General in The Books Store

My dear friend Wendy has trained thousands of women in practical theology through her teaching ministry. I am delighted to see her helpful wisdom now being made available to many more women through this book.”
Mark Driscoll, Pastor and Founder, Mars Hill Church; President, Acts 29 Church Planting Network; President, Resurgence

Have you ever wanted to understand the deep things of the Word but been put off by the intimidating vocabulary of theologians? Have you assumed that studying the attributes of God is for seminary students only? Or maybe “just for men”? Have heavy doctrinal themes felt beyond you and your everyday world? If so—if you’ve ever thought theology was too deep, too impractical, or too irrelevant for your life as a woman—this book is for you.

As author Wendy Alsup explores fundamental theological issues you’ve always wondered about—minus the daunting vocabulary and complex sentence structure of academic tomes—she brings them into real life… into your world… and reveals the heart of true theology. It’s really about “simple yet incredibly profound stuff that affects our daily lives,” she says. Stuff like faith and gaining a right knowledge of God as the foundation for wise daily living.

Alsup writes: “Truly, there is nothing like a good grasp of accurate knowledge about God to enable you to meet the practical demands of your life—the practical demands of being a daughter, mother, wife, sister, or friend.” Let Practical Theology for Women show you the everyday difference that knowing God makes.

In his own foreward to the book, Cardinal Ratzinger compares this work to a much earlier classic of the same title by Romano Guardini because Ratzinger feels that his insights here are similar with what Guardini achieved in his time regarding a renewed understanding of the Liturgy.

"My purpose here is to assist this renewal of understanding of the Liturgy. Its basic intentions coincide with what Guardini wanted to achieve. The only difference is that I have had to translate what Guardini did at the end of the First World War, in a totally different historical situation, into the context of our present-day questions, hopes and dangers. Like Guardini, I am not attempting to involve myself with scholarly discussion and research. I am simply offering an aid to the understanding of the faith and to the right way to give the faith its central form of expression in the Liturgy."

While agreeing with the claim that to remember a wrongdoing is to struggle against it, Volf notes that there are too many ways to remember wrongly, perpetuating the evil committed rather than guarding against it. In this way, "the just sword of memory often severs the very good it seeks to defend." He argues that remembering rightly has implications not only for the individual but also for the wrongdoer and for the larger community.

Intelligent design, creationism, and evolution have always been hot topics for debate in America. Creationism and intelligent design are usually seen as the province of religious people, while evolution belongs to the scientists. More often than not, both camps see the other as "the enemy." But what about committed Christians who find something lacking in the ideas of both creationism and intelligent design? Can you still be a Christian and support the idea of evolution?

Scientist Karl Giberson believes you can. Raised a fundamentalist and influenced as a boy by Henry Morris's creationist classic The Genesis Flood, Giberson firmly believed in creationism through his college years. But while working on his Ph.D. in physics, he began to doubt that science could have gotten everything as thoroughly wrong as the creationists suggested, and he gradually abandoned his creationist beliefs—but not his belief in Christianity. Through careful research, Giberson concluded that Christianity and evolution do not have to be incompatible. In Saving Darwin, Giberson paints a clear picture of the creation/evolution controversy and explores its intricate history, from Darwin to the current culture wars, carefully showing why—and how—it is possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time.