Catholic denominations, and the organization grew to include nearly 300 denominations in the following decades. Visser 't Hooft played a major role in the inclusion of churches from communist countries in the World Council, and he also sought to enlarge the role played by African, Asian, and Orthodox churches in the organization. He served as editor of the Ecumenical Review from 1948 to 1966. He was also the author of numerous books on the ecumenical movement and the nature and functions of the church.

In this first of three volumes addressing Luther's outlaw God, Steven D. Paulson considers the two "monsters" of theology, as Luther calls them: evil and predestination. He explores how these produce fear of God but can also become the great and only comforts of conscience when a preacher arrives.Luther's new distinction between God as he is preached and God without any preacher absolutely frightened all of the schools of theology that preceded it, and for that matter all that followed Luther, as well. That fear coalesced in various opponents like Eck and Latomus, but in a special way in Desiderius Erasmus.For Paulson, bad theology begins with bad preaching, and since the church is what preaching does, bad preaching hides the church under such a dark blanket that it can hardly be detected. He argues that the primary distinction of naked/clothed or unpreached/preached radiates out in all directions for Luther's theology, and shows what difference this makes for current preaching. Specifically, Paulson takes up the central question of all theology (and life): What is God's relation to the law, and the law's relation to God? Luther's answers are surprising and will change the way you preach.

Each volume in the Insights series discusses discoveries and insights gained into biblical texts from a particular approach or perspective in current scholarship. Accessible and appealing to today's students, each Insight volume discusses:-how this method, approach, or strategy was first developed and how its application has changed over time;-what current questions arise from its use;-what enduring insights it has produced; and-what questions remain for future scholarship.In this volume, Karl Allen Kuhn provides a description of what cultural anthropology is and how the discipline has impacted biblical studies. Looking at Scripture through the lens of cultural anthropology is related to social-scientific criticism, which refers to that phase of the exegetical task that analyzes the social and cultural dimensions of the text and its environmental context through the utilization of the perspectives, theories, models, and research of the social sciences.Kuhn discusses general matters garnered from cultural-anthropology interpretation that would be relevant for the study of biblical texts. He analyzes several biblical specific texts from a cultural-anthropology perspective and provides conclusions, challenges, and considerations for the future of cultural anthropology and biblical interpretation.

A title that proceeds through the canon of the Old Testament and the apocrypha, judiciously presenting the state of historical, archaeological, and literary understanding of the biblical text, and engaging the student in questions of significance and interpretation for the contemporary world.

Mihee Kim-Kort is a wife, a mom and a Presbyterian minister. And she's queer, which has brought her closer to Jesus and taught her how to love better. Outside the Lines shows us how God loves us in queer ways. When we love ourselves and our neighbors with the boundary-breaking love of God, we live out queer spirituality in the world.

You're probably missing some of the most interesting books of the Bible.In the Jewish tradition, the five books known as "The Five Scrolls" perform a central liturgical function as the texts associated with each of the major holidays. The Song of Songs is read during Passover, Ruth during Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B'av, Ecclesiastes during Sukkot, and Esther during the celebration of Purim. Together with the five books of the Torah, these texts orient Jewish life and provide the language of the faith.In the Christian tradition, by contrast, these books have largely been forgotten. Many churchgoers can't even find them in their pew Bibles. They are rarely preached, come up only occasionally in the lectionary, and are not the subject of Bible studies. Thus, their influence on the lives and theology of many Christians is entirely negligible. But they deserve much more attention. With scholarly wisdom and a quick wit, Williamson insists that these books speak urgently to the pressing issues of the contemporary world. Addressing themes of human sexuality, grief, immigration, suffering and protest, ethnic nationalism, and existential dread, he skillfully guides readers as they rediscover the relevance of the Five Scrolls for today.

It is time for the Holy Spirit to get its own street cred! There shall be no more third-wheeling the ever-present, life-sustaining, and empowering member of the Trinity. In this guide to the Spirit, Kim is putting the Holy Ghost back where it belongs; after all, the Spirit gave birth to the church and kept it rocking, rolling, revivaling, and transforming across time and culture. Throughout the book, you will get a taste of the different ways the church has understood the Spirit, partnered with the Paraclete, and imaged the Spirit in scripture. Most importantly, Kim brings together the tradition with contemporary culture, science, and the many tongues and testimonies of the global church.The compelling power of this volume comes from the creative interplay Kim orchestrates between images such as the Spirit as vibration, breath, and light and her powerful unpacking of different images such as the releaser of han, a Korean term for unjust suffering, or the concept of Chi. This isn't simply a guide to what the church is saying about the Holy Spirit--it's a guide to actually opening our theological imaginations to a Spirit that is present, active, and calling us to participate in life-giving work.