Media Theory, Religion and Theology

Author: Ravi Zacharias
ISBN: 9780849943270
Pages: 195
Summary: In his most important work to date, apologetics scholar and popular speaker Ravi Zacharias shows how the blueprint for life and death itself is found in a true understanding of Jesus. With a simple yet penetrating style, Zacharias uses rich illustrations to celebrate the power of Jesus Christ to transform lives."Jesus Among Other Gods"contrasts the truth of Jesus with founders of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, strengthening believers and compelling them to share their faith with our post-modern world.

Author: W. Barnes Tatum
ISBN: 9780944344675
Pages: 256
Summary: Since the earliest days of the movies more than a century ago, moviemakers have been intrigued by "the greatest story ever told." They have tried, with varying degrees of success, to capture the life of Jesus on film.
In Jesus at the Movies Barnes Tatum has created a fascinating and exhaustively-researched viewer's guide to the movies about Jesus. Tatum guides the reader film-by-film from Sidney Olcott's silent classic "From the Manger to the Cross" through Denis Arcand's award-winning "Jesus of Montreal" to the future of Jesus movies. With his experience as author, biblical scholar, and teacher on religion and film, he presents this unique look at Jesus films in all dimensions: as cinematic art, as literature, as biblical history and as theology.

Author: Shane Claiborne, Chris Haw
ISBN: 9780310278429
Pages: 348
Summary: Amid all the buzz of politics and elections, Jesus for President is a refreshing reminder that our ultimate hope lies not in partisan political options but in the Jesus who gave his life for us. Politics for ordinary radicals who want to love the world into the kingdom of God.

Author: John Shelby Spong
ISBN: 9780060778415
Pages: 336
Summary: The Pope Describes the Ancient Traditional Jesus; Bishop Spong Brings Us a Jesus Modern People Can Be Inspired By

Author: Dan Gilgoff
ISBN: 9780312378448
Pages: 352
Summary: Led by the immense behind-the-scenes influence of Dr. James Dobson, Focus on the Family has grown from its roots as a California radio show dispensing parenting advice to an unrivaled media ministry broadcasting on more than two thousand stations in the United States alone.  Dobson has supplanted Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ralph Reed as the political spokesman for tens of millions of American evangelical Christians--even though he is not a minister, but a family therapist with a doctorate in child development. Dobson maintains that American political and social values are firmly rooted in Christian tradition--one that has come under siege beginning in the 1960s, as court rulings undermined the importance of religion in public policy.  With the support of evangelical followers, Dobson has built a powerful political machine at both state and national levels to wage a crusade against abortion, gay rights, the teaching of evolution, stem cell research, and judicial activism. Through painstaking research and interviews with leading evangelicals, including Ted Haggard, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, and James Dobson himself, along with rare access to Focus on the Family and its affiliated organizations, Dan Gilgoff reveals the scope of Dobson's empire and its implications for the future of America. This paperback edition includes a new afterword covering the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates--Obama, Clinton, Edwards, Huckabee, McCain, Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson--as they court Dobson and the evangelical vote in 2008.

Author: Adele Reinhartz
ISBN: 9780195146967
Pages: 320
Summary: Since the advent of the cinema, Jesus has frequently appeared in our movie houses and on our television screens. Indeed, it may well be that more people worldwide know about Jesus and his life story from the movies than from any other medium. Indeed, Jesus' story has been adapted dozens of times throughout the history of commercial cinema, from the 1912 silent From the Manger to the Cross to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. No doubt there are more to come.
Drawing on a broad range of movies, biblical scholar Adele Reinhartz traces the way in which Jesus of Nazareth has become Jesus of Hollywood. She argues that Jesus films both reflect and influence cultural perceptions of Jesus and the other figures in his story. She focuses on the cinematic interpretation of Jesus' relationships with the key people in his life: his family, his friends, and his foes. She examines how these films address theological issues, such as Jesus' identity as both human and divine, political issues, such as the role of the individual in society and the possibility of freedom under political oppression, social issues, such as gender roles and hierarchies, and personal issues, such as the nature of friendship and human sexuality.
Reinhartz's study of Jesus' celluloid incarnations shows how Jesus movies reshape the past in the image of the present. Despite society's profound interest in Jesus as a religious and historical figure, Jesus movies are fascinating not as history but as mirrors of the concerns, anxieties, and values of our own era. As the story of Jesus continues to capture the imagination of filmmakers and moviegoers, he remains as significant a cultural figure today as he was 2000 years ago.

Author: Mike Erre
ISBN:
Pages: 224
Summary: Like the first-century Pharisees, we've reduced Christianity to a set of propositional beliefs. Truth is, we've gotten away from what it really means to be a Christian. In The Jesus of Suburbia, Mike Erre reveals that we've created a Jesus in our own image. In a fresh, startling manner, Erre helps us understand that the real Jesus is calling us to live, act, and think in ways that overturn the status quo.
"Expect no sugar-coated sweetness about 'felt needs' and in-church coffee bars from Erre, pastor of teaching at Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa, Calif. Expect instead compelling discussion of how the Christian church has lost sight of the revolutionary teaching and love of Jesus. 'Much of the message of American Christianity presents Jesus as the purveyor of the American Dream,' he says. American Christians, he claims, have reduced Jesus to a study of risk management; we want him to be 'predictable and safe.' Erre also uses the adjectives 'insecure, threatened, naive, simplistic, mean and shortsighted' to describe many of today's churches. He lambastes our love of theology instead of Jesus, our contentment with 'simply knowing about him instead of knowing him.' While this protest continues in the vein of other recent books that take a hard look at Jesus and the church (Jesus Mean and Wild; Out of Your Comfort Zone), it offers a fresh look at how the American church must begin 'demonstrating the message of Christ,' not merely explaining it. After all, says Erre, 'if you follow Jesus, you follow the most radical man who ever existed.'"--Publishers Weekly

Author: Michael Baigent
ISBN:
Pages: 336
Summary: What if everything you think you know about Jesus is wrong? In "The Jesus Papers", Michael Baigent probes into the truth about Jesus's life and crucifixion.
As a religious historian, Baigent explores the religious and political climate in which Jesus was born and raised, and the strife within the different factions of the Jewish Zealot movement. He chronicles the migrations of Jesus's family, his subsequent exposure to other cultures and the events, teachings, and influences that were most likely to have shaped Jesus's early years. Baigent also uncovers the inconsistencies and biases in the accounts of the major historians of Jesus's time, revealing their enduring influence in forming our most common conceptions of Jesus.
Baigent provides a detailed account of his groundbreaking discoveries. The evidence he uncovers leads him to make shocking new assertions that threaten the conventional account of Jesus's life and death and shake the very foundation of Western thought. Ultimately, his investigation raises the hope that we may gain a new understanding of Jesus.
Read by the author

Author: Rob Bell, Don Golden
ISBN: 9780310275022
Pages: 224
Summary: There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building.
Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty.
This is a book about those two numbers.

Author: Bart D. Ehrman
ISBN: 9780061173936
Pages: 304
Summary: Picking up where Bible expert Bart Ehrman's "New York Times" bestseller "Misquoting Jesus" left off, "Jesus, Interrupted" addresses the larger issue of what the New Testament actually teaches—and it's not what most people think. Here Ehrman reveals what scholars have unearthed:
The authors of the New Testament have diverging views about who Jesus was and how salvation works
The New Testament contains books that were forged in the names of the apostles by Christian writers who lived decades later
Jesus, Paul, Matthew, and John all represented fundamentally different religions
Established Christian doctrines—such as the suffering messiah, the divinity of Jesus, and the trinity—were the inventions of still later theologians
These are not idiosyncratic perspectives of just one modern scholar. As Ehrman skillfully demonstrates, they have been the standard and widespread views of critical scholars across a full spectrum of denominations and traditions. Why is it most people have never heard such things? This is the book that pastors, educators, and anyone interested in the Bible have been waiting for—a clear and compelling account of the central challenges we face when attempting to reconstruct the life and message of Jesus.

Author: Mark I. Pinsky
ISBN: 9780664230128
Pages: 160
Summary: In this insightful and accessible book, religion journalist Mark Pinsky takes the curious reader on a tour of the fascinating world of Sunbelt evangelicalism. Pinsky, religion reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, uses his unique position as a Jew covering evangelical Christianity to help nonevangelicals understand the hopes, fears, and motivations of this growing subculture and breaks down some of the stereotypes that nonevangelicals have of evangelicals.
"I hope you’ll find laughter, perhaps puzzlement, and heartfelt interest in how people just like you wrestle with feelings, values, and beliefs that touch the core of their beings. And I hope you’ll catch a glimpse of someone learning to understand and get along with folks whose convictions differ from his own," Pinsky writes in the introduction.
This book will appeal to Jews, mainline and liberal Christians, and curious blue-staters, as well as evangelicals who want to read an outsider’s perspective on their culture. As the country takes to the polls for midterm congressional elections, this book will shed light on how and why evangelical culture is becoming increasingly entwined in American politics.

Author: Jim Henderson, Matt Casper, George Barna
ISBN: 9781414313313
Pages: 208
Summary: Jim Henderson pays people to go to church. In fact, he made national news when he "rented" a soul for $504 on E-Bay after its owner offered an "open mind" to the highest bidder. In "Jim & Casper Go to Church," Hendrson hires another atheist--Matt Casper--to visit ten leading churches with him and give the "first impression" perspective of a non-believer. What follows is a startling dialogue between an atheist and a believer seeing church anew through the eyes of a skeptic, and the development of an amazing relationship between two men with diametrically opposing views of the world who agree to respect each others' space. Foreword by George Barna.
FEATURES: Unique perspective of both Christian and atheist on the church & Christians in the USA Intelligent and respectful, seeking dialogue between key characters Helps the Christian understand the change in attitudes and actions required when shifting from defending the faith to defending "sacred space"--from talking to listening, from strength to weakness, from debate to dialogue, from manipulation to intentionality

Author: Helen De Borchgrave, Helen De Borchgrave
ISBN: 9780800632403
Pages: 223
Summary: Searching always for the spirituality that inspired their work, de Borchgrave's work shows us how Christian artists through the ages strove in mosaic, paint, and stone "to enrich the mind, touch the heart, and feed the soul."
For all who want to broaden and deepen their appreciation of religious art, this magnificent volume offers:
—Over 100 superb color reproductions of some of the world’s greatest paintings
—The story of 2000 years of Christian art—from early wall-paintings to contemporary works by living artists
—Explorations into the lives of more than fifty of the world's greatest artists
—Fascinating insights into the spirituality of the artists and how it informed and shaped their work