Walter Brueggemann

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“My venerable predecessor at Columbia Theological Seminary, James Gailey, has written a wallop of a book! His sustaining theme is 'sexuality and sin,' but he ranges broadly with an emancipated imagination over texts, contemporary critical literature, and most important, his own vivid memory and experience. Gailey has written a playful book that exhibits generosity of spirit, but compromises nothing of his critical capacity to read texts well. Readers will be led to a deep and fresh awareness of our world.”

Sex, Wives, and Warriors

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Esler shows us how to read afresh in the ancient narratives of the Old Testament. He shows us that these several plots of David and his traveling companions are saturated with old social habits and old cultural presuppositions that summon us to alertness and attentiveness. He offers us his deep learning of how stories work, how folk society functions, and how texts reveal and conceal. The outcome is a fresh invitation to textual materials that we thought we had long since mastered an exhausted. This is a welcome exercise in method that keeps its focus on plot and character in all their thickness.”

Shaping the Prayers of the People

Preaching & Worship

“This compelling study will be of immense importance to anyone who must pray in public. Wells and Kocher connect faith claims to life by attention to crafted, lyrical rhetoric — a powerful antidote to too much public prayer that is domesticated, predictable, and rote.”

Shrink

Church Leadership & Ministry

“The book is directed toward evangelicals who lust after megachurches. But I hope his book will spill over into the world of “progressive” Christians where I live. It is a good word, one that the entire church needs to hear. It draws us back to the truth enacted by Jesus.”

Simply Christian

Apologetics

“Readers will welcome such ready access to one of the fine teachers of the church.”

Singing God's Psalms

Preaching & Worship

Foreword

(wrote the foreword)

Six Biblical Plays for Contemporary Audiences

Arts & Literature

“With its emancipated imagination, the Bible clearly is intended for dramatic reperformance. Robin Gallaher Branch has well understood this and has brought her artistic sensibility to the task. The outcome is compelling scripts that will evoke many fresh performances. Her scripts provide the dramatic specificity and concreteness so crucial to the biblical plot.”

Social Justice and the Hebrew Bible, Volume Two

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“It is impossible to overstate the importance of Norman Gottwald for Old Testament study and for theological reflection more generally. By insisting on social scientific perspectives, Gottwald has decisively altered the contours of study in our discipline. In this volume, Gottwald’s singular scholarship is given a valuable summation, plus the tracing of contemporary implications of his work. A bonus is his masterful review of other significant volumes in the field. This summation of Gottwald’s contribution will serve as a reminder of his important work, and a generative opening for continuing work, both historical and contemporary.”

Solomon

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Solomon Israel’s Icon of Human Achievement”

Soul of Shame Minicourse

“Curt Thompson has written a book that is both truthful and honest: honest about our self-diminishment and truthful about alternatives. He is a shrewd observer of human reality and reads the Bible in knowing and compelling ways. The result of these qualities is a book that is potentially transformative and emancipatory for many readers. An important byproduct, in my reading, is the recognition that the church has spent much too much time on the issue of guilt. The move from guilt to shame is a move from rules that may smother to relationships that may hurt but that also have the capacity to heal. This is a wise book that knows about our present tense and our possible future.”

Spoken Worship

Prayer & Spiritual Formation

“We have only the word, but the word will do. It will do because it is true that the poem shakes the empire, that the poem heals and transforms and rescues, that the poem enters like a thief in the night and gives new life, fresh from the word and from nowhere else. There are many pressures to quiet the text, to silence this deposit of dangerous speech, to halt this outrageous practice of speaking alternative possibility. The poems, however, refuse such silence. They will sound. They sound through preachers who risk beyond prose. In the act of such risk, power is released, newness is evoked, God is praised.”

Stories of Desire and Narratives of Faith

Science & Faith

“The brothers Hunter, a medical doctor and a preacher-theologian, have written a splendid, welcome book. . . . These Jayhawk brothers have no interest in apologetics or evangelism, but invite us into the marvel of faith that expresses and responds to the deepest human craving.”

Surprised by Hope

Theology

“An important interpretive contribution to an ongoing theological-pastoral task.”

Surprised by Hope Bible Study Participant's Guide

Bible Studies & Devotionals

“An important interpretive contribution to an ongoing theological-pastoral task.”

Systematic Theology, Volume 2

Theology

“Katherine Sonderegger continues to believe in and trust the intellectual coherence of Christian doctrine in its deepest claims. Here she continues her daring work of rethinking the mystery of the Trinity and shows us how to go about a fresh articulation of that claim. While she is intimate with Thomas, Barth, and Tillich, she does her own hard work, and invites the reader to join her in that hard work. She upholds the deep claims of that doctrine and shows how they matter to the practice of the church. She refuses both the dumbed-down casualness of domesticated faith and reductionist confessionalism that is easy and safe. Her book is a welcome witness for confident faith that has no interest in accommodation to the whims of the day. Her book will have a durable life in the company of the great thinkers of the church; it will also give courage in a time when the gospel is so urgently required and so easily distorted. Much thanks to her!”

Take Heart

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“The hard work of biblical interpretation is to show the ways in which this ancient text continues to ring with contemporaneity. Gossai is a master of such interpretation who does just that work. . . The outcome is an exposition of ethical insistence that in the end empowers us to ‘walk good,’ his formula for a journey of goodness and grace, justice and kindness, compassion and care.”

Talking about Jesus

Evangelism & Missions

“David Stratton has written a winsome, accessible entry point for those who might consider Jesus afresh. He does so with an easy, good humor. He is pedagogically aware so he helps a novice reader along. . . . In all, this is a valuable, helpful vehicle for fresh conversation.”

Talking about Jesus, Small Group Study Leader Edition

Evangelism & Missions

TANAK

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

“Throughout his fruitful scholarly career, Marvin A. Sweeney has repeatedly demonstrated his alert capacity to read biblical texts in knowing and penetrating ways. Now he brings that learning to bear on an extended book–by–book reading of the Jewish Bible that is both critical and theological, making a major contribution to the interpretive task that Jews and Christians share together. Tanak is an important move beyond critical study to Jewish sources and modes of interpretation, showing how the Bible arises from and attends to Jewish faith and identity. It will be of special interest to Christian readers as well, however, who will be led into new perspectives and consequently to important theological insight about their own faith by this magnificent rendering.”

Ten

“I have read Ten with great interest. Two things in particular struck me. First the way Sean shows how the 'rules' are in the service of a relationship. And second, the way Sean weaves the commandments into real life situations with real people. The latter is a special pastoral gift.”