Cultural Awareness - Book recs for going deeper
Cultural Awareness
Below are recommendations for a deeper study in cultural awareness
In an era when Christianity is being attacked from every side - books being written charging Christians with being theocrats and trying to impose their views on an unwilling culture - what is the message of the Christian church? What does the Bible say, and what do we learn from history about the proper relationship between faith and culture? Appealing to scripture, reason, and history, this book tackles society's most pressing and divisive issues. New stories and examples reflect the realities of today, from the clash with radical Islam to the deep division between "reds" and "blues". In an era of angry finger-pointing, Colson furnishes a unique insider's perspective that can't be pigeonholed as either "religious right" or "religious left".
Whatever your political or religious stance, this book will give you a different understanding of Christianity. If you're a Christian, it will help you to both examine and defend your faith. If you've been critical of the new religious right, you'll be shocked at what you learn. Probing both secular and religious values, God and Government critiques each fairly, sides with neither, and offers a hopeful, fair-minded perspective that is sorely needed in today's hyper-charged atmosphere.
Ross Douthat has emerged as one of the most provocative and influential voices of his generation. In Bad Religion he offers a masterful and forceful account of how American Christianity has lost its way - and why it threatens to take American society with it.
In a world populated by “pray and grow rich” gospels and Christian cults of self-esteem, Ross Douthat argues that America’s problem isn’t too much religion; nor is it intolerant secularism. Rather, it’s bad religion. Conservative and liberal, political and pop cultural, traditionally religious and fashionably “spiritual” - Christianity’s place in American life has increasingly been taken over, not by atheism, but by heresy: debased versions of Christian faith that stroke our egos, indulge our follies, and encourage our worst impulses.
In a brilliant and provocative story that moves from the 1950s to the age of Obama, Douthat explores how bad religion has crippled the country’s ability to confront our most pressing challenges and accelerated American decline.
By critically examining the writings of egalitarians, Grudem shows that, while egalitarian leaders claim to be subject to Scripture in their thinking, what is increasingly evident in their actual scholarship and practice is an effective rejection of the authority of Scripture. Egalitarianism is heading toward an Adam who is neither male nor female, a Jesus whose manhood is not important, and a God who is both Father and Mother, and then maybe only Mother. The common denominator in all of this is a persistent undermining of the authority of Scripture in our lives. Grudem's conclusion is that we must choose either evangelical feminism or biblical truth. We can't have it both ways!
