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Means of Grace
A Year of Weekly Devotions Fleming Rutledge
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Edited by Laura Bardolph Hubers
A weekly devotional culled from the sermons of Fleming Rutledge designed to be used within the framework of the liturgical calendar
“This brilliant collection from Rutledge’s sermons leads us into the beauty of the church calendar, in which time itself forms us in the truth of the gospel. That the themes of Rutledge’s sermons naturally lend themselves to the pattern of the liturgical year is a testimony to the depth and range of her theological insight and her profound care for the church. Rutledge is not only a gifted theologian and homilist, but a profoundly gifted wordsmith as well, and her luminous prose gives insight on each page.” — TISH HARRISON WARREN
author of Liturgy of the Ordinary and Prayer in the Night
“A church year’s worth of biblical meditations by the great Fleming Rutledge? Yes, please! Rutledge is one of the best preachers of our time because of her relentless focus on the boundless grace made available to us in Jesus Christ. With a preacher’s heart, an incisive mind, and a lively theological imagination, she opens the gospel to us week by week. What a gift.” — ALAN JACOBS
author of How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
“I cannot think of a more reliable guide to escort us through the church calendar with weekly devotions than Fleming Rutledge. Her love of holy Scripture and the sacred calendar combined with her half century of preaching expertise make Means of Grace a precious gift. From Advent through Ordinary Time, the words of Fleming Rutledge are indeed a means of grace to help us behold the glory of Christ.” — BRIAN ZAHND
author of Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God
Fleming Rutledge is an Episcopal priest, a best-selling author, and a widely recognized preacher whose published sermon collections have received acclaim across denominational lines. Her other books include The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, which won Christianity Today’s 2017 Book of the Year Award.
978-0-8028-7870-0 • Jacketed Hardcover • 279 pages • $24.99 US • $33.99 CAN • £19.99 UK
AVAILABLE NOW
How Beautiful the World Could Be
Christian Reflections on the Everyday Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt Meditations on ordinary life as part of a larger story
Throughout these meditations on Christian life, Frederick Bauerschmidt finds the truth of Scripture refracted through the lenses of current events from the past decade—including the coronavirus pandemic—as well as the seasons of the liturgical year and momentous individual occasions like baptisms, weddings, and funerals.
“In an age where our theology often either wilts or bludgeons, we’re desperate for faithful, artful voices who speak into the grit of our world without adding to the clamor. We need words that pierce while carrying the lilt of love. We need true poets in the pulpit. Thankfully, we have Bauerschmidt’s haunting, holy sentences beckoning us toward the God of beauty and thunder.” — WINN COLLIER
author of Love Big, Be Well and A Burning in My Bones
“A homily is different from a sermon, and not just because it’s shorter—and more Catholic. It seeks to make a single point, and make it resonantly and poignantly, with elegant simplicity. By setting these winsome and memorable homilies out as poetry, Frederick Bauerschmidt highlights that every word counts and that the secret lies in the delivery. To read these homilies and commentaries is to clothe oneself with wisdom and grace.” — SAMUEL WELLS
vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, London
“This beautiful collection couldn’t come at a better time. Deacon Bauerschmidt looks at our world with compassion, eloquence, and something all too rare these days: hope. These homilies reflect all the challenges of our age—from a lethal virus to heartbreaking violence—but reassure us that we are not alone. Grace abounds. God is near. Open these pages and you’ll truly appreciate how beautiful the world could be.” — GREG KANDRA
deacon, journalist, blogger, and author of A Deacon Prays
Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt is professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland and a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, assigned to the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen. His other books include The Love That Is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith.
A Christian Miscellany
Terrible Jokes, Curious Facts, and Memorable Quotes from the Garden of Eden to Armageddon Tim Dowley
You might be familiar with the Serenity Prayer. But are you familiar with the Anti-serenity Prayer? Perhaps you can recite the Apostles’ Creed. But can you recite the Five Points of Calvinism?
You probably know Psalm 23. But do you know about Shakespeare’s odd connections to Psalm 46?
Maybe you’ve memorized the names of the twelve apostles. But what about the nine orders of angels? Perhaps you even know how many animals Moses brought with him on the ark. (Trick question! None!) But do you know how Noah illuminated the ark? (With floodlights!) A Christian Miscellany is the perfect companion to those who like piously showing off (boasting in the Lord!) and to those looking for some wit and wisdom to quote during the awkward silences between the blessing and the meal. Packed with fascinating lists, amusing anecdotes, inspiring poetry, and more, this little book will fit right into any quirky Christian’s library— although coffee tables, nightstands, glove compartments, and toilet tank topper baskets will make fine places for it too.
Tim Dowley is a poet, playwright, and historian who has written widely on church history and Christian music. His many other books include Defying the Holocaust: Ten Courageous Christians Who Supported Jews, Christian Music: A Global History, Atlas of Christian History, Atlas of the European Reformations, and Introduction to the History of Christianity.
978-0-8028-7982-0 • Hardcover • 168 pages • $16.99 US • $22.99 CAN • £13.99 UK
AVAILABLE JANUARY 2022
Gaslighted by God
Reconstructing a Disillusioned Faith Tiffany Yecke Brooks “We have a right to encounter God where we are. We have a sacred responsibility to experience God authentically.”
What happens when the God we’ve been taught to believe in seems powerless to help us in the struggles of life? What do we do when the God we personally encounter no longer resembles the God we’ve been shown in narrow interpretations of the Bible?
Many of those raised in the world of fundamentalist Christianity have been manipulated into accepting a false reality that runs counter to lived experience. The result is confusion, isolation, fear, shame, and trauma, often carried throughout one’s entire life. This book is for the victims of this spiritual abuse—anyone looking to reclaim their faith from legalism, nationalism, sexism, anxiety, intolerance, and other mechanisms of control utilized by the self-appointed gatekeepers of God. It’s for anyone who has learned that the real God is infinitely complex, that authentic faith is perfectly compatible with doubt, and that our suffering is not something we’ve earned.
Gaslighted by God is not a book of easy answers—it’s a companion for those mourning the loss of a belief system who need their pain recognized and legitimized. Tiffany Yecke Brooks shows—through stories from her own life, conversations with Christians from a variety of backgrounds, historical anecdotes, and messy episodes from Scripture—that there can be faith after disillusionment. But it will be a different faith—bruised, battered, nuanced, and real, rather than one wrapped in tissue-thin platitudes and three-point sermons. It will be a faith empowered to see beyond who God “should” be to who God is.
Tiffany Yecke Brooks is the lead or contributing writer on more than two dozen books, including multiple New York Times bestsellers. She is the coauthor of Fear Is a Choice: Tackling Life’s Challenges with Dignity, Faith, and Determination (with NFL running back James Conner), Limitless: The Power of Hope and Resilience to Overcome Circumstance (with Paralympic gold-medalist Mallory Weggemann), and the narrative nonfiction historical thriller Espionage and Enslavement in the Revolution: The True Story of Robert Townsend and Elizabeth (with historian Claire Bellerjeau). She holds a PhD from Florida State University, where her dissertation covered, in part, cultural adaptations of stories from the book of Genesis.
978-0-8028-7868-7 • Jacketed Hardcover • 248 pages • $22.99 US • $30.99 CAN • £17.99 UK
AVAILABLE MAY 2022
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
Mark A. Noll
WITH A NEW PREFACE AND AFTERWORD Winner of the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award
In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship. In a new preface, Noll lays out his ongoing personal frustrations with this situation, and in a new afterword he assesses the state of the scandal— showing how white evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism, their deepening distrust of science, and their frequent forays into conspiratorial thinking have coexisted with surprisingly robust scholarship from many with strong evangelical connections.
“Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind reminds us that ‘modern evangelicals are the spiritual descendants of leaders and movements distinguished by probing, creative, fruitful attention to the mind’ and challenges us to reclaim that heritage.”
— CHRISTIANITY TODAY
“Required reading for those seeking to understand the often peculiar relationship between Evangelical religion and secular culture, this is a brilliant study by— yes—a first-rate Evangelical mind.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“That anti-intellectualism is not inherent in evangelicalism Noll demonstrates by presenting evangelical intellectual history, primarily in the US, with scholarly thoroughness and journalistic accessibility. . . . Noll well exemplifies what he prays evangelicals generally will learn to value again: thinking like a Christian.”
— BOOKLIST
Mark A. Noll is the Francis A. McAnaney Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Notre Dame. His other books include A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, and Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity.
978-0-8028-8204-2 • Paperback • 304 pages • $28.99 US • $38.99 CAN • £22.99 UK
AVAILABLE MARCH 2022
Reading Evangelicals
How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith Daniel Silliman The story of five novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped
TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Defining Evangelicals in a Christian Bookstore 1. The Romance of Abundant Life: Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly 2. Spiritual Warfare in Everyday America: Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness 3. The Rapture Dilemma: Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind 4. Authenticity in Amish Bonnets: Beverly Lewis’s The Shunning 5. Amid Emerging Ambiguities: William Paul Young’s The Shack Conclusion: The Question That Remains
“Beautifully crafted and deftly argued, Reading Evangelicals offers a deeply perceptive analysis of modern evangelicalism through the lens of popular Christian fiction. Carefully researched and laden with keen insights, the book will stand as an essential contribution to the study of American evangelicalism.”
— KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ
author of Jesus and John Wayne
“Reading Evangelicals offers much more than just the stories of five best-selling books that became popular among evangelicals. It is a fascinating and insightful history of the cultures that created the reading audiences for these books and of the cultures these books helped to create. This is the story of modern American evangelicalism—and we need to read it.”
— KAREN SWALLOW PRIOR
author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books
“Winsome, yet incisive. . . . A worthy and essential read for anyone who wants an in-depth, compassionate look at the evangelical culture of reading.”
— ANTHEA BUTLER
author of White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America
Daniel Silliman is the news editor for Christianity Today. He earned a doctorate in American studies from Heidelberg University in Germany and has taught US history and humanities at Heidelberg, Valparaiso University, and Milligan University.
978-0-8028-7935-6 • Jacketed Hardcover • 286 pages • $27.99 US • $37.99 CAN • £21.99 UK
AVAILABLE NOW
Race and the Rise of the Religious Right Randall Balmer A history of the origins of the Religious Right that challenges the misconception that abortion was its original galvanizing issue
“Bad Faith upends the tidy narrative that protesting abortion was the issue that rallied evangelicals in the political realm. Randall Balmer’s historical research helps restore the true and infuriating story, that racism, once again, played a central role in shaping the political and religious landscape of the nation. Before you read another headline or write another social media post about religion, race, or politics, read this book.”— JEMAR TISBY
New York Times bestselling author of The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism
“Forget whatever you’ve always heard about the beginnings of the Religious Right. Balmer’s highly engaging and provocative book pulls back the curtain to reveal how race, not abortion, was the key issue in the birth of what has become a powerful and disturbing alliance.” — MICHAEL B. CURRY
presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and author of Love Is the Way: Holding on to Hope in Troubling Times
“This brilliant, readable detective story demonstrates that the Religious Right, far from speaking for all evangelicals, has masked its recent—and deviant—origin among groups advocating white supremacy. Here Randall Balmer, our most influential historian of American evangelical Christianity, sets forth the evidence and calls for evangelical Christians to return to their actual sources—the teachings of Jesus.”
— ELAINE PAGELS
Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University
“I have been waiting for this book. Randall Balmer’s Bad Faith is the essential reader for all who want to know how America was pushed to the brink and how the evangelical church was led off a cliff. Balmer’s Bad Faith tells the story of how white supremacy was, and continues to be, the central motivating factor of the Religious Right—not abortion. This quick and easy read packs a mighty punch. Every American must read this book before they cast their next vote.” — LISA SHARON HARPER
author of The Very Good Gospel
“Balmer performs an essential service in definitively debunking the myth that the Religious Right was originally organized around opposition to abortion. The revealing and damning truth is that the Religious Right was initially organized in opposition to desegregating private Christian schools, which confirms that the Religious Right has always been racialized in its tactics and political aims. Their most recent embrace of Trumpism and all it represents is therefore the fruit of a poisonous tree of white supremacy and the Religious Right’s racial grievance politics nearly half a century in the making. You simply must read this book.” — JIM WALLIS
New York Times bestselling author of Christ in Crisis?
“In spare and elegant prose, Balmer demolishes the myth that abortion was the issue that launched the Religious Right and replaces it with an uncomfortable fact: it was always about race. More than that, Balmer asks us to consider the consequences of the later suppression of that fact, and points to a profound connection between that willful forgetting and the alliance of the Religious Right with white supremacy and racist demagoguery today. Bad Faith invites us all to rethink our assumptions about the nexus of race, religion, and politics and the origins of our present crisis.”
— KATHERINE STEWART
author of The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism
“For nearly two decades Randall Balmer has reminded us of the important role that racism played in the founding of the Christian Right. Thoughtful readers of all persuasions will come away from this concise and accessible introduction with a better understanding of the powerful connection between conservative evangelicalism and GOP politics.” — JOHN FEA
author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump 978-0-8028-7934-9 • Jacketed Hardcover • 141 pages • $16.99 US • $22.99 CAN £13.99 UK • AVAILABLE NOW
Randall Balmer is the John Phillips Professor in Religion at Dartmouth College. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Evangelicalism in America, Redeemer: The Life of Jimmy Carter, and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America, which is now in its fifth edition and has been made into an award-winning threepart series for PBS.
“Randall Balmer minces no words in this immensely useful and clarifying book. Bad Faith draws a sharp plot line out of the messy story of American evangelicalism and forces readers to confront hard truths about the role of racism in the history of the modern Christian Right.”
— MOLLY WORTHEN
author of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism
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Christ and the Common Life
Political Theology and the Case for Democracy Luke Bretherton
Christ and the Common Life is an introduction to historical and contemporary theological reflection on politics that opens up a compelling vision for a Christian commitment to democracy. In dialogue with Scripture and various traditions, Luke Bretherton addresses fundamental political questions about poverty and injustice, forming a common life with strangers, and handling power constructively.
“A tour de force. . . . Written with incisive clarity and remarkable accessibility, this book is not only a scholarly achievement of great note, but it also is a useful tool for teaching and discussion in universities, seminaries, and churches.”
— SARAH COAKLEY
University of Cambridge and Australian Catholic University, Melbourne
“A monumental achievement in Christian political theology. Demonstrating mastery of a huge literature and multiple, diverse sub-traditions of Christian political thought, and offering a disciplined constructive theological vision of his own, Luke Bretherton offers important, often breakthrough reflections on the most significant issues in this field.” — DAVID P. GUSHEE
Mercer University
“An impressively expansive, smart, and sophisticated introduction to Christian political theology. . . . Christ and the Common Life will surely set the agenda in the field for a generation to come, orienting Christian political theology in the direction of justice.” — VINCENT LLOYD
Villanova University
Luke Bretherton is the Robert E. Cushman Distinguished Professor of Moral and Political Theology and senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. His other books include Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness, winner of the 2013 Michael Ramsey Prize for Theological Writing.
978-0-8028-8179-3 • Paperback • 480 pages • $35.00 US • $46.99 CAN • £28.99 UK
AVAILABLE MAY 2022
Christian Ethics
A New Covenant Model Hak Joon Lee A renewed vision of Christian life centered on grace, justice, and peace—applied to the most urgent and controversial social issues of the twenty-first century
“In this expansive and innovative treatment of Christian ethics, Hak Joon Lee sets out to retrieve the covenant tradition of theology and ethics from its complex and sometimes problematic past, arguing that the new covenant can serve as the key metaphor for a Christian ethic that is liberative, egalitarian, nonviolent, and careful of creation. In his hands, this approach generates a richly textured and wellresourced account of the contours of Christian ethics and thoughtful engagements with some of the most pressing and divisive issues of our time.” — NEIL MESSER
University of Winchester
“Hak Joon Lee’s ‘new covenant ethics’ is an ecumenically oriented and politically constructive evangelical tour de force. While he places the Trinity and Eucharist at the center, he includes nonviolence, community organizing, and just peacemaking among Christianity’s constitutive practices. On debated moral questions like samesex marriage, Lee favors moderate conservatism, yet wisely counsels traditionalists and revisionists to apply a peacemaking ethos to their own coexistence. More importantly, this is an ethics centered on justice and the poor. The cosmic presence of the Spirit gives the new covenant world-spanning, inclusive transformative power. This would be a wonderful book to work through with a seminary class or a congregational study group.” — LISA SOWLE CAHILL
Boston College
“It isn’t every day that a Christian ethicist offers a comprehensive new proposal for the entire discipline. That is what Fuller Seminary professor Hak Joon Lee does in this formidable book. Christian Ethics: A New Covenant Model does more and better work with the biblical theme of covenant than I have ever seen in our discipline.” — DAVID P. GUSHEE
Mercer University
Hak Joon Lee is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. He has published several books, including God and Community Organizing: A Covenantal Approach and Discerning Ethics: Diverse Christian Responses to Divisive Moral Issues.
978-0-8028-7687-4 • Hardcover • 572 pages • $47.99 US • $64.99 CAN • £38.99 UK
AVAILABLE NOVEMBER 2021
The Abuse of Conscience
A Century of Catholic Moral Theology Matthew Levering
The Abuse of Conscience is both an introduction to twentieth-century Catholic moral theology and an argument against conscience-centered Christian ethics. Matthew Levering surveys and critiques the work of twenty-six theologians, both Catholic and Protestant, in order to show how Catholics ought to understand the role of conscience today: as undeniably important, but only when understood within “the broader framework of the Christian moral organism” and formed by the teachings of Scripture and church tradition.
“Crisply written, thorough, and deeply insightful, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in moral theology and its relation to the life of the Church.” — BISHOP ROBERT BARRON
author, speaker, theologian, and founder of Word on Fire
“What a delight! Levering, one of the most important theologians working today, has given us a magisterial book on one of today’s most important topics.”
— CHARLES C. CAMOSY
Fordham University
“Matthew Levering shows beyond doubt that the post-conciliar elevation of conscience consists, ironically enough, of a spurious retrieval of earlier manualist casuistry. Levering’s alternative—a Christ-centered morality with charity at its heart—is a great deal more liberating than the heavy weight of untrammeled individual conscience.”
— HANS BOERSMA
Nashotah House Theological Seminary
Matthew Levering holds the James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology at Mundelein Seminary and is a longtime participant in Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Among his many other books are Dying and the Virtues and Aquinas’s Eschatological Ethics and the Virtue of Temperance.
978-0-8028-7950-9 • Jacketed Hardcover • 368 pages $45.00 US • $60.99 CAN • £36.99 UK
AVAILABLE NOW
KIERKEGAARD AS A CHRISTIAN THINKER
Recovering Christian Character
The Psychological Wisdom of Søren Kierkegaard Robert C. Roberts Discipleship guidance from the writings of Kierkegaard
Genuine Christian character often runs counter to prevailing notions of Christianity—as much in today’s era of nationalistic religiosity as in the staid Christendom of Søren Kierkegaard’s time. Kierkegaard responded to the hypocrisy around him by becoming a missionary of sorts in the Western world. Through his writing he exposed the illusions of conventional wisdom while advancing a compelling vision of the true Christian life that would give rise to essential virtues like faith, hope, love, patience, gratitude, and humility. What might Kierkegaard say to us today about recovering a genuine Christian character amid manifold corruptions of the gospel?
Robert C. Roberts guides the reader through Kierkegaard’s thought about character—clarifying while never unduly simplifying—to show how Kierkegaard’s prescient psychological insights can be applied in the lives of twenty-first-century Christians interested in personal formation. Taking on a Kierkegaardian voice of his own, Roberts powerfully illustrates how virtue arises not from the mastery of individual ethical principles but from the continuity of one’s soul with the heart of God.
“A rich phenomenology of Christian emotions.”
— MEROLD WESTPHAL
author of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith
Robert C. Roberts is distinguished professor emeritus of ethics at Baylor University. Among his other books are Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues.
978-0-8028-7316-3 • Jacketed Hardcover • 392 pages $49.00 US • $65.99 CAN • £39.99 UK
AVAILABLE MARCH 2022
Seeing God
Foreword by Andrew Louth Winner of the Christianity Today Book Award in Theology/Ethics
To see God is our heart’s desire, our final purpose in life. But what does it mean to see God? And exactly how do we see God—with our physical eyes or with the mind’s eye? In this informed study of the beatific vision, Hans Boersma focuses on “vision” as a living metaphor and shows how the vision of God is not just a future but a present reality.
“This is theological reflection of the most illuminating kind.” — DAVID BENTLEY HART
author of The Beauty of the Infinite
“A profound and important work.”
— SIMON OLIVER
Durham University
“Only Hans Boersma could write this book. With a superb command of the Scriptures and of the Reformed, Protestant, and Catholic traditions, he revisits the neglected topic of beatific vision and reminds us what it is to see God in Christ. An energizing book from one of today’s best theologians.”
— JANET SOSKICE
University of Cambridge
“A wonderful achievement.”
— JOHN MILBANK
University of Nottingham
Hans Boersma is the Saint Benedict Servants of Christ Chair in Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House Theological Seminary, Wisconsin. His other books include Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry and Scripture as Real Presence: Sacramental Exegesis in the Early Church.
978-0-8028-8019-2 • Paperback • 487 pages • $34.99 US $46.99 CAN • £28.99 UK
