Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church
Scot McKnight (Brazos Press)
Today the word kingdom is on the lips of many Christians. But we’re hardly agreed on what it means to engage in “kingdom” work. Is it about using activism to build a just society? Witnessing for Jesus? Raising a family, starting a business, tending a garden, or performing simple acts of kindness? McKnight addresses our confusion here, critiquing both the “skinny jeans” perspective (which emphasizes social justice and the common good) and the “pleated pants” alternative (which emphasizes God’s redemptive work through both personal salvation and cultural transformation).
Philip C. Almond (Cornell University Press)
“Whether we believe in the Devil or not is now a matter of choice,” writes Almond, an Australian scholar who has also written books on Adam and Eve and heaven and hell. “It was not always so. For the better part of the last two thousand years in the West, it was as impossible not to believe in the Devil as it was impossible not to believe in God. . . . The history of God in the West is also the history of the Devil, and the history of theology also the history of demonology.” Almond’s “biography” tracks the shifting understandings of the Devil that have prevailed in various societies and stages of history—even up to our postmodern age.
The Stories We Tell: How TV and Movies Long for and Echo the Truth
Mike Cosper (Crossway)
With dramatic series like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and Mad Men leaving outsized cultural footprints and reaching new heights of storytelling sophistication, it’s now safe to say we are smack-dab in the middle of a golden age of television. Cosper, a worship and arts pastor in Louisville, Kentucky, says the most compelling shows don’t “aim at our rational mind, where cultural Christian convictions like ‘we shouldn’t watch Sex and the City’ exist,” but instead “at the imagination, a much more sneaky part of us, ruled by love, desire, and hope.” This volume explores how plots that captivate us on screen testify to our deepest longings—and ultimately to the Story that underlies all others.
