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...

Words that Shape Us explores evangelicalism's influence on the nation's cultural and political discourse through the lens of its main independent news publications. Waters delves into the pages of evangelical periodicals that reveal a movement at a crossroads. This book offers an unprecedented look at the internal debates and divergent paths that could redefine the future of American politics and religion. Waters uncovers the widening gap between evangelical elites and those claiming the faith through meticulous analysis of four key independent evangelical publications. From the 2016, 2020, and 2024 Presidential elections to pressing social issues like immigration, racism, and healthcare,...

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...

Since the publication of Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (1994) and George Marsden's The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1997), Christian educators have worked to challenge anti-intellectualism within American evangelicalism and to demonstrate how religious and theological commitments can deepen our understanding of the world. Yet questions remain about the lasting impact of these efforts: How much progress has been made? To what extent does anti-intellectualism still hinder evangelical thought? And what new challenges and opportunities face faith-informed scholars today? From the Outrageous to the Scandalous explores these questions through a rich and wide-ranging collection of essays....

Sermons preached before a congregation are only one way people hear messages of faith. Whether the listener is seated in a pew or listening to a podcast or a book about faith, most of the faith-talk people hear is shaped by a speaker's faith sensibility. And those faith sensibilities can generally be distinguished as four distinctly different "voices" of preaching. Understanding what these voices are, how they differ in purpose as well as design, and how excellence in each voice can make for greater authenticity in communicating faith is what this book is about. The author canvases the tradition of...

In this updated and expanded edition, the author invites professors of communication and media to reflect on each chapter in light of our current cultural challenges and technological advancements over the past two decades. The collection of voices and conversations offer a discerning introduction to communication theory that guides readers through an interesting, creative, and biblical study of communication. Thoroughly grounded in a Christian worldview, Communicating for Life explores the implications of individual human communication and the influence of communication on community.

What do we expect from our words? And what if those very expectations were not just wrong, but dangerous, and dangerous precisely because they kept us from moving toward justice? In a provocative and sustained argument, Professor Williams forwards the claim that our present ideas of language are a closed loop that inevitably spirals toward violence. By turning to views that were common in the ages before the modern world, but now lost, he suggests not a new but an old perspective on logos, one that seems to provide a foundation for responding to the troubles and limitations of our...

Why does the family matter? How can the family truly flourish with so many different opinions about what family means and what role it plays in society? How can we strengthen the family to reflect God's design for it? Family Communication and the Christian Faith: An Introduction and Exploration provides answers to these questions. This book examines the family from a biblical worldview while integrating theories and practices from diverse academic disciplines (psychology, theology, family studies, sociology) with special emphasis on how communication creates and sustains healthy, rewarding, and godly families. Instructor's Resource and Teaching Guide available. Published by Integratio...

At a time when Christian voices in higher education are facing increased persecution and marginalization, the Christian authors of this collection who teach in public universities share their faith-learning integration journeys including their practical, theoretical, and biblically based strategies for teaching, administration, and doing research. Authors explain how they actively subvert secular worldviews that marginalize biblical truth, promote incivility, and discourage love of neighbor. At the same time, they explore pro-active, bridge-building and transformational methods for cultivating biblical absolutes and Christian virtue in ways that prompt evangelistic encounters. The book adds to ongoing and robust faith-learning conversations in higher education...

This book aims to change the Christian conversation regarding civility, from techniques about achieving civility to the conditions necessary for civility to exist. As such, the authors in this volume explore the work of Dr. Calvin Troup, president of Geneva College, and his insights regarding humility and hospitality--presented at a keynote address at a conference--and interrogate the ideas that serve as its foundation. The goal of the book is to create a conversation across the broad spectrum of Christian experience and voices from within secular culture in order to explore, in a robust fashion, the possibilities for hospitality, humility, and...