Congregations today exist in an in-between, or liminal, time. The customary answers about what it means to be and do church and strategies for renewal based on those answers no longer work. But there is no certainty about the new answers. It is a time of searching—of letting go of the old and experimenting with the new. This means facing the reality of death, which may come as institutions die or as established ways are abandoned. This book addresses this reality while maintaining a consta...

This commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians, excerpted from Fortress Commentary on the Bible: The New Testament, engages readers in the work of biblical interpretation. Laura Nasrallah and David Fredrickson connect historical-critical analysis with sensitivity to current theological, cultural, and interpretive issues.The book is an introduction and commentary using three lenses: ancient context, the interpretative tradition, and contemporary questions and challenges.

How might the Christian church effectively engage today's politically charged, profit-motivated world while remaining faithful to its biblical and theological roots? The contributors in this book argue that public theology provides a promising pathway forward. The public theology emerging from these pages has been influenced by the theological interests and commitments of Gary M. Simpson, Lutheran pastor and systematic theologian. His approach to public theology is intersectional and globa...

Some forty scholars examine California's prehistory and archaeology, looking at marine and terrestrial palaeoenvironments, initial human colonization, linguistic prehistory, early forms of exchange, mitochondrial DNA studies, and rock art. This work is the most extensive study of California's prehistory undertaken in the past 20 years. An essential resource for any scholar of California prehistory and archaeology!

David E. Fredrickson asks a key question for interpreters of the New Testament in the twenty-first century: Do established ways of reading the New Testament need to be challenged and new ones explored? His answer is "yes," but he takes care not to dismiss readers' experiences in the previous two millennia. He values the readings of the past even as he contests the insights of scholars, preachers, monks, nuns, skeptics, the devout, the disinterested, the keenly interested, and all the rest ...

This book explores many of the theological and religious themes present in the Game of Thrones HBO television series and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire novels. Written for academics yet accessible for the layperson, the chapters explore themes of power, religion, and sacred institutions in Westeros; Christian ecclesiology in the Night’s Watch and the religion of the Iron Islands; Augustinian notions of evil in the Night King and anthropology in the Seven; Ori...

The self-emptying of Christ (kenosis) in Philippians 2 has long been the focus of attention by Christian theologians and interpreters of Paul's Christology. David E. Fredrickson sheds dramatic new light on familiar texts by discussing the centuries-old language of love and longing in Greek and Roman epistolary literature, showing that a "physics" of desire was related to notions of power and dominance. Pauls kenotic Christology challenged not only received notions of the p...

Beau has never met anyone he doesn’t want to lick. Ben is wary of love. Beau finds opportunity around every corner. Ben hides in the shadows of shame.Life on All Fours is a love story framed by loss and narrated by one whose four paws are firmly on the ground. Ben Walker lives in San Francisco. It’s 1997, and after nearly two decades of AIDS devastation, finally, there may be reasons to hope. Ben, his ex-wife, Judy, and their mutual best friend, Anthony, struggle in a comp...