Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

Feasts for the Kingdom

Preaching & Worship

“Opening the riches of Eastern Christianity to Christians of all traditions, Khaled Anatolios’s Feasts for the Kingdom rehabilitates the sermon as a true theological genre, to the benefit of both preaching and theology. These sermons are saturated with sophisticated reflection on Scripture and tradition yet are crafted in a way that makes theology accessible and life-giving.”

Two Guides for the Journey

Theology

“By pairing Thomas Aquinas and William Langland, Sheryl Overmyer accomplishes a number of things. She shows that, contrary to the claims of some, a moral theology focused on the virtues did not disappear after Aquinas (only to be revived in our own day) but continued on in such fourteenth-century authors as Langland. She also shows how such a moral theology can be carried on either in Aquinas's dialectical mode or in Langland's poetic and allegorical mode, and the difference that such approaches can make. Perhaps most importantly, she introduces Langland into contemporary discussion of virtue as a figure whose poetic form complements Aquinas's dialectical approach by highlighting the difficult and messy path that virtue takes in the actual lives of Christians.”

Unnatural Death

Theology

“God did not make death” (Wis 1:13) and that “death came through sin” (Rom 5:13) be squared with what seems evident from evolutionary science: that death not only long predated the appearance of human beings on earth, but also is itself integral to the emergence of the human species, as a part of the process of natural selection? Many theologians, without rejecting evolution, have managed to avoid grasping the nettle of this challenge, or if they have, they have tended to presume that the Christian tradition offers scant resources for addressing it. In Unnatural Death, Philip Porter takes up this challenge by turning to figures in the Christian tradition—Augustine, above all—to address how death can haunt all creaturely existence from the outset and yet still not be “natural.” This genre-defying book manages to be at once philosophical, historical, and literary, but above all, theological, inquiring into God and God’s ways with the world.”