It's a long, strange journey to paradise, and often hilarious one, if you bravely follow the road less traveled--wherever it leads. John D. Spalding certainly has. In this smart and insightful collection, Spalding, Beliefnet.com's popular offbeat humorist, wanders America as a modern-day "pilgrim" seeking the Celestial City. Loosely organizing his comic misadventures according to John Bunyan's classic The Pilgrim's Progress, Spalding describes how he spent three days as a street preacher in Times Square ("Excuse me, sir, did you know you're going to hell?"); went to the mat (conversationally) with Omega and Apocalypse, two mainstays of the Christian Wrestling Federation; and visited a man who, practicing the art of trepanation, drilled a hole in his head to make himself permanently happy. He also experienced his own funeral, courtesy of the Dying-to-Get-In Company. Like Christian, Bunyan's beleaguered pilgrim, Spalding never knows who is waiting around the next bend. On his journey, he finds himself at the mercy of rebirthing therapists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormon missionaries, and in the company of a psychic "ghost counselor," America's luckiest (and perhaps divinely blessed) lottery winner, and a mysterious, barefoot holy man named Whatsyourname. Finally, he makes an ancient, five-hundred-mile pilgrimage across Spain, during which he learns what it truly means to be a pilgrim. Funny, wry, and revealing, the stories in A Pilgrim's Digress describe Spalding's satirical quest for the righteous path and what he discovers about the spiritual zeitgeist along the way.

In The Pilgrim's Digress, former editor and literary critic Benjamin Szumskyj details the time he spent writing and working in the genres of fantasy and horror literature. Biographically reflecting on the years he spent as a teenager and young adult, Szumskyj realized that his newly-discovered Christian faith was inconsistent with his involvement with secular fiction. Upon leaving the field of literary criticism, he was concerned to discover that many Christian readers embraced the genres that he once studied. To counter this, Szumskyj began writing The Pilgrim's Digress as a work of discernment in order to expose these genres as not being credible instruments in living out the Great Commission, to rebut claims that secular literature should be celebrated and read by Christians, and to admonish so-called Christian fantasy and horror authors and their novels. Unlike many other Christian books that condone such genres, Szumskyj's The Pilgrim's Digress is a labor of love that seeks to promote a high view of Scripture, redeem the time spent reading works not born of the Kingdom, and inform Christian readers of the dangers in reading both Christian and secular literature that are labeled fantasy and horror.

Practicing Pilgrimage: On Being and Becoming God's Pilgrim People explores both the theological, cultural, and spiritual roots of Christian pilgrimage, and is a "how-to" book on doing pilgrimage in our suburban backyards, city streets, rural roads, churches, retreat centers, and our everyday life. Brett Webb-Mitchell takes the ancient practice of Christian pilgrimage and applies it to our contemporary lives. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }

In our post-Cold War, post-colonial, post-Christian world, Western culture is experiencing a dramatic shift. Correspondingly, says Myron Penner, recent philosophy has taken a postmodern turn in which traditional concepts of reality, truth, language, and knowledge have been radically altered, if not discarded. Here James K.A. Smith, John Franke, Merold Westphal, Kevin Vanhoozer, Douglas Geivett, and R. Scott Smith respond to the question, "What perils and/or promises does the postmodern turn hold for the tasks of Christian thinkers?" Addressing topics such as the nature of rationality and biblical faith, the relationship of language to reality, and the impact of postmodern concerns on ethics, this book presents a variety of positions in vigorous dialogue with each other.

The church is struggling with the gap between the church and adolescents. Over the last decades, the problem of ‘bridging the gap’ was often outsourced to youth ministry in different forms, such as special youth workers, faith-learning programs, local activities, national events, holidays, and education of youth leaders. However, the overall conclusion is that over the last ten years, traditional youth ministry forms cannot function as the bridge they should be; the gap is too deep and too wide, or perhaps the metaphor of the gap is no longer appropriate to describe the current situation regarding the church and adolescents. This book aims to provide a creative and innovative contribution to the search for new paradigms in youth ministry. This book shows that small groups are very important for adolescents. The natural social environment greatly influences adolescents in their process of transformation from childhood to adulthood, including faith socialization. The emphasis on the natural social environment can be defined as follows: “Being goes before organizing, and the individual cannot ‘be’ without others.” Briefly, “being together as a basic given.” The conclusion of this book is that youth ministry needs a twofold turn: a turn from the individual to the communal, and a turn from an organized environment to a natural environment.

Observing a strange disappearance of doctrine within the church, Kevin Vanhoozer argues that there is no more urgent task for Christians today than to engage in living truthfully with others before God. He details how doctrine serves the church--the theater of the gospel--by directing individuals and congregations to participate in the drama of what God is doing to renew all things in Jesus Christ. Taking his cue from George Lindbeck and others who locate the criteria of Christian identity in Spirit-led church practices, Vanhoozer relocates the norm for Christian doctrine in the canonical practices, which, he argues, both provoke and preserve the integrity of the church's witness as prophetic and apostolic.