Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy
Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson (Baker Academic)
Going to church and going to work each revolve around a particular set of rhythms: roles we perform instinctively and lines we know by heart. Yet the rhythms of Sunday and Monday morning “often feel as if they are a million miles apart,” say theologians Matthew Kaemingk and Cory B. Willson. Their book, Work and Worship, asks how believers beset by weekday pressures can experience Sunday as more than a welcome escape or an irrelevant sideshow. “Daily work,” they write, “should ‘show up’ in the community’s prayers and sermons, its songs and benedictions, its testimonies and sacraments. Theologies of work matter, but they need to be sung and prayed.”
Why Black Lives Matter: African American Thriving for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by Anthony B. Bradley (Cascade Books)
Under Martin Luther King Jr., the campaign for black civil rights took on an unmistakably Christian character. By contrast, today’s Black Lives Matter movement often feels alienated from organized religion. Why Black Lives Matter gathers black pastors, scholars, and theologians who bring their faith to bear on matters of black culture, church life, and political protest. As editor Anthony B. Bradley writes of the contributors, they differ on their “specific prescriptions for change,” but they “share a central conviction that there needs to be a resurgence of black religious leadership to properly form the Black Lives Matter movement.”
The Need for Creeds Today: Confessional Faith in a Faithless Age
J. V. Fesko (Baker Academic)
Many strains of American Christianity are skeptical of inherited tradition. They resist being bound to any faith statements they haven’t arrived at through their own biblical and spiritual reflection. In The Need for Creeds Today, theologian J. V. Fesko recovers the importance of the church’s historic confessions, showing how they proceed from the Bible’s own instructions and bring vitality, not bloodless conformity, to God’s people. “When we create, profess, and pass confessions down to future generations,” Fesko writes, “we do not propagate the dead faith of the living but the living faith of the dead.”
