Testifies to the presence of God as both our post-earthly hope and our present-world existence. / These thought-provoking sermons by Ralph Wood, a layman who has taught religion and literature for many years, seek to till new soil in the fertile field of Christian faith and life. They draw on a wide range of reading not only in Christian theology but also in both classical and contemporary literature and culture. And they also mine Wood s own professorial and personal experience in dealing with both the old and the young amid "the chances and changes of life." / Wood squarely engages the American "culture of death" by wrestling with such vexing questions as sexuality and marriage, war and peace, abortion, racial injustice, and abuse of the elderly. By grounding his homilies in specific times, places, and quandaries, Wood demonstrates that Christianity remains a vigorous set of doctrines and morals precisely as preaching and ethics give shape to our worship and living in the here and now. Focusing not so much on our "getting to heaven," Wood's Preaching and Professing shows concretely how the gospel "gets heaven into us."

The new edition includes more than 4,800 resources available at more than 10,000 Internet sites that provide information on a range of biblical study topics including Bible translations in English and other languages, audio translations of the Bible in English and other languages, commentaries, dictionaries, and other resource materials including ones in Greek, Hebrew and other ancient languages. The author also has adopted a new method of referencing and cataloging the most widely used web pages to facilitate a major expansion of resources without increasing the physical length of the book itself. In cases when ten or more resources are listed on a single web page, the author has assigned the web page a three-digit code. The code is used to identify this web page as a major resource within the main text, while any needed instructions for use of the site are cross-referenced separately in the final chapter. In adopting this concise method, the author was able to add hundreds of additional or updated web resources, a surprising number of which can be downloaded onto a hard drive for immediate and continued use.