The official journal of the American Association for the History of Nursing

This book provides clergy, laity, and students with a thorough introduction to their faith as set forth in the Book of Confessions. Jack Rogers explains technical terms and places current issues in perspective by examining the meaning of the creeds, confessions, and declarations found in the Book of Confessions. He examines their role in history, their full meaning, and their continued relevance to the Christian community.

An expert on early Christianity reveals how the early church invented stories of Christian martyrs—and how this persecution myth persists today. According to church tradition and popular belief, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. But as Candida Moss reveals in The Myth of Persecution, the “Age of Martyrs” is a fiction. There was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still invoked by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. By shedding light on the historical record, Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get them.

As I have been doing this work, the questions that I have kept in the forefront of my mind are: How did the PCA come to be the way it currently is? What is the connection between the way the conservative movement in the old southern Presbyterian church developed and the way the PCA lives and breathes as a church of God doing kingdom business today? These historical questions have led me to a more pressing question which I have faced as a teaching elder in the PCA: Do conservative Presbyterian churches, as represented in my denomination, embrace their Presbyterian identity? Or do other ideas, practices, and narratives serve to shape them? In other words, one could read the history of the PCA as an attempt to answer the question: What does it mean to be a (conservative) Presbyterian in the postmodern age? - Preface.

Radical. Crazy. Transformative and restless. Every word we read these days seems to suggest there’s a “next-best-thing,” if only we would change our comfortable, compromising lives. In fact, the greatest fear most Christians have is boredom—the sense that they are missing out on the radical life Jesus promised. One thing is certain. No one wants to be “ordinary.” Yet pastor and author Michael Horton believes that our attempts to measure our spiritual growth by our experiences, constantly seeking after the next big breakthrough, have left many Christians disillusioned and disappointed. There’s nothing wrong with an energetic faith; the danger is that we can burn ourselves out on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. What’s needed is not another program or a fresh approach to spiritual growth; it’s a renewed appreciation for the commonplace. Far from a call to low expectations and passivity, Horton invites readers to recover their sense of joy in the ordinary. He provides a guide to a sustainable discipleship that happens over the long haul—not a quick fix that leaves readers empty with unfulfilled promises. Convicting and ultimately empowering, Ordinary is not a call to do less; it’s an invitation to experience the elusive joy of the ordinary Christian life.