Books published by Cascade Books

This anthology is a collection of readings on the Christian life. They were carefully selected from every era of history and from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. They include letters, sermons, treatises and disputations, poems, songs and hymns, confessions, biblical commentary, and even part of a novel. In each case, the subject is life with God, life in God, life for God--life infused and enlivened by God's grace.The editors introduce each selection, highlighting relevant aspects of the author's biography, spirituality, and historical context. Introductions are also provided for the major eras of the church which present theological, historical, and cultural perspectives to help the reader best engage the selections. For individuals and groups, classrooms and seminars, this collection will generate dialogue between past and present, and between traditions familiar and unfamiliar. It is not merely a book on the Christian life but for the Christian life, making yesterday's witness to life with God a resource for the Church today.""Today, people often know why a biologist or a historian is important. But many people draw a blank when asked what a theologian would be good for. Just in time, The Grammar of Grace reminds us that the theologians are important because they know (or should know) about the reality and communication of God's grace. This highly welcome anthology displays the riches that the life of theological learning, united with Christ, has to offer.""--Matthew Levering, Mundelein Seminary""Grace is central to Christianity, but also-maybe therefore--highly contentious; it could be argued that all controversies among Christians revolve round the notion of grace. This wonderful anthology of passages--drawn from treatises, rules of living, prayer and praise--illustrates both the richness of grace, as its manifold signs are explored, and a sense of the one thing necessary: Christ and his grace.""--Andrew Louth, Durham University""This anthology is a remarkable accomplishment. Traversing the entire history of the church, every major Christian tradition, and a spectrum of literary genres, Eilers, Cocksworth, and Silvas take the reader on an exhilarating pilgrimage, centering throughout on the proximity of God. The result is a tremendous collection of writings that focus on the Christian life--the grammar of God's undeserved, transformative favor in Jesus Christ. The retrieval theology of The Grammar of Grace illuminates life with God as the pulsing heartbeat of the Christian tradition.""--Hans Boersma, Regent CollegeKent Eilers is Professor of Theology at Huntington University (USA). He has authored and edited several books, including Theology as Retrieval, with W. David Buschart (2015) and Sanctified by Grace, with Kyle Strobel (2014).Ashley Cocksworth is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Practice at the University of Roehampton (UK). He is the author of Karl Barth on Prayer (2015) and Prayer: A Guide for the Perplexed (2018). Anna Silvas is adjunct research fellow at the University of New England (Australia). She is the editor and translator of Basil of Caesarea. Questions of the Brothers: Syriac Text and English Translation (2014) and The Rule of St. Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition (2013).

The Society of Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives launched in 2003 with its first conference held at Concordia University Chicago, in River Forest, Illinois. An earlier edition of this book, composed of chapters based on presentations from that conference, was published in 2004. In 2018 a decision was made to revise this book from the inaugural conference, updating some chapters and providing a new perspective on the ongoing work of the organization, now called the Children's Spirituality Summit. For example, given the advances in what we are learning from brain research, a chapter on this topic has been extensively updated.What this revised volume provides is a collection of chapters offering theological perspectives, social science research, and insights on ministry practice about the spiritual lives of children: how they relate to God, how this relationship grows, and what helps in promoting the spiritual formation and vitality of children in the home, church, and school This book offers twenty-three chapters by professors, graduate students, social science researchers, and ministry leaders from different denominational traditions addressing a wide range of issues in theory, research, and ministry practice with children. This second edition offers much to learn from, stimulate your thinking, and improve your practice.""Here are essays on young people that tell of their various ways of seeking God's presence in their ongoing lives--an aspect of faith observed and discussed with intelligence and sensitivity. Here is a book many of us will greatly value--its wisdom an important presence in our effort to understand children.""--Robert Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard Medical School, and author of The Spiritual Life of Children""This extraordinary book is a must read for all who teach and practice religious education. It gathers, with breadth and depth, the best current research from an exploding renewal in the study of the spirituality and religious development of children. Teachers, students, and scholars dedicated to understanding and nurturing our children's growth in faith will find this rich volume indispensable.""--James W. Fowler, author of Stages of Faith and C.H. Candler Professor of Theology and Human Development Director, The Center for Ethics, Emory University""Written in the best of the Evangelical tradition, Children's Spirituality is a must read for all those interested in children, the spiritual life, and Christian formation. Descriptive phrases include: well conceived and edited, clearly written and well documented, thorough and all-encompassing, academically sound and popular, combining research and practical application.""--John Westerhoff, formerly Professor of Theology and Christian Nurture at Duke University, he is Theologian-in-Residence at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Atlanta, GeorgiaKevin E. Lawson, professor of educational studies at Talbot School of Theology (Biola University), was a cofounder of the Society of Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives (now the Children's Spirituality Summit). He served as its chair from 2001 until 2012. Lawson is the editor of Understanding Children's Spirituality (Cascade Books, 2012) and the coeditor, with Adam Harwood, of Infants and Children in the Church (2017).Scottie May, a founding member of the Society of Children's Spirituality: Christian Perspectives (now the Children's Spirituality Summit), is Associate Professor Emerita of Christian Formation & Ministry, Wheaton College. She is co-author of Children Matter (2005) and Listening to Children on the Spiritual Journey, (2010), as well as contributing to edited volumes regarding children's spirituality.

Who was Elie Wiesel? He was a Holocaust survivor, Nobel peace laureate, activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, a writer, and friend of humanity. Born into an observant Jewish family in Sighet, Rumania, he was a God-intoxicated youth who survived the Shoah. As an adult he moved easily among presidents and prime ministers but was equally at home among the poor and disenfranchised. The reflections in this volume come judges in the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel and provide a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future looks ominous, these reflections collectively hold out the promise of a more ethical and morally robust future. Their message reflects Wiesel''s message about the abiding necessity of friendship; the importance of interrogating without abandoning God; the fact that everyone has a share in remembering--an obligation to remember--the past in order to construct a better future; and the importance of fighting against indifference. If we want to repair the world, we need to repair relations with each other and with ourselves.""There is some real beauty to be found here in these memories of my father.""--Elisha Wiesel, Elie Wiesel''s son""Elie Wiesel once said he wrote not to be understood, but to understand. The gift of the Prize in Ethics is that Elie inspired the next generation to do the same . . . In this book lies the opportunity to learn from Elie''s dear friends and partners in the Prize in Ethics, who have worked with him tirelessly over the years in promoting his urgent call to humanity to ''think higher and feel deeper.''""--Dov Seidman, partner to the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity""Through the memories of his colleagues and students, we meet an educator who was able to transform the classroom into a sacred space. It is a privilege for those of us who never knew him to be able to enter that space and to experience for ourselves how profoundly Professor Wiesel touched and transformed the lives around him.""--Theresa Sanders, Georgetown University""I was moved, and at the same time very happy, to read the contributions to this outstanding volume that keeps alive the memory of one of the finest messengers of humankind, our great teacher Elie Wiesel.""--Reinhold Boschki, Tubingen University""This compilation seems the most fitting tribute to a consummate educator whose pedagogy was grounded in story-telling itself. I can think of no better way to honor a man who taught through the stories he told and wrote, than to present this collection--stories of the impact of his life, work, and inspired teaching on individuals and institutions.""--Elizabeth Anthony, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum""This book reminds us that a great teacher can open minds, ennoble spirits, and--most miraculously--break hearts while filling them with joy and hope. In these pages we hear the gracious, kind, caring, wise voice of Elie Wiesel--teaching, mentoring, uplifting . . . Never has a book been so utterly necessary: at a time of shrill crassness and ethical void, we are reminded of the power of grace, of speaking softly and listening to all--especially to one''s students. We are deeply grateful to the editor and contributors for this compelling, extraordinary gift.""--Nehemia Polen, Hebrew College, Newton Center, MassachusettsAlan L. Berger occupies the Raddock Family Eminent Scholar Chair for Holocaust Studies and is Professor of Jewish Studies at Florida Atlantic University where he directs the Center for the Study of Values and Violence after Auschwitz. He is the author or editor of nearly twenty books, including Third-Generation Holocaust Representation (coauthored with Victoria Aarons, 2017), Post-Holocaust Jewish-Christian Dialogue (editor, 2015), and Trialogue and Terror (Cascade Books, 2012).

The humanities offer insights into the highest (and lowest) capabilities of our own natures and, at their best, they function as prophetic champions of human dignity and as inspired celebrants of beauty. Envisioning God in the Humanities pays tribute to the career of Melissa Harl Sellew, a scholar and teacher who embodies the ideals of these academic disciplines. The collaboration of these essays attests to the potentialities for transcendence that emerge from rigorous and collective reflection on the texts, images, and ideas produced in ancient societies. Taking its cue from Professor Sellew''s own distinguished scholarship, this collection of studies begins with analyses of the New Testament Gospels, then moves more broadly toward the religious life of the ancient world as attested both in literature and materiality, among Jews and Christians, Greeks and Romans. Just as Sellew has done throughout her career, so this volume invites us into to the joy of exploring distant societies and, in so doing, into the fuller discovery of one''s own self.Courtney J.P. Friesen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He is author of Reading Dionysus (2015).

Experiencing racial marginalization in society and pressures for success in family, Asian American Christian young adults must negotiate being socially underpowered, culturally dissonant, and politically marginal. To avoid misunderstandings and conflicts within and without their communities, more often than not they hide their true thoughts and emotions and hesitate to engage in authentic conversations outside their very close-knit circle of friends. In addition, these young adults might not find their church or Christian fellowship to be a safe and hospitable place to openly struggle with all of these sorts of questions, all the while lacking adequate vocabulary or resources to organize their thoughts. This book responds to these spiritual-moral struggles of Asian American young people by theologically addressing the issues that most intimately and immediately affect Asian American youths'' sense of identity--God, race, family, sex, gender, friendship, money, vocation, the model minority myth, and community-- uniquely and consistently from the contexts of Asian American young adult life. Its goal is to help young Asian Americans develop a healthy, balanced, organic sense of identity grounded in a fresh and deeper understanding of the Christian faith.""As cultural and generational norms are shifting, Asian American Christians are wrestling with their identity formation and what it means to be thoughtful Christians today. Intersecting Realities is a must-read resource for those Christians who want to live out their faith in a theologically faithful and culturally relevant way."" --Tom Lin, President/CEO of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship""Lee and his colleagues here not only name the oftentimes very painful realities confronted by young Asian Americans, but also provide concrete practical guidelines for navigating a racialized North American world. What is additionally potent for use in CCCU-affiliated institutions and theological seminary classes devoted to race and ethnicity is the vision of scriptural and covenant faithfulness that provides a sure ground upon which to tread in walking out the unavoidably ambiguous choices demanding navigation, and in persisting through the messy outcomes that will follow in our real world. The way forward will not be easy anytime soon, but that is why those serving in and ministering to the present generation of Asian American Christian communities ought to read Intersecting Realities.""--Amos Yong, Professor of Theology & Mission, Fuller Seminary""Intersecting Realities employs the perfect combination of personal narrative, cutting-edge thinking, and sharp biblical reflection to explore today''s key issues facing Asian American Christians. Subsequently, it''s a readable, intelligent, and applicable book that is both pastoral and prophetic. I''m very grateful for the wisdom shared by each of the contributing authors and know that it will bless its readers.""--Russell Jeung, author of At Home in Exile: Finding Jesus Among My Ancestors and Refugee NeighborsHak Joon Lee is the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. Lee has published several books, including Shaping Public Theology: The Max L. Stackhouse Reader, The Great World House: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Global Ethics, and We Will Get to the Promised Land: Martin Luther King Jr.''s Communal-Political Spirituality. For over a decade, he has been deeply involved in curriculum projects for pastors and Asian American youths with a view to furthering church renewal and intergenerational bridge-building in a pluralistic society.

This book is a work of theological resistance. It is not so much about the presidency of Donald Trump as it is about what his popularity and rise to power reveal about the state of Christianity and the moral character of the evangelical Right in the United States today. More specifically, it is about the threat of white Christian nationalism, which is the particular form that the nationalist populist movement of Trumpism has adopted for itself. The contributors are all fellows from the Westar Institute''s academic seminar on God and the Human Future, and include many of the leading figures in theology and Continental philosophy of religion. This volume provides a form of theopolitical resistance based on intersectionality. The authors recognize how the various forms of oppression interrelate to contribute to a vast, dynamic, and seeming impenetrable network of systemic injustice and marginalization. These essays demonstrate that politics need not be played as a zero-sum game with a winner-take-all mentality, and that a critical theology is as urgently needed and as relevant now as ever.""An unfortunately crucial collection of bold essays that assail the white Christian nationalism of our terrifying times and offer counter-political theologies of the multitudinous, the minoritarian, and the earthly.""--Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Wesleyan UniversityJeffrey W. Robbins is a Professor of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College (Annville, Pennsylvania). He is a member of the Board of Directors and is a Research Fellow for the Westar Institute where he chairs the ongoing collaborative academic seminar on God and the Human Future. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Radical Theology (2016).Clayton Crockett is Professor and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Radical Political Theology (2011) and Derrida after the End of Writing (2018), among other books.

FEATURING: Adam Joyce, Lincoln Harvey, Marcia W. Mount Shoop, Margot Starbuck, and Tim SuttlePLUS:Let''s Dance: Zumba and the Imago Dei of Beautiful Black Bodies * Commercial Participation: Modern Sports Fandom and Sacramental Ontology * The Work of Play * Lines and Lines Athwart Lines * Singing with Losers --AND MORE . . .The ancient Olympic games were held every four years at the temple of Zeus. They were a major cultural and religious event that doubled as a contest between rivaling nation-states. Certain strands of mythology even suggest that Heracles, the strongest of mortal men, organized the event and built the Olympic stadium in honor of his father, Zeus. Today, few athletes devote their efforts to the honor of Zeus, but there remains a certain religiosity at work in sport''s place within Western culture. Fame, fortune, and honor; character and fair play; skill and artistic perfection also remain at stake, just in new ways. As Marcia W. Mount Shoop explains in her interview with Jessica Coblentz, sports still ""tap into our most primal existential needs for vitality, for purpose, for creativity, for connection and community, and for work and play,"" and in this, our twenty-fifth issue of The Other Journal, we dive into these characteristics of sport, starting literally with Jennifer Stewart Fueston''s poem ""A Swim"" and then continuing on to the ancient Greek stadium at Nemea. Our contributors consider the ethics, commodification, and embodiment of particular events, as well as the personal and cultural stories which weave in and out of sport. They do the hard work of conscientious fandom at football games; walk us through baseball liturgies; and take us to the windy courts of Philo, Illinois, where noted author David Foster Wallace was an outdoor tennis savant. They show us how to fly and then how to lose. And they invite us to dance, ""to let our bodies taste the salt of our sweat, hear the pant of exhalation, and feel the perspiration on our skin, for it is in these very possibilities,"" argues John B. White, ""that we relate to God, others, and self.""The issue features essays and reviews by Jeff Appel, Andrew Arndt, Ben Bishop, Jen Grabarczyk-Turner, Lincoln Harvey, Jonathan Hiskes, Adam Joyce, Lakisha R. Lockhart-Rusch, Benj Petroelje, Justin Randall Phillips, Heather L. Reid, Margot Starbuck, Tim Suttle, and John B. White; an interview by Jessica Coblentz with Marcia W. Mount Shoop; creative nonfiction by Brett Beasley, Meghan Florian, and Katie Karnehm-Esh; poetry by Bethany Bowman, Catherine Thiel Lee, and Jennifer Stewart Fueston; and art by Allen Forrest, Gerald Lopez, and Abigail Platter.

Sound matters. The New Testament's first audiences were listeners, not readers. They heard its compositions read aloud and understood their messages as linear streams of sound. To understand the New Testament's meaning in the way its earliest audiences did, we must hear its audible features and understand its words as spoken sounds. Sound Matters presents essays by ten scholars from five countries and three continents, who explore the New Testament through sound mapping, a technique invented by Margaret Lee and Bernard Scott for analyzing Greek texts as speech. Sound Matters demonstrates the value and uses of this technique as a prelude and aid to interpretation. The essays that make up this volume illustrate the wide range of interpretive possibilities that emerge when sound mapping restores the spoken sounds of the New Testament and revives its living voice.""Sound Matters has set itself the awesome task of transforming typographic space into soundscape. In this, the book has succeeded magnificently. Margaret Lee and the nine contributors are to be applauded for their formidable efforts in forging suitably analytical tools and criteria, and for placing sound mapping on a firm empirical basis. More than merely recovering lost or ignored meanings in interpretation, sound mapping, along with a number of other fields, is clearly driving toward a genuinely new paradigm in biblical scholarship.""--Werner H. Kelber, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies, Rice UniversityMargaret E. Lee is retired as Assistant Professor of Humanities at Tulsa Community College. She is the author of ""Sound Mapping"" in The Dictionary of the Bible in Ancient Media (2017) and numerous articles on sound mapping. She is coauthor with Bernard Brandon Scott of Sound Mapping the New Testament (2009). Earlier she also wrote Reading New Testament Greek (1993) with Scott and others.

Who was Elie Wiesel? He was a Holocaust survivor, Nobel peace laureate, activist on behalf of the oppressed, a teacher, a writer, and friend of humanity. Born into an observant Jewish family in Sighet, Rumania, he was a God-intoxicated youth who survived the Shoah. As an adult he moved easily among presidents and prime ministers but was equally at home among the poor and disenfranchised. The reflections in this volume come judges in the Elie Wiesel Ethics Essay contest. They share their personal and professional experiences working with and learning from Wiesel and provide a glimpse of the person behind the public figure. At a time when the future looks ominous, these reflections collectively hold out the promise of a more ethical and morally robust future. Their message reflects Wiesel's message about the abiding necessity of friendship; the importance of interrogating without abandoning God; the fact that everyone has a share in remembering--an obligation to remember--the past in order to construct a better future; and the importance of fighting against indifference. If we want to repair the world, we need to repair relations with each other and with ourselves.

The Other Journal is a space for Christian interdisciplinary reflection at the intersection of theology and culture. TOJ tackles the cultural crises of our time with verve and slant, advancing a progressive, provocative, and charitable response in sync with the peacefully contrarian Christ.In this issue, we address the theme of environment by visiting the ""barren moonscapes"" of Appalachia, the tobacco fields of Kentucky, an air-conditioned office in the Bronx, and urban Midwestern streets that are ""blighted with trash."" We read the foreign language of animal footprints in the sandy soil at the base of Mount Hood. And in all this, we seek to envision a kingdom of God that encompasses each fruit, flower, and herb. Our environment issue features writing by Karen Brummund, Daniel Castillo, Samuel F. Chamelin, Ruthanne SooHee Crapo, Mary DeJong, Michael J. Iafrate, Glen A. Mazis, Brett McCracken, Kris Pint, Dave Pritchett, Meaghan Ritchey, Remco Roes, Leah D. Schade, Paul J. Schutz, and Catherine Wright; interviews by Jonathan Hiskes and Jessina Leonard with Norman Wirzba and Aaron Canipe, respectively; poetry by Maryann Corbett, Kris Pint, Daniel Tobin, and Jeanne Murray Walker; an art installation by Sara Bomans, Tom Lambeens, and Remco Roes; and photography by Karen Brummund, Aaron Canipe, Mary DeJong, Rob Jefferson, Remco Roes, and Kristof Vrancken.

Few Christian writings have had the world-changing impact of St Paul''s epistles to the churches, and yet from the very beginning these works proved themselves to be tricky texts. The Second Letter of Peter, commenting about them, says: ""There are some things in them that are hard to understand"" (2 Pet 3:16). Indeed! To this day many issues of their interpretation remain highly contested. In this book, Anthony Thiselton grasps the nettle and examines forty puzzling passages from Paul''s epistles. He considers the various scholarly proposals about their meaning and offers his own reflections in the hope of dispersing fog and shedding light, and of expounding a coherent and self-consistent Paul.""This is an exhilarating and infuriating book by Tony Thiselton. It is exhilarating because he does not shy away from many of the most troubling passages in the Apostle Paul''s letters, but infuriating because Thiselton cannot easily or predictably be put in a box regarding his conclusions. In his inimitable style, Thiselton takes each passage and explains the issues, weighs the options, and makes his proposals for others to judge for themselves. Many readers are bound to find this a very helpful book written by one of our senior Pauline scholars.""--Stanley E. Porter, President, McMaster Divinity CollegeAnthony Thiselton is Emeritus Professor of Christian Theology and Head of Department in the University of Nottingham, UK. He is also Emeritus Canon Theologian of Leicester and Southwell and Nottingham. He has written nearly thirty books, including major works on biblical interpretation and Paul''s letters. He holds four doctorates and is a Fellow of King''s College, London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.