In Founding Sins, Joseph Moore examines the forgotten history of the Covenanters, America's first Christian nationalists. He explores how they profoundly shaped American's understandings of the separation of church and state and set the acceptable limits for religion in politics for generations to come.

The Essential Guide for Beating Temptation Falling for temptation isn’t inevitable. We don’t have to lose the fight. In fact, we can win if we understand the root of the problem and what Christians have done from the beginning to beat it. Our Favorite Sins shines a much-needed light in our lives’ dark corners and reveals the time-tested methods for getting victory over sin. Are you tyrannized by your own desires? If you are breathing, your answer is probably yes. The question is: What are you going to do about it? With more than thirty years of pastoral experience, Todd D. Hunter knows that most people—himself included—struggle every day with temptation. All too often, we fail and fall, and some of us are at our wit’s end, utterly defeated. What do we do to get a grip on the sin in our life and live like God wants? There’s good news: despite all our failures and shameful “moments after,” there really is a way out, a way forward, and a way that draws us closer to the life that God desires for us. In Our Favorite Sins, Hunter cracks open the problem of temptation and points to practical, biblically based, time-tested solutions. First revealing the role played by our disordered desires, Hunter shows how different temptations trip us up and how we can resist and overcome them, even if we’ve fallen prey to them for decades. Victory starts with reordering our desires, and the church has given us the tools for the job. Hunter shows us how to use them and start beating the temptations that so often beat us. Informed by exclusive research from the Barna Group, Our Favorite Sins offers a view that works for any believer wherever they are and no matter how big the battle they’re fighting.

“Hilarious, honest, and full of the hard-won wisdom...At its core is this truth: real change only happens when we realize God loves us whether we change or not.” —Susan E. Isaacs, author of Angry Conversations With God From a popular pastor and radio host—Three Free Sins teaches that the only people who make any progress toward being better are those who know that God will still love them, regardless of how good they are. This book is about the misguided obsession with the management of sin that cripples too many Christians. It’s about the view that religion is all about sin…about how to hide side sin or how to stop sinning all together. In the Introduction, the author toys good-naturedly with an agitated caller on his radio program, teasing him in a segment where he offers three free sins. The offer is real. Not that Steve has the power to forgive sins, but he wants to make the point that Jesus has made the offer to cover all of our sins – not just three. Chapter one, titled “Teaching Frogs to Fly,” is even better. The gist of this chapter is that you can’t teach frogs to fly, just like you can’t teach people not to sin. Steve tells a story about a guy who has a frog, and he’s convinced he can teach the frog how to fly. The man keeps throwing the frog up in the air or up against walls – all to the poor frog’s demise. The message is that even though people can be better, they can never not sin—just like a frog can never learn to fly, no matter how much pressure is put on it. Steve continues through the book to show readers that while they can never manage sin, they can relax in knowing that they are completely forgiven—not just of three, but of all.

The first in-depth psychoanalytic study of the Old and New Testaments, Beyond Yahweh and Jesus centers on God's role in enabling humans to cope with death and the anxieties it evokes. Yahweh is seen as tending to increase rather than diminish these death anxieties, while Christ offers near-perfect solutions to each type. Why, then, asks Dr. Langs, has Christ failed to bring peace to the world? Langs' answer is focused on what is, he argues, Western religion's lack of a deep understanding of human psychology-i.e., an absence of the psychological wisdom needed to supplement the spiritual wisdom of religion. This is a void bemoaned as early as the mid-1800s by the Archbishop Temple and by Carl Jung in the early 20th century. The journey on which Langs' study embarks leads through an examination of the related topics of knowledge acquisition and divine wisdom; the failure of psychoanalysis to provide religion with the psychology it needs to fulfill its mission; and a set of propositions that are intended to bring psychological wisdom to religion and thereby to initiate the third chapter in the history of God, in which a refashioned morality and fresh divine wisdom play notable roles. Simultaneously, the book offers a foundation for secular forms of spirituality and morality, as well as for human efforts to cope with death and its incumbent anxieties. The mission of this book is a lofty but necessary one: to reinvigorate religion with new dimensions and insights so as to empower it, at long last, to help bring peace to the world, both individually and collectively.

Winner NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARDS in Contemporary Jewish Life & Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award A crucial new lens on repentance, atonement, forgiveness, and repair from harm—from personal transgressions to our culture’s most painful and unresolved issues American culture focuses on letting go of grudges and redemption narratives instead of the perpetrator’s obligations or recompense for harmed parties. As survivor communities have pointed out, these emphases have too often only caused more harm. But Danya Ruttenberg knew there was a better model, rooted in the work of the medieval philosopher Maimonides. For Maimonides, upon whose work Ruttenberg elaborates, forgiveness is much less important than the repair work to which the person who caused harm is obligated. The word traditionally translated as repentance really means something more like return, and in this book, returning is a restoration, as much as is possible, to the victim, and, for the perpetrator of harm, a coming back, in humility and intentionality, to behaving as the person we might like to believe we are. Maimonides laid out 5 steps: naming and owning harm; starting to change/transformation; restitution and accepting consequences; apology; and making different choices. Applying this lens to both our personal relationships and some of the most significant and painful issues of our day, including systemic racism and the legacy of enslavement, sexual violence and harassment in the wake of #MeToo, and Native American land rights, On Repentance and Repair helps us envision a way forward. Rooted in traditional Jewish concepts while doggedly accessible and available to people from any, or no, religious background, On Repentance and Repair is a book for anyone who cares about creating a country and culture that is more whole than the one in which we live, and for anyone who has been hurt or who is struggling to take responsibility for their mistakes.