A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2020 After The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus, the Nobel Prize-winning author completes his haunting trilogy with a new masterwork, The Death of Jesus In Estrella, David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old who is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Simón and Bolívar the dog usually watch while his mother Inés now works in a fashion boutique. David still asks many questions, challenging his parents, and any authority figure in his life. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote. One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Simón and Inés to live with Julio, but before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness. In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.

Recent scholarship on the historical Jesus has rightly focused upon how Jesus understood his own mission. But no scholarly effort to understand the mission of Jesus can rest content without exploring the historical possibility that Jesus envisioned his own death. In this careful and far-reaching study, Scot McKnight contends that Jesus did in fact anticipate his own death, that Jesus understood his death as an atoning sacrifice, and that his death as an atoning sacrifice stood at the heart of Jesus' own mission to protect his own followers from the judgment of God.

Written by an L. A. County homicide detective and former atheist, Cold-Case Christianity examines the claims of the New Testament using the skills and strategies of a hard-to-convince criminal investigator. Christianity could be defined as a “cold case”: it makes a claim about an event from the distant past for which there is little forensic evidence. In Cold-Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace uses his nationally recognized skills as a homicide detective to look at the evidence and eyewitnesses behind Christian beliefs. Including gripping stories from his career and the visual techniques he developed in the courtroom, Wallace uses illustration to examine the powerful evidence that validates the claims of Christianity. A unique apologetic that speaks to readers’ intense interest in detective stories, Cold-Case Christianity inspires readers to have confidence in Christ as it prepares them to articulate the case for Christianity.

By anchoring your understanding of productivity in God's plan, What's Best Next gives you a practical approach for increasing your effectiveness in everything you do. There are a lot of myths about productivity--what it means to get things done and how to accomplish work that really matters. In our current era of innovation and information overload, it may feel harder than ever to understand the meaning of work or to have a sense of vocation or calling. So how do you get more of the right things done without confusing mere activity for actual productivity? Matt Perman has spent his career helping people learn how to do work in a gospel-centered and effective way. What's Best Next explains his approach to unlocking productivity and fulfillment in work by showing how faith relates to work, even in our everyday grind. What's Best Next is packed with biblical and theological insight and practical counsel that you can put into practice today, such as: How to create a mission statement for your life that's actually practicable. How to delegate to people in a way that really empowers them. How to overcome time killers like procrastination, interruptions, and multitasking by turning them around and making them work for you. How to process workflow efficiently and get your email inbox to zero every day. How to have peace of mind without needing to have everything under control. How generosity is actually the key to unlocking productivity. This expanded edition includes: a new chapter on productivity in a fallen world a new appendix on being more productive with work that requires creative thinking. Productivity isn't just about getting more things done. It's about getting the right things done--the things that count, make a difference, and move the world forward. You can learn how to do work that matters and how to do it well.

What does the most infamous criminal proceeding in history--the trial of Jesus of Nazareth--have to tell us about capital punishment in the United States? Jesus Christ was a prisoner on death row. If that statement surprises you, consider this fact: of all the roles that Jesus played--preacher, teacher, healer, mentor, friend--none features as prominently in the gospels as this one, a criminal indicted and convicted of a capital offense. Now consider another fact: the arrest, trial, and execution of Jesus bear remarkable similarities to the American criminal justice system, especially in capital cases. From the use of paid informants to the conflicting testimony of witnesses to the denial of clemency, the elements in the story of Jesus' trial mirror the most common components in capital cases today. Finally, consider a question: How might we see capital punishment in this country differently if we realized that the system used to condemn the Son of God to death so closely resembles the system we use in capital cases today? Should the experience of Jesus' trial, conviction, and execution give us pause as we take similar steps to place individuals on death row today? These are the questions posed by this surprising, challenging, and enlightening book

This is an extraordinary new fable from one of the world's greatest living novelists, two-time Booker Prize winner and Nobel Laureate. David is a small boy who comes by boat across the ocean to a new country. He has been separated from his parents, and has lost the piece of paper that would have explained everything. On the boat a stranger named Simon takes it upon himself to look after the boy. On arrival they are assigned new names, new birthdates. They know little Spanish, the language of their new country, and nothing about its customs. They have also suffered a kind of forgetting of old attachments and feelings. They are people without a past. Simon's goal is to find the boy's mother. He feels sure he will know her when he sees her. And David? He wants to find his mother too but he also wants to understand where he is and how he fits in. He is a boy who is always asking questions. The Childhood of Jesus is not like any other novel you have read. This beautiful and surprising fable is about childhood, about destiny, about being an outsider. It is a novel about the riddle of experience itself. J.M. Coetzee was the first author to win the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. His work includes Waiting for the Barbarians, Life and Times of Michael K, The Master of Petersburg, Disgrace and Diary of a Bad Year. He lives in Adelaide. 'Coetzee is a master we scarcely deserve.' Age 'Coetzee gradually, with great intelligence and skill, brings to extraordinary - possibly divine - life an ostensibly simple story.' Weekend Australian 'A theological and philosophical fable of considerable brilliance, power and wit. Coetzee hasn't done anything as fine and beautifully executed as this since Disgrace.' Canberra Times and Age '[A] quiet, haunting novel...Coetzee's calm, emblematic prose lifts the plot into something redolent with metaphor and mystery...Any statement can become a symbol; every event is suffused with potential revelation; something magical is always present and just out of reach...It's a memorable accomplishment, turning the everyday into the almost everlasting.' Weekend Herald (NZ) 'Double Booker Prize-winner Coetzee's fable has a dream-like, Kafkaesque quality. Are we in some kind of heaven, purgatory or simply another staging post of existence? Clear answers are elusive, but this is a riveting, thought-provoking read and surely Coetzee's best novel since Disgrace more than a decade ago.' Daily Mail 'Written with all of Coetzee's penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender for an unprecedented third Booker prize.' Observer 'The Childhood of Jesus represents a return to the allegorical mode that made him famous...a Kafkaesque version of the nativity story...The Childhood of Jesus does ample justice to his giant reputation: it's richly enigmatic, with regular flashes of Coetzee's piercing intelligence.' Guardian 'The sense of calm, furthered by Coetzee's spare prose, is very unsettling...These are not the horrors of Waiting for the Barbarians, this is the horror of banality.' Independent on Sunday

Few treatments of the death of Jesus Christ have made a point of accounting for the gruesome, degrading, public manner of his death by crucifixion, a mode of execution so loathsome that the ancient Romans never spoke of it in polite society. Rutledge probes all the various themes and motifs used by the New Testament evangelists and apostolic writers to explain the meaning of the cross of Christ. She shows how each of the biblical themes contributes to the whole, with the Christus Victor motif and the concept of substitution sharing pride of place along with Irenaeus's recapitulation model.