Public Theology

In this culmination of his highly acclaimed Cultural Liturgies project, James K. A. Smith examines politics through the lens of liturgy. What if, he asks, citizens are not only thinkers or believers but also lovers? Smith explores how our analysis of political institutions would look different if we viewed them as incubators of love-shaping practices—not merely governing us but forming what we love.

What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community's fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the Black church in the United States.

Jesus calls us to make disciples of all the nations. Many Christians believe this means enlisting soldiers in a culture war. But putting faith in the service of politics risks remaking God in our own image. How can the church help bring God's kingdom to earth without relying on the political structures of this world? Critiquing our idolization of the values of classical Western liberalism, Steven Félix-Jäger seeks a renewal of the church's public witness.

Praxeology, the science of human action, is a lens through which truthfulness of the world is revealed. Truth goggles, if you will. Praxeology teaches us that everything going on in our society is rooted in the wills and desires of individuals. Starting from an irrefutable set of statements about human beings, we can come to conclusions about human behavior that are true regardless of what any political ideology might assert.

Drawing on a collection of lectures that N. T. Wright delivered from 1999 to 2015, God in Public brings together the message of Jesus--in its larger biblical context--and the challenges of the contemporary public and political worlds. In this book, Wright challenges the West's response to 9/11...

John Locke's theory of toleration is generally seen as advocating the privatization of religion. This interpretation has become conventional wisdom: secularization is widely understood as entailing the privatization of religion, and the separation of religion from power. This audiobook turns that conventional wisdom on its head and argues that Locke secularizes religion, that is, makes it worldly, public, and political. In the name of diverse citizenship, Locke reconstructs religion as persuasion, speech, and fashion.

Phillip E. Johnson pries the lid off public debate about questions of ultimate concern - questions often suppressed by our society’s intellectual elite. Moving far beyond matters of creation and evolution, Johnson outlines the questions we all ought to be asking about the meaning of human history, the limits of scientific inquiry, religion and education in a pluralistic society, truth, liberty and moral choices, and God and his word, Jesus Christ.

The latest and most bitterly contested battle in the culture war is the controversy over Darwin and intelligent design. But much of what you've heard about it is wrong. Jonathan Wells, a battle-hardened veteran with doctorates in biology and theology, sets the record straight.