St. Paul writes "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." The poems in William Wenthe's God's Foolishness mine the feelings of human uncertainty in matters of love and desire, time and death, and uncover difficult truths with transformative insights. These are poems of crisis. Wenthe examines our conflicting urges to see nature as sustenance and to foolishly destroy it. His poems shift from close observation to panorama with cinematic fluidity, from a tea mug to an ancient monument, from a warbler on an elm branch to the specter of imminent natural disaster. Offering passion and intellect balanced with a careful concern for poetic craft, Wenthe's God's Foolishness gives us fine poems to savor and admire.

St. Paul writes "the foolishness of God is wiser than men." The poems in William Wenthe's God's Foolishness mine the feelings of human uncertainty in matters of love and desire, time and death, and uncover difficult truths with transformative insights. These are poems of crisis. Wenthe examines our conflicting urges to see nature as sustenance and to foolishly destroy it. His poems shift from close observation to panorama with cinematic fluidity, from a tea mug to an ancient monument, from a warbler on an elm branch to the specter of imminent natural disaster. Offering passion and intellect balanced with a careful concern for poetic craft, Wenthe's God's Foolishness gives us fine poems to savor and admire.

In 1964 Nola Warren was a young missionary with three small children, a wonderful marriage and a growing ministry. One day her husband, Jerry Witt, flew away in his airplane to do what he loved to do in his ministry--distribute Bibles to the most remote villages of Mexico. Jerry never came home. He was killed in an airplane crash that has never been completely explained or resolved.Even though she spoke very little Spanish at the time, Nola obeyed God and remained in Mexico to continue the work Jerry had begun. She felt very inept and could not understand why God has chosen her. But God reminded her that "the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than men's strength"(1 Cor. 1:25, NIV). About the author: Nola Warren and her second husband, Frank live in Durango, Mexico, where they are supervisors of more than twenty congregations. Together they have helped develop many ministries, and they continue to do missionary work in many parts of Mexico. Nola is also recognized as an international speaker and has authored two best-selling books in Spanish.

The first two chapters of Paul’s first epistle to the Christians of Corinth, written in the fifth decade of the first century, have played a significant role in the history of Christian theology. Interpreting the central event in Christianity, namely the crucifixion of Jesus, Paul reflects on the wisdom and foolishness of God, which he opposes to the world’s wisdom. According to Paul, the “word of the cross,” which is “foolishness” to some and “scandal” to others, leads to an upheaval in one’s way of thinking. For two millenia, theology has often turned to these passages in order to sustain its reflection. Many central questions emerge from Paul’s text on the meaning of a crucified Messiah, on God’s omnipotence, weakness, and suffering. This volume hopes to achieve two things by seeking to place exegetes, historians, philosophers, and theologians in conversation: to better understand Paul’s text and its reception and also to examine the ways in which it can nourish our theological reflection today.

What did Paul mean when he wrote that the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom? Through close analysis of the sixteenth-century reception of Paul's discourses of folly, this book examines the role of the New Testament in the development of what Erasmus and John Calvin refer to as the “Christian philosophy.” Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God reveals the importance of Pauline rhetoric in the development of humanist critiques of scholasticism while charting the formation of a specifically affective approach to religious epistemology and theological method. As the first book-length examination of Calvin's indebtedness to Erasmus, which also considers the participation of Bullinger, Pellikan, and Melanchthon in an Erasmian exegetical milieu, it is a case study in the complicated cross-confessional exchange of ideas in the sixteenth century. Kirk Essary examines assumptions about the very nature of theology in the sixteenth century, how it was understood by leading humanist reformers, and how ideas about philosophy and rhetoric were received, appropriated, and shared in a complex intellectual and religious context.

In our post-Christian society many skeptics, atheists, and agnostics assume that the Christian faith involves belief in spite of a lack of evidence and that Christianity encourages its adherents to be satisfied with not understanding the world. This is untrue. Christianity has a legacy of thought and logic, and a convincing case can be made that modern science and Western culture could only have sprung from the Judeo-Christian worldview. Although questions of origins, purpose, and meaning are not easily proved true in a "scientific" or empirical sense, things can be true without empirical proof. It does not follow that religion is untrue or that religious belief is for the credulous and the gullible. Many of the presuppositions underlying any worldview cannot be proven empirically, and acceptance of many of the truth claims of atheism and postmodernism requires just as much faith as acceptance of the fundamentals of Christianity. This book is an attempt to demonstrate that biblical Christianity is true, in the sense that it is a logical interpretation of reality and our lived experience, and that the implications of Christian faith make more rational sense than a rejection of that faith.

An examination of what it means to "preach the Word" in the context of Anglican ministry.