Christ and Culture Revisited by Donal Carson.
H. Richard Niebuhr’s 1951 book, Christ and Culture, is one of those seminal works with which nearly every church leader is challenged to wrestle. In Christ and Culture Revisited,
Donald Carson revisits Niebuhr’s book as the springboard for an
exploration of the way in which Christians are called to engage for,
with, and against the context in which they find themselves at he
beginning of the 21st century. The author “tries to lay out a
responsible biblical theology that any responsible Christian will want
to acknowledge, and ... to show how these turning points in the history
of redemption must shape Christian thinking about the relationships
between Christ and culture.”
The result is a richer sense of the tensions within Scripture, and of
the immense difficulties and subtleties we must all face, as we seek to
live in Christ as Lord between the already of Christ’s incarnation and
the not yet of his completely fulfilling his purposes in history.
– The Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon
WINTER 2008
All the People in the Bible: An A-Z Guide to the Saints, Scoundrels, and Other Characters in Scripture by Richard Losch.
“Born to be battered ... the loving phone call book. Underline
it, circle things, write in the margins, turn down page corrs, the more
you use it, the more valuable it gets to be.”
So reads an old advertisement by the South Central Bell Telephone
Company which illustrates well what our approach to the Bible should be.
All the People in the Bible was written with the express purpose of
helping us better understand more of the characters in Scripture.
Giving special attention to the “lesser characters of the Bible,” this
book also serves as a valuable and readable Scriptural resource, and
witnesses well to the seasoned ministry of the retired Episcopal rector
who is its author.
– The Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon
SPRING 2009
Rowan's Rule: The Biography of the Archbishop of Canterbury by Rupert Shortt.
The current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is
a complex man. He was at Oxford when I was there in the early
1990s and I say to people often you will not understand him unless you
see clearly that he is a scholar, a Trinitarian and catholic Christian,
a mystic and an iconoclast.
Rupert Shortt explores how the events of the Archbishop’s remarkable
life have shaped his beliefs and practices today. Of particular
interest is the riveting account of Williams’ experience near the World
Trade Center towers on the morning of September 11, 2001. Written
with Williams’s cooperation, Rowan’s Rule not only elucidates his ideas
but gives a compelling portrait of a private and in some ways
surprisingly vulnerable man.
– The Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon
The
Anglican Book Club