Books published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers

Many of us would like to know more about the Bible, but don't know where to begin. A Beginner's Guide to Reading the Bible is a concise introduction that assumes no previous acquaintance with Scripture. The author provides an overview of the content of the Bible, a look at the kinds of literature it contains, describes how the Old and New Testaments were formed, discusses some commonly used English translations, and lists resources that can be helpful to beginning readers.

Here, Granger Westberg presents a creative, new way for congregations to provide a wholistic ministry to their members. His parish nurse program brings nurses onto congregations' staffs to work as ministers of health on a part-time or full-time basis. In this way congregations can play an increasingly important role in keeping people spiritually and physically healthy and giving leadership in the field of preventive medicine. Parish nurses serve as health educators, health counselors, volunteer trainers, and support group organizers. In hundreds of congregations, this program has been well received by clergy and church members.

Acnt Galatians Phillippians (Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament)

The Augsburg commentary on the new testament is written for laypeople, students and pastors. Laypeople will use it as a resource for Bible study at home and at church. Students and instructors will read it to probe the basic message of the books of the new testament. And pastor s will find it to be a valuable aid for sermon and lesson preparation.

This completely revised and expanded edition offers an up-to-date analysis of developments in biomedical technology of the past 10 years. James B. Nelson and Jo Anne Smith Rohricht examine the social, political, legal, and moral dimensions of abortion, human experimentation, reproductive technologies, genetics, death and dying transplants, and health care systems.

R. A. Martin is the author of James and John H. Elliott is the author of I-II Peter/Jude.

Why do we all like a good story? Stories give us joy, hope, visions of wonderful grace at work, says William White. But how can we learn to tell Christian stories? How can we find good story ideas? How can we make our stories interesting? Speaking in Stories is full of practical ideas on how to begin, what to avoid, how to use stories in classrooms, camps, churches. White's many examples of stories -- from the Bible, folktales, modern parables, for Christmas -- serve as a valuable resource as you weave your tales.

Few would doubt that this is a time of transition in our understanding of human sexuality. The confusion about sexual morals and mores is the more obvious evidence of this. But there is something else. For too long the bulk of Christian reflection about sexuality has asked an essentially one-directional question: what does Christian faith have to say about our lives as sexual beings?- from the Preface

This book about Luther's theology is written out of a two-fold conviction. First, that many of our problems have arisen because we have not really understood our own traditions, especially in the case of Luther; and second, that there is still a lot of help for us in someone like Luther if we take the trouble to probe beneath the surface. It is an attempt to interpret Luther's theology for our own day.The fundamental theme of the book is the "down-to-earth" character of Luther's theology. In using this theme, Forde points out that we have failed to understand the basic thrust or direction of Luther's theology and that this failure has caused and is still causing us grief. Modern scholarship has demonstrated that Luther simply did not share the views on the nature of faith and salvation that subsequent generations have foisted upon him and used to interpret his thinking. This book attempts to bring the results of some of that scholarship to light and make it more accessible to those who are searching for answers today.The central questions of Christianity are examined in this fresh restatement of Luther's thoughtthe God-man relationship, the cross, the sacraments, this world and the next, and the role of the church. The author presents the "down-to-earth" character of Luther's theology in the hope that it will help individual Christians today to be both faithful to God and true to their human and social responsibilities.

The Texts @ Contexts series gathers scholarly voices from diverse contexts and social locations to bring new or unfamiliar facets of biblical texts to light. Matthew sheds new light from new perspectives on themes in the Gospel including community; land, labor, and Empire; children, parents, and families; health and disabilities; and border-crossings. The authors challenge us to consider how we deal with cultural distances between ourselves and these ancient writingsand between one another in the contemporary world.

Whether dealing with collective catastrophe or intimate trauma, recovering from emotional and physical hurt is hard. Kathleen O'Connor shows that although Jeremiah's emotionally wrought language can aggravate readers' memories of pain, it also documents the ways an ancient community-and the prophet personally-sought to restore their collapsed social world. Both prophet and book provide a traumatized community language to articulate disaster; move self-understanding from delusional security to identity as survivors; constitute individuals as responsible moral agents; portray God as equally afflicted by disaster; and invite a reconstruction of reality.

This volume highlights points of agreement and disagreement on the subject of religious pluralism. The dialogue partners in the discussion are Paul F. Knitter, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions, and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, and Harold A Netland, professor of Mission and Evangelism and director of Intercultural Studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois.

In this masterful volumethe culmination of his three-volume History of New Testament Research (vol. 1, From Deism to Tubingen, 1992; vol. 2, From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann, 2012)William Baird continues his insightful, balanced, and accessible survey of the major developments in New Testament scholarship. Volume 3 charts the dramatic discoveries and breakthroughs in method and approach that characterized the mid- and late twentieth century. Baird gives attention to the biographical and cultural setting of persons and approaches, affording both beginning student and seasoned scholar an authoritative account of the evolution of historical-critical study of the New Testament.

Peterson suggests that we understand the church as a people created by the Spirit to be a community, and that we must claim a narrative method to explore the churchs identityspecifically, the story of the churchs origin in the Acts of the Apostles. Finally, here is a way of thinking of church that reconciles the best of competing models of church for the future of mainline Protestant theology.

Cynthia Crysdale and Neil Ormerod here present a robust theology of God in light of supposed tensions between Christian belief and evolutionary science. Those who pit faith in an almighty and unchanging God over against a world in which chance is operative have it wrong on several accounts, they insist. Creator God, Evolving World clarifies a number of confused assumptions in an effort to redeem chance as an intelligible force interacting with stable patterns in nature.A proper conception of probabilities and regularities in the worlds unfolding reveals neither random chaos nor a predetermined blueprint but a view of the universe as the fruit of both chance and necessity. By clarifying terms often used imprecisely in both scientific and theological discourse, the authors make the case that the role of chance in evolution neither mitigates Gods radical otherness from creation nor challenges the efficacy of Gods providence in the world.