This is my sixth local books round-up of 2024, covering nine newly published books from the local Christian community.
Again there is a range of topics – one is even a Christmas book. The write-ups are primarily from Amazon and publisher / author sites.
- Tim MacIntosh: Eyes on Jesus: Through Mark’s Gospel (Friesen Press)
- Tim MacIntosh: Eyes on Jesus: The Christmas Chronicles (Friesen Press)
- Tim MacIntosh: Eyes on Jesus Through John’s Gospel (Friesen Press)
Do you want to draw closer to Jesus, hear his voice, watch his life, know his heart? Come explore.
Eyes on Jesus: Through Mark’s Gospel is a collection of daily devotionals that leads the reader through Mark’s Gospel, portion by portion, reflecting on Jesus’ life and keeping eyes open to know him better. Mark has a unique perspective, unfolding his story of Jesus in fast moving succession, more pointed and concise than the other Gospel writers. It’s an exhilarating adventure.
Mary and Joseph, Herod, the Magi, the shepherds and Simeon are just some of those who share their experience of the arrival of Jesus. The familiar story comes alive in Eyes on Jesus: The Christmas Chronicles, with all the shocking wonder encountered by these first witnesses – some with faith, some with doubt, some with hostility or indifference. In the process we’re invited to carefully consider the Child who was born so long ago, who lived to set us fee, and who welcomes us into relationship with God himself.
So come on the journey. Eyes on Jesus: Through John’s Gospel will lead you through John’s account in a series of daily devotionals that strike a healthy balance between theological insight and personal application. Ideal for study on your own or with a group.
Tim MacIntosh holds an MDiv from Regent College and has served as a pastor for the past 41 years with Christian Brethren, Baptist and Alliance churches, seeing his primary role as leading people more deeply into the Scriptures. He writes a daily devotional blog on Facebook titled ‘Eyes on Jesus (Through the Scriptures),’moving progressively through the New Testament. He and his wife Sarah have four grown children, and have been married for 30 years. They live in Abbotsford.
- Linda Ambrose: Pentecostal Preacher Woman: The Faith and Feminism of Bernice Gerard (UBC Press)
Evangelical pastor, talk-show host and politician – Reverend Bernice Gerard (1923 – 2008) was all of this and more. Pentecostal Preacher Woman explores Gerard’s life as one of the most influential spiritual figures of 20th century British Columbia, whose complicated blend of social conservatism and social compassion contains lessons for our polarized times.
Coming out of a difficult childhood, Gerard was attracted to Pentecostalism’s emphasis on direct personal experience of God and the use of spiritual gifts, and she eventually became an international evangelist.
As a pastor, radio personality and alderperson, she was a compelling communicator for the Christian right and an ardent critic of liberal social mores, yet she supported social justice for refugees, Indigenous people and Vancouver’s homeless population. She remained rooted in patriarchal religious institutions but also practiced a kind of feminism.
Based on Reverend Gerard’s personal archives and writings, Pentecostal Preacher Woman traces the complex evolution of a conservative woman’s ideas about faith and society.
(I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Bernice when I worked with BC Christian News and she was on the board. I plan to review the book in the new year.)
Linda M. Ambrose is a professor of history at Laurentian University. She is the author, with Michael Wilkinson, of After the Revival: Pentecostalism and the Making of a Canadian Church. She also co-edited Women in Agriculture: Professionalizing Rural Life in North America and Europe, 1880 – 1965 with Joan M. Jensen.
- Jesse P. Nickel: A Revolutionary Jesus: Violence and Peacemaking in the Kingdom of God (Fortress Press)
A Revolutionary Jesus is about Jesus’s perspective on violence, the ways this is demonstrated in his ministry and its implications for Jesus’s followers. It begins by examining the nature and role of violence within Second Temple Jewish eschatology.
‘Eschatological violence’ – violence connected in some way with eschatological expectations – was an important factor in the world of Jesus and his contemporaries.
Many believed that God’s long-awaited deliverance was contingent on his people’s taking up the sword against their oppressors, thus demonstrating their zealous allegiance to the covenant.
In contrast, Jesus articulated and enacted a vision for God’s reign in which violence was completely disassociated both from the means of the kingdom’s inauguration and from the character of those who belonged to it.
This was a kingdom defined by peace, whose people would be identified by peacemaking, exemplified by its Lord, whose victory was accomplished in giving his own life. Jesus’s rejection of violence thus grew from the very core of his understanding of his task, his identity and the character of the kingdom. To be a disciple is to follow Jesus’s teaching and example. Therefore, it is clear that violence should have no place in Christian praxis.
Jesse Nickel (PhD, University of St. Andrews) is on the faculty of Columbia Bible College in Abbotsford, where he teaches in the biblical studies program. He is the author of The Things That Make for Peace: Jesus and Eschatological Violence and coeditor of It’s About Life: The Formative Power of Scripture. He discussed his new book on a Regent College podcast November 16.
– Gareth Brandt: Radical Roots: A Collection of Paintings, Stories & Poems Celebrating the 500th Anniversary of Anabaptist Origins (Masthof Press)
Who were the Anabaptists? What happened 500 years ago that was so significant? Why does the Anabaptist movement still matter today?
Radical Roots, a collection of paintings, stories and poems celebrating the 500th anniversary of Anabaptist origins, offers an accessible and engaging introduction to the early Anabaptists – it not only educates but also inspires. Throughout the book the author’s original watercolour paintings help to bring the stories to life.
Gareth Brandt is a freelance artist, speaker and independent scholar. He has served churches in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia as a youth pastor and more recently as a college professor. For over two decades he taught spiritual formation, Anabaptist history and Anabaptist theology at Columbia Bible College. He and his wife Cynthia live in Abbotsford and attend Emmanuel Mennonite Church.
- Jens Zimmermann, Yaakov Ariel, Gregor Thuswaldner, editors: The Routledge Handbook of Christianity & Culture (Routledge)
The centrality and importance of the intersection of Christianity and culture when it comes to English-speaking countries and particularly American culture, history and politics is beyond doubt.
The Routledge Handbook of Christianity and Culture is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising over 35 chapters by a team of international contributors, the handbook is divided into five parts:
- Practicing Christianity
- Christianity and the Word
- Social and Political Aspects of Christianity and Culture
- Christianity and Culture in a Global Context
- Christianity and the Arts
Within these parts, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including liturgy, material Christianity, education, missions, religion and science, hermeneutics, Bible translations, Christian wars, human rights, law, social action, the secular, ecumenicalism, inter-religious relations, visual arts, literature, music, theatre and film.
Jens Zimmermann is J.I. Packer Chair of Theology at Regent College and Director of the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, which fosters interdisciplinary and interreligious dialogue on the central question of the late-modern world: what does it mean to be human? His main intellectual interests are philosophical anthropology (who we are) and epistemology (how we know). He has authored and edited numerous books, including Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Christian Humanism (Oxford UP, 2019), and Re-Envisioning Christian Humanism: Education and the Restoration of Humanity (Oxford UP, 2017).
Yaakov Ariel is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina; Gregor Thuswaldner is Professor of World Languages & Cultures at Whitworth University.
- Justin Tse: Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim (University of Notre Dame Press)
Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they reflect on their efforts to adapt to secular communities while retaining their identity and beliefs.
In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the ‘Pacific Rim’ refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives emphasized skilled migration and the rise of multicultural societies – the era before the rise of Chinese nationalism in 2012 and the Hong Kong protests.
Diasporic Cantonese Protestant Christians of this time were frequently portrayed as a homogenous people bringing their Chinese culture and Christian communities from Hong Kong to cities such as Vancouver and San Francisco – sometimes contesting liberal developments like same-sex marriage but also offering new democratic awareness.
Sheets of Scattered Sand challenges that depiction of Cantonese Protestants with authentic voices from the community. Tse finds that Cantonese Protestants consider themselves “sheets of scattered sand” – politically disparate and ideologically fragmented, but united in a sense of tension with the secular world.
His work serves as an illuminating prequel to contemporary stories of the Hong Kong protests and a newly emergent Asian American politics, underscoring the importance of incorporating these voices in wider reflections on Christianity and secularity.
Justin K.H. Tse is Assistant Professor of Religion and Culture at Singapore Management University’s College of Integrative Studies. He is the co-editor of Theological Reflections on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement. Before moving to Singapore, he lived in Vancouver and completed his PhD at UBC.
- Paul Allen & Flavia Marcacci: Divined Explanations: The Theological and Philosophical Context for the Development of the Sciences, 1600 – 2000 (Brill)
Critical junctures in the historical development of science owe their origins to ideas, concepts and theories that became definitive in the minds of leading scientists who lived in a more or less religious culture.
Scientists are never solitary, but always internal to a network of scientific relationships and friendships. They have a well-attested genius, nurtured not only by their scientific training but also by ideas and stimuli received from the cultural and social contexts in which they lived. In particular, metaphysical and theological aspirations guided the genesis of many scientific ideas.
Divined Explanations offers 12 examples of the development of scientific ideas that were shaped by religious factors and which changed the course of science itself. The interwoven nature of science, philosophy, theology and culture is pervasive in these cases, thus demonstrating that throughout the modern era, natural philosophy enjoyed a deep coherence with theology.
That entanglement lingers in the minds of scientists into the contemporary period, and it continues to nourish scientific creativity in subtle and profound ways. New explanations of the world have emerged through illuminative, revolutionary and, one might say, divined
Paul Allen, PhD is Dean of Corpus Christi College and Professor of Theology at St. Mark’s College on the UBC campus. He specializes in science-theology relations, theological anthropology and political theology. His works include: Ernan McMullin and Critical Realism in the Science-Theology Dialogue (2006), Theological Method (2012), and Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues (2023) as well as numerous book chapters and articles.
Flavia Marcacci, PhD is Professor of History of Scientific Thought at the Pontifical Lateran University (Vatican State).
Here are links to the first, second, third, fourth and fifth ‘local books’ updates of 2024.