Blog posts & Sermon Notes
Book Recommendations
Being Christian
In accessible, pastoral terms Williams discusses the meaning and practice of baptism, the Bible, the Eucharist, and prayer, inviting readers to really think through the Christian faith and how to live it out. Questions for reflection and discussion at the end of each chapter help readers to dig deeper and apply Williams's insights to their own lives.
Being Disciples
In his typically gentle, inviting, pastoral writing style, Rowan Williams offers biblically grounded wisdom for Christians at all stages of their journeys as disciples of Jesus.
The Apostles’ Creed
The Apostles’ Creed has become so familiar to us that we don’t think about what we’re saying.
Ben Myers re-introduces that creed. He shows us what about the Christian faith is so counter-cultural, and what truths embedded in the Apostles’ Creed we’ve come to assume, when really they should amaze us and earn our allegiance unto death.
After Doubt
Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it?
After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them.
Prayer in the Night
Framed around a nighttime prayer of Compline, Tish Harrison Warren, author of Liturgy of the Ordinary, explores themes of human vulnerability, suffering, and God's seeming absence.
This book offers a prayerful and frank approach to the difficulties in our ordinary lives at work, at home, and in a world filled with uncertainty.
How to Survive a Shipwreck
With visionary artistry and pastoral wisdom, Jonathan Martin reveals what we'll need to make it through those uncharted waters, how we can use these defining experiences to live out of our depths, and why it will then become impossible to go back to the half-life we once lived.
Faith in the Shadows
"People don't abandon faith because they have doubts. People abandon faith because they think they're not allowed to have doubts."
Doubt, Fischer contends, is no reason to leave the faith. Instead, it's an invitation to a more honest faith―a faith that's not in control, but that trusts more fully in its Lord.
Seculosity
Seculosity takes a thoughtful yet entertaining tour of American "performancism" and its cousins, highlighting both their ingenuity and mercilessness, all while challenging the conventional narrative of religious decline. Ultimately he brings us to a fresh appreciation for the grace of God in all its countercultural wonder.
The Deeply Formed Life
The Deeply Formed Life is a roadmap to live in the richly rooted place we all yearn for: a place of communion with God, a place where we find our purpose.
Reading While Black
McCaulley calls the church to a dynamic theological engagement with Scripture, in which Christians of diverse backgrounds dialogue with their own social location as well as the cultures of others. Reading While Black moves the conversation forward.
The Divine Conspiracy
Dallas Willard skillfully weaves together biblical teaching, popular culture, science, scholarship, and spiritual practice, revealing what it means to "apprentice" ourselves to Jesus. Using Jesus’s Sermon of the Mount as his foundation, Willard masterfully explores life-changing ways to experience and be guided by God on a daily basis, resulting in a more authentic and dynamic faith.
Subversive Sabbath
Combining creative storytelling, pastoral sensitivity, practical insight, and relevant academic research, Subversive Sabbath offers a unique invitation to personal Sabbath-keeping that leads to fuller and more joyful lives.
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality
In this book, Scazzero unveils what's wrong with our conventional means of "spiritual growth" and offers not only a model of spirituality that actually works, but seven steps to transformation that will help readers experience a faith charged with authenticity, contemplation and a hunger for God.
You are What you Love
In this book, award-winning author James K. A. Smith shows that who and what we worship fundamentally shape our hearts. Smith helps readers recognize the formative power of culture and the transformative possibilities of Christian practices.
Simply Christian
Provocative and insightful, with a discussion guide for individuals and groups, Simply Christian offers answers to expand and guide all of our lives.
The Blue Parakeet
McKnight challenges us to rethink how to read the Bible, not just to puzzle it together into some systematic belief but to see it as a Story that we're summoned to enter and to carry forward in our day.
The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry
“Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.”
Within the pages of this book, you’ll find a fascinating roadmap to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.
The Color of Compromise
An acclaimed, timely narrative of how people of faith have historically--up to the present day--worked against racial justice. And a call for urgent action by all Christians today in response.
The Color of Compromise is both enlightening and compelling, telling a history we either ignore or just don't know. Equal parts painful and inspirational, it details how the American church has helped create and maintain racist ideas and practices. You will be guided in thinking through concrete solutions for improved race relations and a racially inclusive church.
Liturgy of the Ordinary
Framed around one ordinary day, this book explores daily life through the lens of liturgy, small practices, and habits that form us. Drawing from the diversity of her life as a campus minister, Anglican priest, friend, wife, and mother, Tish Harrison Warren opens up a practical theology of the everyday.