Money Matters: Faith, Life, and Wealth
R. Paul Stevens and Clive Lim (Eerdmans)
Most people devote a good portion of their waking hours to making and spending money—or wishing they could do more of both. How can we handle financial resources in a way that acknowledges the blessings of wealth but avoids idolatrous traps? In Money Matters, two experts on marketplace theology—one (Lim) who grew up poor, and one (Stevens) whose family was well-off—give biblical, historical, and practical guidance on this theme. “Money grabs at the heart,” they write. “It is not neutral. It is a power. It can be a radioactive issue. We want to have money, but money wants to have us.”
Every Leaf, Line, and Letter: Evangelicals and the Bible from the 1730s to the Present
Edited by Timothy Larsen (IVP Academic)
For all of today’s consternation over the meaning of evangelical, no plausible definition can get around the centrality of the Bible: reading it, preaching it, distributing it, and striving to apply its teachings. And this has been true throughout the movement’s modern history, as a diverse range of scholars make clear in this volume. The essays in Every Leaf, Line, and Letter study the changing shape of evangelical “biblicism” across different eras, places, and cultures. As Baylor University historian Thomas Kidd avers in the book’s introduction, “the uses that evangelicals have made of the Bible are almost as varied as evangelicals themselves.”
Hope Always: How to Be a Force for Life in a Culture of Suicide
Matthew Sleeth (Tyndale Momentum)
Between the travails of the COVID-19 era and recent sociological work charting a troubling rise in “deaths of despair,” it’s clear that the specter of suicide hovers over many in today’s world. In Hope Always, former ER doctor Matthew Sleeth writes to stem this tide, drawing on his Christian faith and hands-on hospital experience to marshal the best interventions that the Bible, medicine, and psychology can offer. “I want those who are depressed among us to live,” writes Sleeth. “I want you to be able to help others to live. We who live in the age of suicide are indeed our brother’s and our sister’s keepers.”
