Marc Barnes first cared about being Catholic, “not out of any profound love for the person of Christ, but out of a profound distaste for my other options.” After exploring the options of the secular world, Barnes came to the conclusion that even the secular world isn’t secular enough. In fact, it is hopelessly Christian. Through these essays Barnes exposes the hopelessly Catholic nature of our fallen world, and the joyous news that, even for the bad Catholic or the non-Catholic, there is n...

It is from the Bible that society obtains its most enduring and successful patterns for the tapestries formed by our social fabric. The institution of marriage is no exception. Given to us by God at the very beginning of His creation, marriage was to be the bedrock of all societies; and over the millennia since God first gave Adam and Eve life in the garden of Eden, this bedrock remains essential to His will for mankind. While this book will neither exhaust the topic of biblical marriage n...

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon reason as its primary access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary to reason, untrustworthy, or both. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, via the religious existentialists, has contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist tra...

Have you experienced betrayal and now feel trapped, exhausted, or emotionally paralyzed by thoughts that won’t leave you alone?Betrayal shakes your world, making everything you once believed feel uncertain. Suddenly, the person you trusted most feels like a stranger. You're caught in cycles of anxiety, self-doubt, and questions that keep you awake at night:“Why did this happen?”“How can I ever trust again?”“Will this pain ever end?”

You’re not stuck. Your brain is just used to being that way.You keep hearing it: you can change. But when stress takes over, when habits sabotage your progress, or when you keep repeating thoughts that drain you — it doesn’t feel like change is even possible.The truth? Most people live their entire lives thinking their brain is static. Fixed. Wired a certain way from birth. That belief alone is the trap.Here’s the science-backed truth: your brain is plasti...

Envisioning a future in which the Christian church plays a viable and transformative role in shaping society, Gretta Vosper argues that if the church is to survive at all, the heart of faith must undergo a radical change. Vosper, founder of the Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity and a minister in Toronto, believes that what will save the church is an emphasis on just and compassionate living -- a new and wholly humanistic approach to religion. Without this reform, the church as w...

For many people, prayer is an essential part of daily life, connecting them with God, a force or the universe, bringing them, among other things, assistance and protection. Others cannot imagine being so dependent upon a concept they can neither justify nor comprehend.In Amen, Gretta Vosper, United Church minister and author of the controversial bestseller With or Without God, offers us her deeply felt examination of worship beyond conventional prayer, and a call ...

Every five hundred years, the church cleans out its attic and has a giant rummage sale. Well, not exactly. But according to Phyllis Tickle, this is an accurate summary of the church's massive transitions over time. According to the pattern, we are living in such a time of change right now. Tickle calls it "the Great Emergence"--a time of dizzying upheaval and hopeful promise during which various sectors of today's church swirl into a great confluence at the center.As an inte...

The bestselling author of The Holy Longing provides an inspiring message of hope and perseverance for all of us struggling with our faith in tumultuous timesThe last few decades have rapidly birthed a modern world that would have been unrecognizable fifty years ago. As long-held beliefs on love, faith, and God are challenged by the aggregate of changes that have overhauled our world, many of us are left feeling confused and uncertain while old norms are ch...

'Since the middle of the twentieth century,' writes Elizabeth Johnson, 'there has been a renaissance of new insights into God in the Christian tradition. On different continents, under pressure from historical events and social conditions, people of faith have glimpsed the living God in fresh ways. It is not that a wholly different God is discovered from the One believed in by previous generations. Christian faith does not believe in a new God but, finding itself in new situations, seeks t...

The author of The Holy Longing explores the debilitating obsessions that often dominate our lives and offers down-to-earth guidance for learning to leave our fears, anxieties, and guilt “forgotten among the lilies.”“Rarely do we taste the food we eat or the coffee we drink. Instead we go through our days too preoccupied, too compulsive, and too dissatisfied to really be able to be present for and celebrate our own lives,” Ronald Rolheiser writes in the introduction to this...

Is it still possible in an age of religious and cultural pluralism to engage in Christian apologetics? How can one urge one's faith on others when such a gesture is typically regarded with suspicion if not outright resentment? In Humble Apologetics John G. Stackhouse brings his wide experience as a historian philosopher journalist and theologian to these important questions and offers surprising--and reassuring--answers. Stackhouse begins by acknowledging the real impediments to Christian ...