Practical theology emerged as a discipline steeped in white supremacy, traces of which can be found in some of its most central practices and habits of mind. Identifying the remnants of this legacy allows practical theologians to begin to imagine how to proceed without reinscribing narratives of white saviors, unlimited progress, dominating control of bodies, and individual heroic leadership. You are invited to question this worldview while learning from scholars imagining a decolonized future.

The Questions Would Teach Her More Than the Answers It wasn't long after arriving in Oxford for graduate school that twenty-two-year-old Andrea Lucado - preacher's daughter from Texas - faced not only culture shock, a severe lack of coffee, but also some unexpected hard questions: Who am I? Who is God? Why do I believe what I believe? "So many nights in Oxford, I felt like the details of my faiths were getting fuzzier. Nights turned restless with the questions and the thoughts. I questioned God's existence and the doubt, it was getting into my bones...." In this engaging memoir, Andrea speaks to all of us who wrestle with faith, doubt, and spiritual identity. Join Andrea as she navigates the Thames River, the Oxford Atheist Society, romance in ancient pubs--and a new perspective on who God is. As Andrea learned, sometimes it takes letting go of old ideas to discover lasting truth.

Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it? Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it. Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God. After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

Veteran journalist Bill Tammeus contends that the road to a rich, dynamic, healthy faith inevitably must run through the valley of the shadow of doubt. He argues in favor of recognizing our mortality, of adopting the Benedictine virtue of humility and of realizing that we live by metaphor, by myth. It's our willingness to question that builds ...

You don't need to memorize evangelical formulas or answers. You just have to be willing to ask questions. There was something different about the way Jesus communicated with the lost: He didn't force answers upon people; He asked questions. So why don't we? Campus ministry veteran Randy Newman has been using a questioning style of evangelism for years. In this thought-provoking book, he provides practical insights to help Christians engage others in meaningful spiritual conversations. To Newman, asking questions challenges how we think about unbelievers, their questions, and our message, instead of telling unbelievers what to think. A perennial best-seller, this third edition includes both revisions of current chapters, such as an expanded discussion on LGBTQ+ issues and the debate on transgenderism, and new chapters that ponder issues such as science and suffering. "Distilled out of twenty years of personal evangelism, this book reflects both a deep grasp of biblical theology and a penetrating compassion for people--and finds a way forward in wise, probing questions. How very much like the Master Himself!" --D. A. Carson, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School "Questioning Evangelism steps outside the boundaries of evangelism as usual and tackles the tougher issues of our modern day." --Mitch Glaser, Chosen People Ministries

Challenging the central place that "practices" have recently held in Christian theology, Lauren Winner explores the damages these practices have inflicted over the centuries Sometimes, beloved and treasured Christian practices go horrifyingly wrong, extending violence rather than promoting its healing. In this bracing book, Lauren Winner provocatively challenges the assumption that the church possesses a set of immaculate practices that will definitionally train Christians in virtue and that can't be answerable to their histories. Is there, for instance, an account of prayer that has anything useful to say about a slave-owning woman's praying for her slaves' obedience? Is there a robustly theological account of the Eucharist that connects the Eucharist's goods to the sacrament's central role in medieval Christian murder of Jews? Arguing that practices are deformed in ways that are characteristic of and intrinsic to the practices themselves, Winner proposes that the register in which Christians might best think about the Eucharist, prayer, and baptism is that of "damaged gift." Christians go on with these practices because, though blighted by sin, they remain gifts from God.

A passionate meditation on the consolations and disappointments of religion and poetry