Ilia Delio goes beyond the debate on evolution and intelligent design to reveal the Christ who is at the center of our lives in a complete universe. She draws on mystics and theologians to locate the love of God at the heart of a total redemptive process, not just physical but cosmic, cultural, spiritual, and taking place in human consciousness. Along the way, she offers surprising insights on issues such as artificial intelligence, technology, the search for extraterrestrial life, and, most of all, the meaning of Christ in our lives and our role as co-creators. Christ in Evolution is not an argument but a way of seeing the universe and our place in it with a vision that is "ancient but ever new.

During these last years the writer has heard clergymen again and again confess that they did not know how to present the Gospel to the younger generation. The old bases of appeal are ineffective. The fear of Hell has gone; interest in immortality itself is absent from the minds of many; the old forms of appeal seem to many too individualistic and selfish to be inspiring. Many of the questions raised by modern knowledge are not met by the theologies that were formulated before the newer discoveries were made. The writer has found that young people heartily respond to the Gospel when garbed in the dress with which he has clothed it here, and that young clergymen go forth to their work with a new sense of mission and of the dignity of their calling when they understand that they are fellow workers with God in completing the creation of the human race.

Does evolution make faith superfluous? Part One of this book looks across the whole spectrum of biology—from molecules to ecosystems to human societies—and at the fossil history of life on earth, concluding that evolution is the only explanatory concept that makes sense of it all. Doesn’t this demolish the core Christian claim that God created the entire universe? Part Two explores whether God might instead embrace that universe with love and compassion, without micromanaging or interfering. Jesus bears witness to such a God in his kingdom teaching, calling Christians to follow his example of humility, serving others, and valuing what the world considers unimportant. This suggests paths of repentance and restraint that are urgently needed in a world facing rapid climate change and likely mass extinction.

Click here to visit evolutionandchristianfaith.org "I'm an evolutionary biologist and a Christian," states Stanford professor Joan Roughgarden at the outset of her groundbreaking new book, Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist. From that perspective, she offers an elegant, deeply satisfying reconciliation of the theory of evolution and the wisdom of the Bible. Perhaps only someone with Roughgarden's unique academic standing could examine so well controversial issues such as the teaching of intelligent design in public schools, or the potential flaws in Darwin's theory of evolution. Certainly Roughgarden is uniquely suited to reference both the minutiae of scientific processes and the implication of Biblical verses. Whether the topic is mutation rates and lizards or the hidden meanings behind St. Paul's letters, Evolution and Christian Faith distils complex arguments into everyday understanding. Roughgarden has scoured the Bible and scanned the natural world, finding examples time and again, not of conflict, but of harmony. The result is an accessible and intelligent context for a Christian vision of the world that embraces science. In the ongoing debates over creationism and evolution, Evolution and Christian Faith will be seen as a work of major significance, written for contemporary readers who wonder how-or if-they can embrace scientific advances while maintaining their traditional values.

Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era.