The American evangelical church today faces profound political and cultural challenges. It is vitally important for the church to understand these challenges more fully and to think about them more theologically. It is also important for the church to repent of how we have failed to be the edifying and countercultural influence we ought to be, and craft an approach to public and political life that bears authentic and life-giving witness to who our God is and what he is like. In this book, the author shows how Justin Martyr, a prominent second-century church leader, provides a useful and powerful...

Reuben V. "Uncle Bud" Robinson, born a moonshiner's son in Tennessee and converted under the preaching of a traveling circuit rider while working as a Texas ranch hand, persevered to become the Mark Twain of the early twentieth-century holiness movement. And, at the height of his ministry, he was dubbed the "the most popular man in America." This book explains how a man who originally came from nothing eventually came to personify an entire subset of American Christianity and what it means for Christianity and evangelicalism today. The author examines how "Uncle Bud's" preaching brought together people from all walks...

Opposites Attract introduces readers to the genre of philosophical dialogue and to dialectic, which the author defines as "a back-and-forth that gets us somewhere we couldn't have gotten without the back-and-forth." In an easy-to-follow (and sometimes humorous) way, the book analyzes classical and modern examples to argue that direct, monologic communication is not always the most persuasive form of argumentation. By presenting ideas that seem to contradict one another, or by presenting one's case as a dialogue between opposing parties, others can engage your thought processes in a dynamic way. Dialectic, at its best, makes readers active participants in the...