Angela N. Parker

Everyday Activism

Christian Living

“Oftentimes pastors and lay people do not know where to start when beginning an activist journey. J.W. Buck’s Everyday Activism is an answer to their prayers. Buck masterfully engages issues of power, privilege, and trauma with the gospel message of Jesus. Filled with poignant stories, questions, and takeaways, Buck’s book is one that my own white-identifying students can engage as they connect the gospel of Jesus to social justice and activist work. Buck provides an example to follow that will help many others to take their rightful place in activist work. As a Womanist Christian scholar, I appreciate Buck’s clear clarion call for white-identifying Christians to engage justice work.”

Dr.

Faithfully Dissident Daughters

Women

“Do you need to reclaim wholeness and liberation? How would the world change if we believed that God is as feminine as God is masculine? Are women’s bodies and lived experiences sacred spaces where God dwells? In Faithfully Dissident Daughters , Chelsea unflinchingly tackles such questions and produces a manifesto wherein women can put together the fragments of their faith in ways where purity culture and problematic evangelicalism have torn faith apart. This is a must-read for those who are reconstructing faith.”

Scapegoats

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“In her timely work, Jennifer Bashaw does not simply rehash René Girard’s work on scapegoats to discuss interpretation of texts pertaining to Jesus alone. Bashaw expands this research by engaging theory in order to push contemporary Christians to practice solidarity with society’s current victims. Bashaw’s work rightly demands that Christians walk in the ways of Jesus when he engages women, people in poverty, and people who are considered ‘other.’ Scapegoats is definitely a must-read for both academics and ministerial practitioners.”

Storied Witness

Theology

“While challenging biblical infallibility through engagement with their own contexts, Zilpha Elaw, Sojourner Truth, and Julia Foote left behind theological road maps for antiracist work in contemporary contexts. Kate Hanch explores these Black women’s stories in her much needed and relevant work, Storied Witness. As a white woman who recognizes her own legacy of sin that dehumanized Black women, Hanch places front and center the narratives, sermons, and memoirs of Elaw, Truth, and Foote to argue for a Trinitarian theme of humility, embodiment, and mystic spiritualism that should move all believers to relational empathy. In a day and age when empathy is under fire, I welcome Hanch’s work as another tool to fight against the callousness that seems to be overtaking present-day Christianity.”

The Moral Teachings of Jesus

Christian Living

“As a biblical scholar who has delved deeply into Pauline ethics, I see David Gushee’s The Moral Teachings of Jesus as an essential addition to the disciplines of Christian ethics and biblical scholarship. Gushee’s engagement with the ethics of Jesus is a tour de force that invites the reader to radically reorder the ways that we engage the humanity of those that we often ignore. I look forward to assigning this text in my classes.”

To Rebehold the Stars

Christian Living

“During the course of my career as a New Testament professor, students have accused me of ‘stealing’ their Jesus as I teach them to read our biblical text with critical eyes. Now I have a book to recommend where we all can redefine, reimagine, and reconstruct new language around the faith of Jesus and his example of what it means to walk the faith as modeled in the New Testament. Kudos to Tiffany Yecke Brooks for her bold endeavor that grants permission to dream big in our language of faith.”

We Are All Witnesses

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Witnessing and testimony are central to the project of Smith and Newheart’s We Are All Witnesses. Our varying contexts, journeys of faith, and life experiences demand that we adhere to their call for ‘hermeneutical humility.’ I highly recommend this book as a pedagogical model for doing biblical interpretation that is both creative and disruptive of injustice.”