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9780918954862 Academic Inspection Copy

Contending for the Faith

The Church's Engagement with Culture
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This book calls for churches to offer an unapologetically Christian witness to a post-modern world. It asks whether we are witnessing - due to the triumph of the autonomous and unattached self - the complete destruction of those institutions and practices that once shaped human character toward fulfillment in goods larger than our own self-interest; the chief of these being the worship and service of God. The answer the book offers is that Christian existence can never be taken for granted so churches must seek to create a Christian culture that will offer the world a drastic alternative to its own cultureless existence. Among the ways the book suggests this task might be accomplished are the following: (1) by reinvigorating an often sentimental and anti-intellectual evangelicalism. (2) by developing a Christian understanding of church-based education. (3) by avoiding the twin dangers of conservatism and liberalism. (4) by focusing Christian worship on the beauty and holiness of God, (5) by understanding the relation of Christian marriage to Christian singleness, and (6) by stressing the dependence of Christian spirituality on Christian doctrine.
RALPH C. WOOD, a professor of theology and literature at Baylor University, holds the M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Comedy of Redemption; Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Notre Dame University Press)
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1. The Crisis Afflicting Church and Culture Alike 2. A Neo-Conservative Alternative 3. A Neo-Liberal Alternative 4. The Inadequacy of the Evangelical Engagement with Culture 5. The Challenge Facing the Church's Colleges 6. Creating a Christian Educational Culture 7. Christian Skepticism vs. Religious Sentimentality 8. The Ugly, the Beautiful, and the Holy in Christian Worship 9. A Christian Regard for Romance in an Eroticized World 10. The Outward Faithfulness of Inward Christian Piety Conclusion Notes Index
"[The Church's] task is not to create a counterculture, so much as a new culture based on one so ancient and nearly forgotten that it looks freshly minted."-from the Introduction
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