Over 100,000 Copies Sold
Magnificent and memorable." --Randy Alcorn, author, Heaven
Once upon a time there lived a man and a woman. They were the happiest people on the planet.
True, they were the only people on the planet, but they were still terrifically happy.
Unfortunately, things didn't stay happy and wonderful for long . . .
The Bible is full of exciting stories that fill children with awe and wonder. But kids need to know how all those classic stories connect to Scripture's overarching message about God's glorious plan to redeem his rebellious people.
In The Biggest Story, Kevin DeYoung--a best-selling author and father of nine--leads kids and parents alike on an exciting journey through the Bible, connecting the dots from the garden of Eden to Christ's death on the cross to the new heaven and new earth.
With powerful illustrations by award-winning artist Don Clark, this imaginative retelling of the Bible's core message--how the Snake Crusher brings us back to the garden--will draw children into the biblical story, teaching them that God's promises are even bigger and better than we think. Ages 5-8 (read to me) Ages 8-11 (read to myself)Monica A. Coleman's great-grandfather asked his two young sons to lift him up and pull out the chair when he hanged himself, and that noose stayed in the family shed for years. The rope was the violent instrument, but it was mental anguish that killed him. Now, in gripping fashion, Coleman examines the ways that the legacies of slavery, war, sharecropping, poverty, and alcoholism mask a family history of mental illness. Those same forces accompanied her into the black religious traditions and Christian ministry. All the while, she wrestled with her own bipolar disorder.
Bipolar Faith is both a spiritual autobiography and a memoir of mental illness. In this powerful book, Monica Coleman shares her life-long dance with trauma, depression, and the threat of death. Citing serendipitous encounters with black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Angela Davis, and Renita Weems, Coleman offers a rare account of how the modulated highs of bipolar II can lead to professional success, while hiding a depression that even her doctors rarely believed. Only as she was able to face her illness was she able to live faithfully with bipolar. And in the process, she discovered a new and liberating vision of God.
"The idea of bittersweet is changing the way I live, unraveling and re-weaving the way I understand life. Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a moment of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak, and that rejoicing is no less rich even when it contains a splinter of sadness. "It's the practice of believing that we really do need both the bitter and the sweet, and that a life of nothing but sweetness rots both your teeth and your soul. Bitter is what makes us strong, what forces us to push through, what helps us earn the lines on our faces and the calluses on our hands. Sweet is nice enough, but bittersweet is beautiful, nuanced, full of depth and complexity. Bittersweet is courageous, gutsy, audacious, earthy. "This is what I've come to believe about change: it's good, in the way that childbirth is good, and heartbreak is good, and failure is good. By that I mean that it's incredibly painful, exponentially more so if you fight it, and also that it has the potential to open you up, to open life up, to deliver you right into the palm of God's hand, which is where you wanted to be all long, except that you were too busy pushing and pulling your life into exactly what you thought it should be. "I've learned the hard way that change is one of God's greatest gifts, and most useful tools. Change can push us, pull us, rebuke and remake us. It can show us who we've become, in the worst ways, and also in the best ways. I've learned that it's not something to run away from, as though we could, and that in many cases, change is a function of God's graciousness, not life's cruelty." Niequist, a keen observer of life with a lyrical voice, writes with the characteristic warmth and honesty of a dear friend: always engaging, sometimes challenging, but always with a kind heart. You will find Bittersweet savory reading, indeed. "This is the work I'm doing now, and the work I invite you into: when life is sweet, say thank you, and celebrate. And when life is bitter, say thank you, and grow."
The runaway New York Times bestseller that became a cornerstone of Christian nonfiction, Blue Like Jazz is a fresh and original perspective on life, love, and redemption.
"I never liked jazz music because jazz music doesn't resolve...Sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself. It is as if they are showing you the way. I used to not like God because God didn't resolve. But that was before any of this happened."
Donald Miller was raised in a strict Texas denomination where he was only vaguely familiar with a distant God. When he grew older, he ran all the way to the least-religious university in the US: Rice College in Portland, Oregon. Still, God pursued him. When he came to know Jesus, he pursued the Christian life with great zeal. However, within a few years he had a successful ministry that ultimately left him feeling empty, burned out, and, once again, far away from God.
In this intimate, non-judgmental, and soul-searching account, Miller describes his remarkable journey with and back to the infinitely loving God, helping you...
Blue Like Jazz is a gentle, honest resource for those curious about the Christian faith, or new to it, and offers a fresh and original perspective on life, love, and redemption.
People and churches across America are discovering that their secular friends and neighbors have been unknowingly waiting for the chance to experience the good God. Blue Ocean Faith is a network of churches that have seen thousands of secular people--from Harvard deans to public housing residents--connect with God. Blue Ocean founder Dave Schmelzer details six profound paradigm shifts that unlock a depth of connection to God that's new for many churchgoers and that's unprecedented for their secular neighbors. Embracing centered-set faith, becoming solus Jesus, and taking a third-way approach to LGBTQ congregants are among the game-changers that empower this rich life of faith. Rather than retreating from or drawing lines against our increasingly secular world, people of faith can join Jesus--as followers like Saint Francis of Assisi have done for millennia--in joyfully entering the world around them with profound wonder and an equally-profound offer of a life that really is life.
"Blue Ocean Faith is a riveting book about an exciting new movement of churches emerging out of the ashes of American evangelicalism/fundamentalism. This could be a charter document for a new kind of Jesus movement. Everyone should read it," writes David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University.
With plenty of engaging storytelling, Schmelzer brings together ancient and cutting-edge insights in a book that might revitalize your experience of God, open up your connection to your neighbors and your city ... and maybe even kick off a new Jesus movement.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer publicly confronted Nazism and anti-Semitic racism in Hitler's Germany. The Reich's political ideology, when mixed with theology of the German Christian movement, turned Jesus into a divine representation of the ideal, racially pure Aryan and allowed race-hate to become part of Germany's religious life. Bonhoeffer provided a Christian response to Nazi atrocities.
In this book author Reggie L. Williams follows Bonhoeffer as he defies Germany with Harlem's black Jesus. The Christology Bonhoeffer learned in Harlem's churches featured a black Christ who suffered with African Americans in their struggle against systemic injustice and racial violence--and then resisted. In the pews of the Abyssinian Baptist Church, under the leadership of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Bonhoeffer absorbed the Christianity of the Harlem Renaissance. This Christianity included a Jesus who stands with the oppressed rather than joins the oppressors and a theology that challenges the way God can be used to underwrite a union of race and religion.
Bonhoeffer's Black Jesus argues that the black American narrative led Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the truth that obedience to Jesus requires concrete historical action. This ethic of resistance not only indicted the church of the German Volk, but also continues to shape the nature of Christian discipleship today.
Now, readers of every persuasion--Crumb fans, comic book lovers, and believers--can gain astonishing new insights from these harrowing, tragic, and even juicy stories. Crumb's Book of Genesis reintroduces us to the bountiful tree lined garden of Adam and Eve, the massive ark of Noah with beasts of every kind, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by brimstone and fire that rained from the heavens, and the Egypt of the Pharaoh, where Joseph's embalmed body is carried in a coffin, in a scene as elegiac as any in Genesis. Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretation that have often obscured the Bible's most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of Biblical originals: from the serpent in Eden, the humanoid reptile appearing like an alien out of a science fiction movie, to Jacob, a "kind've depressed guy who doesn't strike you as physically courageous," and his bother, Esau, "a rough and kick ass guy," to Abraham's wife Sarah, more fetching than most woman at 90, to God himself, "a standard Charlton Heston-like figure with long white hair and a flowing beard."
As Crumb writes in his introduction, "the stories of these people, the Hebrews, were something more than just stories. They were the foundation, the source, in writing of religious and political power, handed down by God himself." Crumb's Book of Genesis, the culmination of 5 years of painstaking work, is a tapestry of masterly detail and storytelling which celebrates the astonishing diversity of the one of our greatest artistic geniuses.
Nominated for three 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: Best Adaptation from Another Work, Best Graphic Album, Best Writer/Artist.