WINNER AUSTRALIAN CHRISTIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2008. What if God lived next door? Would you recognise him, talk to him at the fence or avoid catching his eye? Simon Carey Holt has uncovered the spiritual possibilities of our urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Simon Carey Holt is Lecturer in Spirituality at Whitley College (University of Melbourne & Melbourne College of Divinity).

Where do you run when a world is out to get you? AIs, Forged beings, superheroes, angels, and worlds that change in the blink of an eye—here is a richly imagined tale of ordinary redemption in an extraordinary world from one of the most provocative writers working today. . . . Francine is a young runaway looking to find a definition of love she can trust. In Sankhara, she finds a palace where rooms are made of bone, flowers, and the hearts of heroes. She finds a scientist mapping the territory of the human mind. She finds a boyfriend. And she finds Eros itself—incarnated in the androgynously irresistible form of Jalaeka. But not everyone is in love with the god of love. Unity, for one, wants to assimilate Jalaeka along with every other soul in the universe. And contrary to what everyone always believes, love alone can’t save the day. It will take something both more and less powerful than the human heart to save the worlds upon worlds at risk when gods collide. “For Robson, world-building is a literary device like any other, useful for exposing buried fears and desires to the light of day, no matter how strange the sun.”—New York Times Book Review

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We applaud men for doing good things. We enshrine God for doing great things. But what about a man who does God things? One thing is certain. We can't ignore him. If these moments are factual, if the claim of Christ is actual, then he was, at once, man and God. The single most significant person who ever lived. Forget MVP. He is the entire league. The head of the parade? Hardly. No one else shares the street. Who comes close? Humanity's best and brightest fade like dime-store rubies next to him. Dismiss him? We can't. Resist him? Equally difficult. Why would we want to? Don't we need a God-man Savior? A just-God Jesus could make us, but not understand us. A just-man Jesus could love us, but never save us. But a God-man Jesus? Near enough to touch. Strong enough to trust. A next door Savior.

There was a time when neighbors knew each other’s names, when small children and the old and infirm alike had more than their families looking out for them. There was a time when our neighborhoods were our closest communities. No more. Neighborhoods have become the place where nobody knows your name. Into this neighborhood crisis the words of Jesus still ring true: Second only to the command to love God is the command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” In Next Door as It Is in Heaven, Lance Ford and Brad Brisco offer first principles and best practices to make our neighborhoods into places where compassion and care are once again part of the culture, where good news is once again more than words, and where the love of God can be once again rooted and established.