Distinguishing between religion and spirituality, Burke offers what he calls a new way of looking at God, one centered on the idea of grace. He emphasizes a God who is looking to save the world, not a God who seems more intent on condemning certain practices . . . . For Burke, God is to be questioned, not simply obeyed. His challenging thesis will appeal to many people today who have given up on organized religion but still seek some connection to spirituality.

This book is intended to open Christians' minds up to other Christians and to help improve dialog between them. It deals with where a lot of them are coming from doctrinally, and the problems to be dealt with on both sides. There is a core to all true Christians that should bind us, but we cannot do that as long as we cannot be open with our differences and open-minded enough to understand why some people believe what they do. Mature Christians should be able to talk about the elephant in the room. I am of the firm belief that if everybody was coming from the Bible with what they believed, we would have a lot more agreement. (And the world would hate us all the more.) I certainly do not expect every Christian to agree with me on everything. It is not for nothing I call myself Hereticus.

The Christian Skeptic was written for those who are not sure if they can still call themselves Christian because they are no longer able to "drink the Kool-Aid" of orthodoxy. It is also for seekers who find the person of Jesus intriguing or compelling but who struggle with all the doctrines that surround his story. Inspired by Leslie Weatherhead's now out-of-print book The Christian Agnostic, Jody Seymour takes a fresh look at some of the basic tenets of the Christian Faith. He offers new insight into concepts such as the nature of God, the person and work of Jesus, how to read the Bible, the role of the church, and the question of whether or not Jesus really said "my way or the highway." This book will give you an opportunity to explore the faith with the windows open to some fresh air, and you may discover that being caught between belief and doubt is a good place to be.

"You can be young, passionate about Jesus Christ, surrounded by diversity, engaged in a postmodern world, reared in evangelicalism and not be an emergent Christian. In fact, I want to argue that it would be better if you weren't." The Emergent Church is a strong voice in today's Christian community. And they're talking about good things: caring for the poor, peace for all men, loving Jesus. They're doing church a new way, not content to fit the mold. Again, all good. But there's more to the movement than that. Much more. Kevin and Ted are two guys who, demographically, should be all over this movement. But they're not. And Why We're Not Emergent gives you the solid reasons why. From both a theological and an on-the-street perspective, Kevin and Ted diagnose the emerging church. They pull apart interviews, articles, books, and blogs, helping you see for yourself what it's all about.

While plenty of books related to the conversations as well as controversies surrounding the emergent church have surfaced in recent years, no comprehensive evangelical assessment of the movement has been published until now. Evangelicals Engaging Emergent draws from a broad spectrum of conservative evangelicalism to serve as a clear, informative, fair, and respectful guide for those desiring to know what “emergent” means, why it originated, where the movement is going, what issues concern emergent believers, and where they sometimes go wrong theologically. Among the dozen contributors are Norman Geisler (“A Postmodern View of Scripture”), Darrell Bock (“Emergent/Emerging Christologies”), Ed Stetzer (“The Emergent/Emerging Church: A Missiological Perspective”), and Daniel Akin (“The Emerging Church and Ethical Choices: The Corinthian Matrix”).

A thoughtful Christian theology of religions that emphasizes the no-compromise importance of faith in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in relation to others' beliefs.

In his sweeping indictment of contemporary culture and religion, Staub concludes that American popular culture is superficial and soulless and that American Christianity has devolved into its own superficiality--and only a renaissance of faith can restore the balance.

This ambitious study presents Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as the most outstanding and influential thinker of modernity—and examines the question of whether he was the "first secular Jew." A number-one bestseller in Israel, Spinoza and Other Heretics is made up of two volumes—The Marrano of Reason and The Adventures of Immanence. Yirmiyahu Yovel shows how Spinoza grounded a philosophical revolution in a radically new principle—the philosophy of immanence, or the idea that this world is all there is—and how he thereby anticipated secularization, the Enlightenment, the disintegration of ghetto life, and the rise of natural science and the liberal-democratic state. The Marrano of Reason finds the origins of the idea of immanence in the culture of Spinoza's Marrano ancestors, Jews in Spain and Portugal who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. Yovel uses their fascinating story to show how the crypto-Jewish life they maintained in the face of the Inquisition mixed Judaism and Christianity in ways that undermined both religions and led to rational skepticism and secularism. He identifies Marrano patterns that recur in Spinoza in a secularized context: a "this-worldly" disposition, a split religious identity, an opposition between inner and outer life, a quest for salvation outside official doctrines, and a gift for dual language and equivocation. This same background explains the drama of the young Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community in his native Amsterdam. Convention portrays the Amsterdam Jews as narrow-minded and fanatical, but in Yovel's vivid account they emerge as highly civilized former Marranos with cosmopolitan leanings, struggling to renew their Jewish identity and to build a "new Jerusalem" in the Netherlands.

To survey harsh criticisms against Brian Douglas McLaren (1956‒), readers gain the inaccurate impression that he is a heretical relativist who denies objective truth and logic. While McLaren’s inflammatory and provocative writing style is partly to blame, this study also suspects that his critics base much of their analyses on only small portions of his overall corpus. The result becomes a caricature of McLaren’s actual philosophy of religion. What is argued in this book is that McLaren’s philosophy of religion suggests a faith-based intersubjective relationship with the divine ought to result in an existential appropriation of Christ’s religio-ethical teachings. When subjectively internalized, this appropriation will lead to the assimilation of Jesus’ kingdom priorities, thereby transforming the believer’s identity into one that actualizes Jesus’ kingdom ideals. The hope of this book is that by tracing McLaren’s philosophy of Christian religion, future researchers will not only be able to comprehend (and perhaps empathize with) McLaren’s line of reasoning, but they will also possess a more nuanced discernment of where they agree and disagree with his overall rationale.

This book investigates the process of spiritual borrowing between the emergent church (EC) and the Christian mystical tradition. From its inception, the EC has displayed interest in mystic practices, but the exact nature of this interest or how these practices are appropriated and reinterpreted in the EC context has not been researched. My research shows that the emergent church is appropriating Christian mystic practices by investing these practices with their own theological content. The practices themselves are changed to fit in their new context, showing that EC belief shapes EC behavior. My study adds a new case study perspective to the sociological examination of the process of spiritual borrowing, especially through close inspection of how a spiritual practice changes to fit a new theological context. Additionally, my book contributes to the study of the complex relationship between belief and behavior.