Set in Stone: America’s Embrace of the Ten Commandments
Jenna Weissman Joselit (Oxford University Press)
The Ten Commandments are woven deeply into the fabric of American history—not only the commandments themselves, but also the irrepressible habit of giving them physical form. Stretching back to the mid-19th century, observes Joselit, a historian at George Washington University, the American people “saw to it that the Ten Commandments were just about everywhere: in houses of worship and private homes, on the street, in school, in the subway, and even on the interstate.”Set in Stone shows how depictions of the Ten Commandments have provoked “heated exchange on some of the big, juicy issues of the day: national identity, inclusion, pluralism, change.”
Spirituality for the Sent: Casting a New Vision for the Missional Church
Edited by Nathan A. Finn and Keith S. Whitfield (IVP Academic)
“In recent decades,” write Finn and Whitfield, the editors of this volume, “evangelicals in North America have shown a growing interest in missional thought and spiritual formation—but not necessarily at the same time. Unfortunately, though the missional and spiritual formation movements among evangelicals overlap each other chronologically, they have rarely intersected in meaningful ways.” In these pages, Finn (Union University) and Whitfield (Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) have gathered a variety of Bible experts, theologians, historians, and other scholars committed to bringing these movements into more fruitful conversation.
Every Job a Parable: What Walmart Greeters, Nurses and Astronauts Tell Us about God
John Van Sloten (Tyndale)
Van Sloten, a pastor from Calgary, Alberta, has interviewed people who perform every kind of labor you can imagine. In Every Job a Parable, he reflects on how different forms of work connect us to God and his creation. Understanding our various jobs as parables, he writes, is about “understanding how Jesus is speaking directly to you (via your personal experience of work) and how he is speaking through you (to the broader world). It’s about hearing God’s creational words through created things: the rocks a geologist explores, the cars a mechanic fixes, the lights an electrician wires, the customers a retail workers serves.”
