Theologian Douglas Harink invites readers to rediscover Romans as a treatise on justice, tracing Paul's thinking on this theme through a sequential reading of the book and finding in each passage facets of the gospel's primary claim—that God accomplishes justice in the death and resurrection of Jesus Messiah.

Resurrecting Church interweaves three strands. First, it is the remarkable turnaround story of Caldwell Presbyterian Church, which was on the edge of extinction when author John Cleghorn filled the role of pastor. Second, Cleghorn tells the story of his own growth and liberation from the myopia of privilege. Cleghorn traded his position as senior vice president of the nation's largest bank for ministry and the dusty and dated church office at Caldwell Presbyterian. The third strand includes the stories of several diverse congregations researched by the author. These congregations are examples of faith communities that have taken risks, deepening empathy and seeking justice. Through these stories, the book updates the "same old" conversation about church vitality in timely and surprising ways. Cleghorn raises these important questions: Can churches survive, even be resurrected, at the intersections of race, sexuality, class, and faith background? Can congregations be liberated by rebuilding around those on the margins who have been wounded by church? As more US cities become majority-minority, the "mainline" church remains stubbornly white and homogeneous. Church leaders and thinkers are seeking ways to build more racial diversity and radical welcome. This book provides hope and practical examples of how this can happen. Cleghorn declares, "God is doing what Isaiah calls 'a new thing'" in congregations where multiple types of diversity intersect, erecting spiritual hospitals for the wounded and marginalized. For the church, these intersections provide both a current lens of self-examination and avenues to growth in faith. With stories, people profiles, and insights from their leaders and members, this book breaks new ground with practical learning and lessons drawn from original research and the lived experience of intersectional churches across the US.

The last two decades have seen Marxism's academic renascence. In fields as diverse as law, literary criticism, history, and philosophy, Marxism once again captivates no small number of scholars. In part, this reassessment is driven by the efforts of a group of philosophers and economists to reconstruct Marx from the ground up on a more rigorous basis. The work of these "Analytical Marxists" -- who include G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, and John Roemer -- is given a sustained examination and critique in David Gordon's Resurrecting Marx. The charge of the Analytical Marxists that capitalism is inherently exploitative and unjust is the primary subject of Gordon's book. Gordon takes issue with that contention; he argues that the Analytical Marxists' withering criticism of classical Marxism is essentially correct, but that they fail to replace it with a superior theoretical edifice. Gordon also analyzes the Analytical Marxists' reformulation of the Marxian notion of exploitation, the implications of their rejection of the labor theory of value, their differences over what rights people have, and their arguments for the compatibility of markets with socialism.

Short. Timely. Poignant. Pointed. Burying White Privilege is all of these and more. This is the book that everybody who cares about contemporary American Christianity will want to read. Many people wonder how white Christians could not only support Donald Trump for president but also rush to defend an accused child molester running for the US Senate. In a 2017 essay that went viral, Miguel A. De La Torre boldly proclaimed the death of Christianity at the hands of white evangelical nationalists. He continues sounding the death knell in this book. De La Torre argues that centuries of oppression and greed have effectively ruined evangelical Christianity in the United States. Believers and clerical leaders have killed it, choosing profits over prophets. The silence concerning—if not the doctrinal justification of—racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia has made white Christianity satanic. Prophetically calling Christian nationalists to repentance, De La Torre rescues the biblical Christ from the distorted Christ of white Christian imagination.

A path-breaking scholar's insightful reexamination of the resurrection of the body and the construction of the self When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected--young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be recast in heaven for a body to qualify as both ours and heavenly? The resurrection is one of the foundational statements of Christian theology, but when it comes to the New Testament only a handful of passages helps us answer the question "What will those bodies be like?" More problematically, the selection and interpretation of these texts are grounded in assumptions about the kinds of earthly bodies that are most desirable. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this illuminating book both revisits central texts--such as the resurrection of Jesus--and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Drawing on never-before-published original source detail, the epic story of two of the most consequential, and largely forgotten, moments in Supreme Court history. For two hundred years, the constitutionality of capital punishment had been axiomatic. But in 1962, Justice Arthur Goldberg and his clerk Alan Dershowitz dared to suggest otherwise, launching an underfunded band of civil rights attorneys on a quixotic crusade. In 1972, in a most unlikely victory, the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s death penalty law in Furman v. Georgia. Though the decision had sharply divided the justices, nearly everyone, including the justices themselves, believed Furman would mean the end of executions in America. Instead, states responded with a swift and decisive showing of support for capital punishment. As anxiety about crime rose and public approval of the Supreme Court declined, the stage was set in 1976 for Gregg v. Georgia, in which the Court dramatically reversed direction. A Wild Justice is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the Court, the justices, and the political complexities of one of the most racially charged and morally vexing issues of our time.

Reading Scripture from the perspective of Black church tradition can help us connect with a rich faith history and address the urgent issues of our times. Demonstrating an ongoing conversation between the collective Black experience and the Bible, New Testament scholar Esau McCaulley shares a personal and scholarly testament to the power and hope of Black biblical interpretation.

During the late second and early third centuries C.E. the resurrection became a central question for intellectual commentary, with increasingly tense divisions between those who interpreted the resurrection as a bodily experience and those who did not. The relationship between the resurrected person and their mortal flesh was also a key point of discussion, especially in regards to sexual desires, body parts, and practices. Early Christians struggled to articulate how and why these bodily features related to the imagined resurrected self. The problems posed by the resurrection thus provoked theological analysis of the mortal body, sexual desire and gender. Resurrecting Parts is the first study to examine the place of gender and sexuality in early Christian debates on the nature of resurrection, investigating how the resurrected body has been interpreted by writers of this period in order to address the nature of sexuality and sexual difference. In particular, Petrey considers the instability of early Christian attempts to separate maleness and femaleness. Bodily parts commonly signified sexual difference, yet it was widely thought that future resurrected bodies would not experience desire or reproduction. In the absence of sexuality, this insistence on difference became difficult to maintain. To achieve a common, shared identity and status for the resurrected body that nevertheless preserved sexual difference, treatises on the resurrection found it necessary to explain how and in what way these parts would be transformed in the resurrection, shedding all associations with sexual desires, acts, and reproduction. Exploring a range of early Christian sources, from the Greek and Latin fathers to the authors of the Nag Hammadi writings, Resurrecting Parts is a fascinating resource for scholars interested in gender and sexuality in classical antiquity, early Christianity, asceticism, and, of course, the resurrection and the body.

This book is about the philosophy of de-extinction. To make an extinct species ‘de-extinct’ is to resurrect it by creating new organisms of the same, or similar, appearance and genetics. The book describes current attempts to resurrect three species, the aurochs, woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon. It then investigates two major philosophical questions such projects throw up. These are the Authenticity Question—‘will the products of de-extinction be authentic members of the original species?’—and the Ethical Question—‘is de-extinction something that should be done?' The book surveys and critically evaluates a raft of arguments for and against the authenticity or de-extinct organisms, and for and against the ethical legitimacy of de-extinction. It concludes, first, that authentic de-extinctions are actually possible, and second, that de-extinction can potentially be ethically legitimate, especially when deployed as part of a ‘freeze now and resurrect later’ conservation strategy.

Considers the legacy and future of radical theology. In 1966, an infamous Time magazine cover asked “Is God Dead?” and brought the ideas of theologians William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer to the wider public. In the years that followed, both men suffered professionally and there was no notable increase to the small number of thinkers considered death of God theologians. Meanwhile, Christian fundamentalism staged a striking comeback in the United States. Yet, death of God, or radical, theology has had an ongoing influence on contemporary theology and philosophy. Contributors to this book explore the origins, influence, and legacy of radical theology and go on to take it in new directions. In a time when fundamentalism is the greatest religious temptation, this volume makes the case for the necessity of resurrecting the death of God. “Resurrecting the Death of God shows why Altizer continues to ride the stream of contemporary conversations in academic theology and continental philosophy without ever losing his luster.” — Carl A. Raschke, author of Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event