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The Reformed Institute of Metropolitan Washington has been created by a group of Presbyterian churches in the Washington D.C. area to promote understanding and deepen appreciation of the Reformed tradition among the staffs and members of Presbyterian churches. LOOKING FOR A BOOK TO READ THIS SUMMER? The selections are not exactly beach reading, but this year the Reformed Institute recommends…Kelsey, David. Imagining Redemption (Westminster/John Knox, 2005) This book is an exercise in applied theology, designed to show how Christian faith can enable people to respond constructively to the hard challenges life sometimes presents. Kelsey, who until recently was a member of the faculty of the Yale Divinity School, indicates he wrote the book to make sense, as a theologian, of a devastating illness that befell a small boy with whom he was acquainted. The question he seeks to answer is what it means to say that Jesus Christ redeems such situations. Kelsey was the leader of the Reformed Institute’s first lay theological colloquy in 2005 - 2006, and he will be a featured speaker at the Institute’s 2009 convocation. Jenkins, Philip. God’s Continent—Christianity, Islam and Europe’s Religious Crisis(Oxford, 2007) This is the third volume in a trilogy on the future of Christianity which Philip Jenkins has published in recent years. The first was The Next Christendom—The Coming of Global Christianity, which focused on the global expansion which Christianity has experienced in recent decades, primarily in the Southern hemisphere. The second was The New Faces of Christianity—Believing the Bible in the Global South, which focused on the way the Bible is being read in the places where the growth has been concentrated. Now in this latest volume Jenkins turns his attention to Europe, focusing, as the subtitle suggests, on the question of what is likely to be in store for a continent that seems to be turning against its Christian heritage while at the same time attracting large numbers of Muslim immigrants. The book has all the virtues of the prior volumes: it is well written, informative, tightly argued, and provocative. It is particularly effective in discussing the relevant facts about the state of Islam in Europe, and it offers a vision of the future that is significantly different from what the prophets of doom have been suggesting. This is must reading for anyone who wants to have an informed view of what is taking place in the religio-political struggles of our time. Barth, Karl. Fifty Prayers (Westminster/John Knox, 2005)The author of this collection is commonly thought to be the most important Reformed theologian of the 20th century. He was an original thinker and a prolific writer, but at times his published work is difficult to understand. This slim little volume, which brings together prayers Barth prepared for use in connection with sermons he preached on a variety of different occasions, is eminently readable, and it serves as a down-to-earth introduction to his thought. Keller, Timothy. The Reason for God—Belief in an Age of Skepticism (Dutton, 2008) We are now awash in a sea of books on the subject of the rationality of religious belief. This is one of the best. Written by an ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) who is the senior pastor of a 5,000 member church in New York City, the book has been on the New York Times best-seller list for many weeks now. It directly confronts many of the more popular intellectual objections to Christian belief today, and it does so in a way that is at once philosophically informed and down-to-earth. A neat trick. The author espouses a conservative version of Protestant theology, and he is critical of the alternatives espoused by liberals. But anyone (and especially any Protestant) who is interested in grappling seriously with the intellectual challenges facing Christians today will benefit from reading what he has to say. Gustafson, James. Moral Discernment in the Christian Life—Essays in Theological Ethics (Westminster/John Knox, 2007) A collection of essays written over a 40-year period by one of America’s premier theological ethicists, who does his work quite self-consciously as a Reformed thinker. The essays are quite readable, and they cover everything from the differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant approaches to the subject to such practical matters as euthanasia and dealing with Down syndrome. A good introduction to the way a theologian who wants to make appropriate use of the latest scientific findings does ethical reflection. McGrath, Alister. Christianity’s Dangerous Idea—The Protestant Revolution: A History from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First. (HarperOne, 2007) The author of many books on the history of Western Christianity (especially the Protestant part of the story) that are prized for both their erudition and their accessibility for lay readers, McGrath has now provided in this one volume an overview of the entire global history of Protestant Christianity since the time of the Reformation. The book also provides a provocative characterization of what it means to be a Protestant as well as an informed critique of Protestantism. But unlike so many other critics, McGrath ultimately is quite optimistic about the future of Protestantism in the world today.
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