The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart
10 best books like The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (Peter J. Gomes): Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, The Prophetic Imagination, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church Is Transforming the Faith, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally
| Author | Marcus J. Borg |
| ISBN | 0060609176 |
Of the many recent books on the historical Jesus, none has explored what the latest biblical scholarship means for personal faith. Now, in Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, Marcus Borg addresses the yearnings of those who want a fully contemporary faith that welcomes rather than oppresses our...
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
| Author | Karen Armstrong |
| ISBN | 0517223120 |
Over 700,000 copies of the original hardcover and paperback editions of this stunningly popular book have been sold. Karen Armstrong's superbly readable exploration of how the three dominant monotheistic religions of the world - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - have shaped and altered the conception...
The Prophetic Imagination
| Author | Walter Brueggemann |
| ISBN | 0800632877 |
It is almost cliche to say that our world has been numbed into apathy about a great many things, spirituality included. If fact, I believe it would be fair to say that many Christians have found their faith to be drained of mysticism and imagination. Taught that mysticism is evil or somehow against the...
Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers In Exile
| Author | John Shelby Spong |
| ISBN | 0060675365 |
An important and respected voice for liberal American Christianity for the past twenty years, Bishop John Shelby Spong integrates his often controversial stands on the Bible, Jesus, theism, and morality into an intelligible creed that speaks to today's thinking Christian. In this compelling and...
| Author | John Dominic Crossan |
| ISBN | 0060616296 |
"He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know exactly where the line is drawn between poverty and destitution. He looks like a beggar yet his eyes lack the proper cringe, his voice the proper whine,...
| Author | Diana Butler Bass |
| ISBN | 0060836946 |
For decades the accepted wisdom has been that America's mainline Protestant churches are in decline, eclipsed by evangelical mega-churches. Church and religion expert Diana Butler Bass wondered if this was true, and this book is the result of her extensive, three-year study of centrist and progressive...
Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew
| Author | Bart D. Ehrman |
| ISBN | 0195182499 |
The early Christian Church was a chaos of contending beliefs. Some groups of Christians claimed that there was not one God but two or twelve or thirty. Some believed that the world had not been created by God but by a lesser, ignorant deity. Certain sects maintained that Jesus was human but not divine,...
| Author | John Shelby Spong |
| ISBN | 0060675187 |
I’m sure there are hundreds of reviews by now of this book on Amazon and elsewhere, so I won’t repeat what everyone else is saying. I just want to call it to your attention.
If you’re new to Bishop Spong’s books and his liberal Christian bent, then pick this up. Published way back in 1991,...
| Author | Brian D. McLaren |
| ISBN | 0061853984 |
“Some books provide us with information about the world, but every once in a while a book appears that enables us to imagine new, more wonderful worlds. [A New Kind of Christianity] is one of these.” —Peter Rollins, Ikon
A New Kind of Christianity is Brian D. McLaren’s much anticipated...
Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally
| Author | Marcus J. Borg |
| ISBN | 0060609192 |
Many Christians mistakenly believe that their only choice is either to reconcile themselves to a fundamentalist reading of scripture (a "literal-factual" approach) or to simply reject the Bible as something that could bring meaning and value into their lives. In Reading the Bible Again for the First...
In The Heart of Christianity, world-renowned Jesus scholar and author of the bestseller Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time argues that the essential ingredients of a Christian life—faith, being born again, the kingdom of God, the gospel of love—are as vitally important today as they have...
Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas
| Author | Elaine Pagels |
| ISBN | 0375501568 |
Pagels, a writer and thinker on religion and history, winner of the National Book Award for The Gnostic Gospels, reflects on what matters most about spiritual and religious exploration in the 21st century. This book explores how Christianity began by tracing its earliest texts, including the Gospel...
Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity
| Author | Elaine Pagels |
| ISBN | 0679722327 |
Deepens & refreshes our view of early Christianity while casting a disturbing light on the evolution of the attitudes passed down to us.
Acknowledgments
The Book of Genesis, Chapters 1-3
Introduction
"The Kingdom of God is at hand"
Christians against the Roman order
Gnostic...
| Author | Phyllis A. Tickle |
| ISBN | 1596445750 |
From the church's birth to the reign of St. Gregory the great, to the Great Schism and through the Reformation, Phyllis Tickle notes that every 500 years the church has been rocked by massive transitions. Remarkably enough, Tickle suggests to us that we live in such a time right now. The Great Emergence...
| Author | Peter Rollins |
| ISBN | 1557255059 |
With sensitivity to the Christian tradition and a rich understanding of postmodern thought, Peter Rollins argues that the movement known as the “emerging church” offers a singular, unprecedented message of transformation that has the potential to revolutionize the theological and moral...
When Brian McLaren began offering an alternative vision of Christian faith and life in books such as "A New Kind of Christian" and "A Generous Orthodoxy, " he ignited a firestorm of praise and condemnation that continues to spread across the religious landscape. To some religious conservatives, McLaren...
Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium
In this highly accessible discussion, Bart Ehrman examines the most recent textual and archaeological sources for the life of Jesus, along with the history of first-century Palestine, drawing a fascinating portrait of the man and his teachings.
Ehrman shows us what historians have long...
When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome
| Author | Richard E. Rubenstein |
| ISBN | 0156013150 |
A thoroughly researched and vivid re-creation of one of the most critical periods in the history of Western religion
The life of Jesus, and the subsequent persecution of Christians during the Roman Empire, have come to define what many of us know about early Christianity. The fervent...
