You don’t need to be different; you don’t need to be better. You just need to know that God loves you just the way you are now...today. When you truly believe this, you will find the strength and incentive to fight sin, experience freedom from shame, and walk in the fullness of all that God desires for you.

We live in an age of vast and rapid destruction of habitats and species. Yet Christianity holds great potential for healing this situation. Indeed, the Bible and Christian tradition are a treasure trove of rich images and stories about God as an "earthen" being who sustains the natural world with compassion and thereby models for humankind environmentally healthy ways of being.Mark Wallace's stimulating book retrieves a central but often neglected biblical theme - the idea of God as carnal Spirit who indwells all things - as the basis for constructing a "green spirituality" responsive to the environmental needs of our time.In the biblical tradition, he writes, God as Spirit is an ecological presence that shows itself to us daily by living in and through the earth. One message of Christianity, therefore, is celebration of the bodily, material world - ancient redwoods, vernal springs, broad-winged hawks, everyday pigweed - as the place that God indwells and cares for in order to maintain the well-being of our common planetary home.Alongside his green reading of the Bible and tradition, Wallace employs the resources of deep ecology, Neopagan spirituality, and the environmental justice movement to rethink Christianity as an earth-based, body-loving religion. He also analyzes color images reproduced in the book. Wallace's bold yet careful work reawakens our sense of the sacrality of the earth and the life that the trinitarian God creates there. It also grounds the impulses of New Age spirituality in a profoundly biblical notion of God's being and activity.

This first of its kind collection of stories documents the power of music within the global Body of Christ. Agencies and churches around the world show how music has made as much impact in reaching the unreached as other methods of evangelism. Many of the stories come from far-off, exotic places where missionaries and musicians quietly fulfill their calling to encourage people groups to offer their indigenous songs to the Lord. These worship stories remind us that day by day, year by year, melody by melody, rhythm by rhythm, the great rehearsal is underway, awaiting the time when we join our voices with people from every tribal group and language in a continuous praise gathering proclaiming endless worship to God. A CD of indigenous worship music is included.

Christians know the Psalms, sing the Psalms, and pray the Psalms more than any other book of the Bible. Yet, even as believers have grown more devoted to individual psalms, they have lost the big picture-the single sense that unites all the psalms as one coherent book. Michael Barber is at the forefront of an emerging movement in biblical theology. With this book, he is recovering the narrative plot that was the common heritage of Jews and Christians in the ancient world. Barber shows how King David serves as an example for the chosen people as they struggled in exile. As David was rescued by the Lord, so would Israel be restored as a kingdom for all ages. This is the story of Christ as well, whom Barber reveals as the "new David." And, in Christ, it is the story of every Christian. The Psalms bring us-in our reading and in our prayer-from suffering and pleading to glory, triumph, and praise. Barber's analysis follows upon an extensive introduction by Scott Hahn, Ph.D., detailing the historical, cultural, and theological background of the Psalter.

Noting that academic biblical scholars and Christian ethicists have been methodologically estranged for some decades now, Brian Brock seeks to reframe the whole Bible-and-ethics discussion in terms of this question: What role does the Bible play in God's generation of a holy people -- and how do we participate in that regeneration? Brock first examines various major contemporary thinkers on the Bible and Christian ethics, including John Howard Yoder, Brevard Childs, John Webster, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He then undertakes major discussions of Augustine and Martin Luther, unpacking their interpretation of the Psalms. Finally, Brock articulates the processes of renewal in God's people. His close study of a few individual psalms shows how we enter the world of praise in which all human life is comprehended within God's work -- and is thus renewed. Immersion in the exegetical tradition of the Christian faith, Brock argues, must be the heart and soul of theology and ethics.

'Singing the Body of God' is a study of the devotional poetry of the 14th-century poet-philosopher Vedāntadeśika, one of the most influential figures in the Hindu tradition of Sri-Vaishnavism.