The Conversion of the Imagination contains some of the best work on Paul by first-rate New Testament scholar Richard B. Hays. These essays probe Paul's approach to scriptural interpretation, showing how Paul's reading of the Hebrew Scriptures reshaped the theological vision of his churches. Hays's analysis of intertextual echoes in Paul's letters has touched off exciting debate among Pauline scholars and made more recognizable the contours of Paul's thought. These studies contain some of the early work leading up to Hays's seminal Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul and also show how Hays has responded to critics and further developed his thought in the years since. Among the many subjects covered here are Paul's christological application of Psalms, Paul's revisionary interpretation of the Law, and the influence of the Old Testament on Paul's ethical teachings and ecclesiology.

Maguire uncovers a history of French thought that casts the imagination as a dominant faculty in our experience of the world. Original and thought-provoking, this book will interest a range of readers across intellectual history, political theory, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religious thought.

For two thousand years countless people around the world viewed reality through a Christian lens that endowed their lives with meaning, purpose, and coherence. Today, in an era of unprecedented secularization, many have ceased to find meaning not only in Christianity but in life in general. In Converting the Imagination, Patrick Manning offers a probing analysis of this crisis of meaning, marshalling historical and psychological research to shed light on the connections among the disintegration of the Christian worldview, religious disaffiliation, and a growing mental health epidemic. As a response Manning presents an approach to religious education that is at once traditionally grounded in the model of Jesus' own teaching and augmented by modern educational research and cognitive science. Converting the Imagination is an invitation to transform the way we teach about faith and make sense of the world, an invitation that echoes Jesus' invitation to a fuller, more meaningful life. It is sure to captivate scholars and practitioners of religious education, ministers seeking to reengage people who have drifted away from the faith or to support young people suffering from existential anxiety, and anyone in search of deeper meaning in their religious traditions or in their own lives. Converting the Imagination was a finalist for the 2021 Lilly Fellows Program Book Award: https://www.lillyfellows.org/grants-and-prizes/book-award/

"This book is essential reading for those interested in the imagination, epistemology, naturalism, and the philosophy of religion." - Charles Taliaferro, Professor of Philosophy, St. Olaf College, Minnesota The role of imagination in psychology, ethics and aesthetics provides a good analogy for thinking about the imagination in religious belief. in dealing with the inner lives of other human beings, moral values or aesthetic qualities we need to employ the imagination: to suppose, form hypotheses, empathize or imaginatively engage with alien people or worlds in order to understand. Just as we use the imagination to relate to other minds, appreciate beauty and understand goodness, we need imagination to engage with God's action in the world.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies. A probing study of the cultural fragmentation-social, spatial, and racial-that took root in the Western mind, this book shows how Christianity has consistently forged Christian nations rather than encouraging genuine communion between disparate groups and individuals. Weaving together the stories of Zurara, the royal chronicler of Prince Henry, the Jesuit theologian Jose de Acosta, the famed Anglican Bishop John William Colenso, and the former slave writer Olaudah Equiano, Jennings narrates a tale of loss, forgetfulness, and missed opportunities for the transformation of Christian communities. Touching on issues of slavery, geography, Native American history, Jewish-Christian relations, literacy, and translation, he brilliantly exposes how the loss of land and the supersessionist ideas behind the Christian missionary movement are both deeply implicated in the invention of race. Using his bold, creative, and courageous critique to imagine a truly cosmopolitan citizenship that transcends geopolitical, nationalist, ethnic, and racial boundaries, Jennings charts, with great vision, new ways of imagining ourselves, our communities, and the landscapes we inhabit.

Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries. Exploring their reasons and the repercussions they faced, Kselman demonstrates how this expanded sense of liberty informs our secular age.

The apostle Paul gave the gospel the first place in his preaching, endeavored with all his might to proclaim it clearly, and even went so far as to pronounce a curse upon all those who would pervert its truth. Yet how sad it is that many, even among those considering themselves evangelicals, have reduced the gospel message to a few trite statements to be repeated, and view conversion as a mere human decision. In The Gospel Call and True Conversion , Paul Washer challenges such easy believism as he examines the real meaning of things like faith, repentance, and receiving Christ. He also deals extensively with the effects of saving grace that God promises in the new covenant; namely, the creation of new hearts and new people. Table of Contents: PART ONE: The Gospel Call 1. A Call to Repentance 2. A Call to Faith 3. Believe and Confess 4. Receiving Christ 5. Christ at Heart’s Door PART TWO: New Hearts and the Nature of True Conversion 6. The Great Motive and End of Salvation 7. The Author of Salvation 8. Separation and Cleansing 9. A New Heart 10. The Effectual Spirit PART THREE: New People and the Nature of True Conversion 11. The Glory of the New Covenant 12. The Making of New People 13. The Christian’s Sure Knowledge of God 14. The Heart and Way of God’s People 15. The Everlasting Covenant 16. God’s Goodness to His People Series Descriptions Although the Recovering the Gospel Series does not represent an entirely systematic presentation of the gospel, it does address most of the essential elements, especially those that are most neglected in contemporary Christianity. It is the hope of the author that these words might be a guide to help you rediscover the gospel in all its beauty, scandal, and saving power. It is his prayer that such a rediscovery might transform your life, strengthen your proclamation, and bring the greatest glory to God.

Apologetics, the defense of the Faith, shows why our Christian faith is true—but it’s much more than that. Apologetics isn’t just the province of scholars and saints, but of ordinary men and women: parents, teachers, lay ministry leaders, pastors, and everyone who wants to develop a stronger faith, to understand why we believe what we believe, to know Our Lord better, and love him more fully. In Apologetics and the Christian Imagination: An Integrated Approach to Defending the Faith, Holly Ordway shows how an imaginative approach—in cooperation with rational arguments—is extremely valuable in helping people come to faith in Christ. Making a case for the role of imagination in apologetics, this book proposes ways to create meaning for Christian language in a culture that no longer understands words like ‘sin’ or ‘salvation,' suggests how to discern and address the manipulation of language, and shows how metaphor and narrative work in powerful ways to communicate the truth. It applies these concepts to specific, key apologetics issues, including suffering, doubt, and longing for meaning and beauty. Apologetics and the Christian Imagination shows how Christians can harness the power of the imagination to share the Faith in meaningful, effective ways.

August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.

In this final volume of Robert Denoon Cumming's four-volume history of the phenomenological movement, Cumming examines the bearing of Heidegger's philosophy on his original commitment to Nazism and on his later inability to face up to the implication of that allegiance. Cumming continues his focus, as in previous volumes, on Heidegger's connection with other philosophers. Here, Cumming looks first at Heidegger's relation to Karl Jaspers, an old friend on whom Heidegger turned his back when Hitler consolidated power, and who discredited Heidegger in the denazification that followed World War II. The issues at stake are not merely personal, Cumming argues, but regard the philosophical relevance of the personal.