Religion Theory

The world is full of secrets and things that have yet to be learned. We can’t imagine that everything we hear on the news and media is completely truthful. Whether things start out as a cover-up for the truth or somebody had the wrong information to begin with, there are a number of things in life that we may not know the entire story about. This book is about some of those types of things. Whether you are already a conspiracy theory buff or you’re just looking for something interesting to hear, this book can provide you with some amazing information.

In Rooted Leadership, John E. Johnson explores how Christian theology provides an overarching leadership framework and applies that theory to leadership practices. Spiritual reflection, guided by scripture, points us to the very center of leadership--God--and the purpose of leadership--that we might display his glory. All the best forms of leading take their cues from who God is, his purposes, and his ways of working with people that he has progressively revealed.

From New Year’s resolutions to Christmas consumerism, Halloween sugar rituals to birthday performance pressure, The Holiday Business walks you month-by-month through the cultural con. This isn’t a book about hating holidays. It’s about reclaiming them. It’s about seeing how sacred rituals became revenue events, how love got priced, and how freedom got scheduled. If you’ve ever felt strange about the way we celebrate —this is your permission to stop pretending.

As the 21st century marches into its third decade, our understanding of the world, and our place within it, seems to be clearer than ever. Each day brings us more and more miraculous scientific discoveries, while technology has interconnected us to an extent that our ancestors and forefathers could not have conceived. And yet, despite the collective of human knowledge lying at our fingertips, there are still a multitude of unsolved mysteries that stubbornly resist any attempts at solving them.

In our shrinking, pluralistic world, the belief that Jesus is the only way of salvation is increasingly called arrogant and even hateful. In the face of this criticism, many shrink back from affirming the global necessity of knowing and believing in Jesus. In Jesus: the Only Way to God, John Piper offers a timely plea for the evangelical church to consider what is at stake in surrendering the unique, universal place of Jesus in salvation.

We are living in an extraordinary time: a Time of Mercy. But what is mercy? What does it mean to be living in a Time of Mercy? How can we receive God’s Mercy? And how should we respond? In Doors of Mercy, authors Fr. Jeffrey Kirby and Brian Kennelly answer these important questions. They act as your tour guides on a whirlwind tour of salvation history, from Adam and Eve to the coming of the Savior, and into the present day with the beautiful story of St. Faustina and the Divine Mercy message and devotion.

On the one hand, we have traditional science, based on the premises of materialism, reductionism, and randomness, with a belief that reality consists solely of matter and energy, that everything can be measured in the laboratory or observed by a telescope. If it can't, it doesn't exist. On the other hand, we have traditional religious dogma concerning God that fails to take into account evolution, a 4.6-billion-year-old Earth, and the conflicting claims of the world's religions.

The culture of Native Americans is one of the oldest in the world. Over the centuries, the Shamans and teachers of the tribes have preserved the rich knowledge accumulated in their community in order to pass it on to the next generations. One of the many secrets they have kept is the extraordinary properties of the wheel of colors. The wheel of colors will allow you to discover the colors that are best for you, so you can realize and maximize your potential in the best possible way.

Colleges, universities, and seminaries do more than just transfer knowledge to students. They sell themselves as "experiences" that transform young people in unique ways. The conservative evangelical Protestant network of higher education has been no different. In Fundamentalist U, Adam Laats shows that these colleges have always been more than just schools; they have been vital intellectual citadels in America's culture wars. These unique institutions have defined what it has meant to be an evangelical and have reshaped the landscape of American higher education.

According to John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, God raised up Methodism in order to spread the central teaching of entire sanctification. The church has offered an unbalanced understanding of the gospel for too long. This book calls all Methodists—the spiritual descendants of the Wesleyan revival, regardless of contemporary denominational expression—back to who we have been at our best. Perfect Love provides an in-depth explanation of entire sanctification and helps listeners pursue all that God has for us.

The doctrine of the atonement lies at the heart of the Christian faith. In this book, the doctrine is examined through the lens of the social world of the first century in order to contextualize it, and answer objections to the doctrine of the atonement.

Forty years as a 4th generation member of a conservative Presbyterian "church family" didn't count for much when this author's wife had an affair and he sought council from his church shepherds. Robinson tithed his time, his talents, and his money, and church young people ate at his table at least once a week, but when he and his teenaged daughter went to their pastor and board of elders for help, they were branded as despicable liars and turned away. Eventually, even after the truth came out, they were still shown the door.

As Israel increasingly becomes the center of global Jewish life, Jews everywhere are undergoing a process of Israelization. In this important breakthrough work, Yossi Shain takes us on a sweeping and surprising journey through the history of the Jewish people, from the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE up to the modern era. Over the course of this long history, Jews have moved from a life of Diaspora, which ultimately led to destruction, to a prosperous existence in a thriving, independent nation state.

In Reality in Ruins, Dr. Jared Stacy braves the untold history of conspiracism in American evangelicalism and the anxiety at the heart of this radioactive movement that affects us all. In a new age of what he calls “Disreality,” many are left reeling in the ruins of what was once a common world, now splintered by warring ideologies, religious and political extremism, and cults of certainty. Dr. Stacy reports from the inside as someone raised and even ordained in one of the nation’s most conservative denominations.

In this candid book based on his own struggle with doubt, John Ortberg traces the line between belief and unbelief and finds that it's less a dividing line between hostile camps than a razor's edge that runs through every soul. His findings point toward the relief of being totally honest. Doubt … Questions … Honest faith … Outrageous hope … It's a chain reaction that can actually strengthen our relationship with God, and that, says Ortberg, is cause for celebration.

Aurelius Augustinus (354-430), bishop of Hippo Regius (the modern Annaba in Algeria), is considered one of the outstanding thinkers in Western Christian civilization, Catholic and Protestant alike. Particularly influential has been his pessimistic doctrine of divine predestination, which holds that only a small proportion of humanity has been selected by God for salvation, while the overwhelming majority, including all unbaptized persons, are damned. The book is for all listeners attracted to Christian doctrine.

It's time to open your eyes to the freeing power of authentic grace - grace that releases us from trying to earn God's favor, grace that liberates from the tyranny of trying to please others, grace that empowers us to pursue authentic holiness. That's what the theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin did in their own day for the people around them. Time magazine recently dubbed Calvinism as one of the top-10 ideas changing the world right now.

How did we get here? All cultures have a creation story, but a little over 150 years ago, Charles Darwin introduced a revolutionary new one. We, and all living things, exist because of the action of evolution on the first simple life form and its descendants. In How Evolution Explains Everything About Life, leading biologists and New Scientist take you on a journey of a lifetime, exploring the questions of whether life is inevitable or a one-off fluke and how it got kick-started.

After a tragic accident, Levi and his family move to his boyhood hometown for a fresh start. But starting over is more complicated than he expected. Levi soon faces challenges that threaten to turn his deepest core values upside-down. As he works to rebuild his life, he’s forced into a fight for the lives of those closest to him in the face of an unrelenting shift in society’s moral compass.

In the 1820s, two families, unknown to each other, worked on farms in the American wilderness. It seemed unlikely that the families would ever meet—and yet, they did. The son of one family, the famed actor John Wilkes Booth, killed the son of the other, President Abraham Lincoln, in the most significant assassination in American history. The murder, however, did not come without warning—in fact, it had been foretold. In the Houses of Their Dead is the first book of the many thousands written about Lincoln to focus on the president's fascination with Spiritualism.