Books published by Westminster/John Knox Press,U.S.

In A Captive Voice, David Buttrick encourages pastors to look afresh at the Bible, church, culture, and Christian identity in order to answer the question of how to preach. Buttrick examines the renewal of ecclesiology in the mid-twentieth century, a time when the high-hung pulpits were scaled down as preaching came to be seen as a conversation...

Using a pragmatic, reader-orientated approach and informed by contemporary theory of metaphor and related topics, Katheryn Darr examines the meaning and functions of child and female imagery for sequential readers of the Isaiah scroll in its entirety. Having identified the associated commonplaces surrounding such tropes--a necessary task if one...

This insightful study of how Jesus reflects God will be interesting and accessible not only to scholars but to pastors and church members. Well-known author William Placher shows that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is portrayed in the biblical narratives as a God willing to risk vulnerability in order to fully love...

This resource for counselors who work with lesbian couples gives a clear assessment of the issues faced in working through their relationship within the context of their sexuality and society's oppression of lesbians.The purpose of the Counseling and Pastoral Theology series is to address clinical issues that arise among particular populations...

For believers who have grown weary or disillusioned with their Christian commitment, the letter to the Hebrews offers much practical assistance. In this day of dwindling church attendance and clergy burnout, a new reading of Hebrews offers an encouraging, renewed understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ. The letter of James deals...

There will always be those among us who are unable to fully provide for themselves. In Sacramental Cocoa, Lynn Perry writes of her experiences with the marginalized and disenfranchised, who, not unlike their more prosperous counterparts, long for connection with others and with God. Sacramental Cocoa is a love story. The vignettes affirm the...

Taken together, the nine prophets found in the books Obadiah through Malachi lived during a tumultuous two hundred years of Israelite history. Their communities dealt with the crisis of the impending Assyrian threat in the eighth century and the Babylonia exile in the sixth, as well as the hopeful age of restoration in the late sixth and early...

In this original interpretation of the book of Esther, Kenneth Craig offers to interpreters a new way of reading this story. According to Craig, Esther has been undervalued and misunderstood because its true genre, the literary carnivalesque, has not been considered.The Literary Currents in Biblical Interpretation series explores current trends...

William Farmer has devoted much of his career to addressing the question of the relationship among the three Synoptic Gospels--Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In particular, Farmer has challenged the Two Source Hypothesis, which says that Mark is the earliest Gospel, and that Matthew and Luke used Mark and another document, called "Q," as the two...

This collection of familiar hymn texts offers readers an opportunity to read and enjoy the language and poetry of their favorite hymns free of the encumbering musical notation. Reading the hymn texts is spiritually enriching and will also enable the reader to sing the hymns with greater...

Spiritual Roots of Addiction and Recovery

This book will help pastors educated in the literate culture of academia bridge the cultural gap between them and those in their congregations who verbalize their faith in proverbs and stories. Tex Sample suggests some implications for preaching, teaching, and counseling and discusses how questions of morality and social change are handled by...

R. David Kaylor believes that Jesus' vision of a just society and his prophetic engagement with social, political, and economic conditions led to his execution by the Romans. Here, he presents Jesus' message of a just society based on Israel's covenant tradition. He shows the prophetic background and social content of Jesus' ethical teaching...

In this book, Carl Raschke and Susan Doughty Raschke argue that God's own self-revelation is neither exclusively male nor female but both at once. With this self-revelation of the "two in one," the authors contend that the Scriptures are actually a radical proclamation of gender equality. Basing their findings on historical, anthropological...

This in-depth survey provides a vivid overview of the religious world of the Baby Boomers. The authors worked with a national sample of persons confirmed in the Presbyterian Church, examining the religious faith of Baby Boomers and exploring the reasons they gave for leaving or staying in the church. The authors identify eight types of young...

Calvin had always been regarded as one of the greatest biblical commentators in the history of the church. Now again available is this complete study of his Old Testament expositions--both written commentaries and lectures transcribed verbatim. The book begins by describing the composition and delivery of the expositions, as well as Calvin's...

This enlarged and revised edition of a much-acclaimed, full-length study (1971) of Calvin's New Testament commentaries expounds upon Calvin's principles of interpretation. It considers early sixteenth-century hermeneutics and gives special emphasis to the reformers Melanchthon, Bucer, and Bullinger and to "rhetorical" interpretation. Included...

This valuable resource from one of the founding fathers of the black theology movement discusses how to minister to the black community. Using an interdisciplinary approach, J. Deotis Toberts shows how theological concepts can be applied to education, pastoral care, and political and economic...

Over a period of years, Donald Smith probed, analyzed, interpreted, and reinterpreted data pertaining to what makes for effective ministry. Through all his research, one fact kept emerging: pastors who focus on empowering others are recognized as the most effective. This book distills the best information about cultivating an effective ministry...

Ethicist Max Stackhouse challenges libertarian and liberationist arguments that distort the nature and character of love, sexuality, and commitment. He seeks to recover a covenantal ethic, which would recapture the value of strong family relationships.The Family, Culture, and Religion series offers informed and responsible analyses of the state...

New and different readings of biblical texts are one consequence of a growing awareness of the environmental crisis and how it relates to social relations, especially in urban settings. Walter Brueggemann explores readings from Isaiah and how they relate to the environment and urban crisis. He approaches the readings as an artistic-theological...

George Smith, a twentieth-century American, moved into a house with a large vineyard in the Eastern Mediterranean during the first century AD, going back in time and space. He needed help on his land and requested that individuals interested in work be at his place at 9 a.m. on August 8. No one showed up. Why not? This is just one of the sixty...

In this thought-provoking book, Clark Williamson challenges churches and theologians to become aware of the inherited ideology of anti-Judaism that has distorted their teaching, even on such key matters as Jesus, the Scriptures, the church, and God. Williamson bases his study on a wide range of confessional literature from Roman Catholic to...

Singing the psalms is one of the richest treasures of both Jewish and Christian worship. Across the ages, singing the psalms has been an important part of communal and private prayer. In The Psalter: Psalms and Canticles for Singing, one will find a variety of responsorial psalm settings ranging from old forms to the contemporary. It includes...

This excellent book shows how literary criticism illuminates the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, reclaiming them as biblical narrative. William Kurz explores literary aspects such as implied authors or readers, plot, and assumed information, or gaps. He then highlights the role of the narrator, who is the primary key to the focus...

What kind of language and images should we use to communicate faith to children? How can we translate theological abstractions into concrete realities that make sense to children? This book provides insight into the stages of children's mental and spiritual development in order to enable us to share faith with them in appropriate...

This thought-provoking study reviews priesthood from a theological perspective and explores the theological value and significance of priests in Old and New Testaments. Richard D. Nelson reviews biblical concepts of priesthood and provides guidance and data for exegetes and systematic theologians as they work out the implications of the Bible's...

This important collection draws together fascinating recent studies of aspects of the New Testament of special interest to women by Louise Schottroff, a leading European scholar. These essays, translated for the first time, will deepen feminist scholarship in the English-speaking world. There are insightful depictions of the Virgin Mary, "the...

Grace Cumming Long provides us with a Christian ethics from the perspective of women's experience, rooted in passion and reason, emotion and research. Through a collage of autobiographical narratives and feminist theologies Cumming Long constructs an unconventional approach to moral questioning, using the arts of cooking, painting, quilting...