Bøger udgivet af Baylor University Press

The Miss America pageant has extraordinary staying power. Despite the cultural winds of the past century, Miss America continues to captivate the nation, giving America what it wants most-sex, entertainment, competition, religion, and even self-discovery. In Miss America's God, Mandy McMichael traces the pageant's long and complicated history. She demonstrates that the pageant is a little explored window into American culture, one that reveals a complex cocktail of all Americans hold dear. Ultimately, McMichael contends that the pageant is an unexpected cultural space of religious expression and self-discovery for many contestants whose faith communities support and validate their pageant participation. Miss America's God utilizes feminist theory, women's history, sociology, psychology, ethnography, and religious studies to explain the enduring popularity of the pageant, as well as religion's curious embrace of its spectacle. While contestants use the pageant to build faith and identity, the pageant uses the faith of the contestants to remain relevant in a society that is increasingly suspicious of it. McMichael shows just how central religion has been to Miss America. Religion, for Miss America, sanctifies sex, ritualizes entertainment, justifies competition, and enables self-discovery. Religion makes Miss America a cultural icon that withstands the test of time.

Presents an array of early maps of Texas, dating from 1561 to 1860. The painstaking labours of Spanish, French, English, and Mexican mapmakers illustrate the progressive and differing views of Texas geography and boundaries. These maps staked new claims, fueled by new dreams, on new territory that settlers had heard about but never seen.

While for many today the idea of an embodied God seems simplistic - even pedestrian - Christoph Markschies reveals that in antiquity, the educated and uneducated alike subscribed to this very idea. More surprisingly, the idea that God had a body was held by both polytheists and monotheists.

Like other creatures, human beings are inhabitants of their ecosystems. But are humans good inhabitants? According to Jennifer Ayres, the way of inhabitance is stubbornly elusive. The work of understanding, loving, and tending God's world is constrained by patterns of alienation, exploitation, and systemic neglect and injustice.Faced daily by evidence of ecological death and decay, Ayres determines that this important work of inhabitance is constantly threatened by ecological despair. Ecological despair stems from alienation from the natural world, acute and generational grief resulting from loss of home places, and, for many, an overwhelming guilt at having been complicit in the planet's suffering. In Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education, Ayres proposes a solution to this increasing alienation: the way of inhabitance. Just as other animals live and thrive within their ecosystems, so do humans live in a habitat created, sustained, and loved by God. This God perpetually invites us to become better inhabitants.Many religious communities already cultivate inhabitance as a way of life, work that they consider to be central to their deepest theological commitments. Inhabitance examines a diverse array of such practices that foster more intentional engagement with the particular places in which people live. Ecological religious education, Ayres demonstrates, nurtures a disposition of loving commitment toward God's creation. Inhabitance demands a willingness to love other beings and a willingness to courageously encounter the human and ecological suffering of the world and be fully present to that suffering. And even as humans live more lovingly, courageously, and attentively within their particular places, their lives are opened up to the deepest sources of human well-being-for when God's world around us flourishes, so do we.

The Psalms, gritty and bold prayers of a people seeking to be obedient to a powerful and compassionate God, collectively illustrate what a real faith in the living God looks like. In Psalms as a Grammar for Faith, W.H. Bellinger Jr traces the way the Psalms exemplify and create a grammar for living a life of faith.

Focuses upon the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus in their discussion of pistis Christou. The authors survey Paul's use of pistis in Philippians, the Corinthian letters, Galatians, Romans, and Ephesians, revealing how pistis epitomizes the risen Christ's continuing faithfulness toward all those who participate in him by pistis.

No one purposefully chooses to become an idolater. No one consciously abandons the living God to fall prey to a pantheon of earthly gods. Yet idolatry has a way of subtly seeping into the cracks of human life.In Idolatry, Stephen E. Fowl explores how believers lapse into idolatry, a process he insists is much different from the decision of those who have rejected belief in God. He asserts that the Old Testament's account of Israel's idolatry as dramatic folly and betrayal describes the after effects of idolatry, not the process of how believers lapse into idolatry. Idolatry is a process of slowly diverting love and attention away from the one true God and toward false gods.Fowl identifies the various habits, practices, and dispositions that can lead to this process, using Scripture to demonstrate different ways believers become inclined to idolatry. He first turns to Deuteronomy to show how to combat idolatry by remembering the grace of God. He then examines Ephesians and Colossians to demonstrate how the suggested practices of thanksgiving and gratitude can serve as the antidotes to idolatrous greed. He looks to 1 John to find the love that casts out the fear and insecurity that the books of Kings, Isaiah, and Luke name as the forerunners of idolatry. Finally, he examines curiosity, traditionally considered a vice, and how it turns believers toward idols unless it is countered by an undistracted focus on Jesus.Idolatry looms over believers in a world overflowing with false gods, but Fowl offers hope. By diagnosing and defining the root causes of idolatry before these initial temptations become precipitated actions, Christians learn to navigate a world littered with false idols to live abundantly with the one true God.

Traces the development of pneumatology as a modern discipline and its responses to experiences of social confusion and suffering, often associated with questions linked to the category of theodicy. Ephraim Radner proposes that the proper parameters of pneumatology are found in studying Israel and her historical burdens as the Body of Christ.

Investigates the Easter event of Jesus. Bruce Chilton undertakes his close reading of the New Testament texts without privileging the exact nature of the resurrection, but rather begins by situating his study of the resurrection in the context of Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Syrian conceptions of the afterlife.

Biology continues to be the most widely recognized determinant of family in the United States and heterosexual intercourse the most common form of family creation. But what happens when children cannot be created in this way? Is it still possible to create a family? Surrogacy provides an alternative means of conception, not only to heterosexual couples who encounter infertility or reproductive loss, but also to single, same-sex, or transgender individuals who want to have children.However, surrogacy itself raises a number of concerns, arguably introducing as many difficulties as it solves. In Conceiving Family, Danielle Tumminio Hansen tackles the unnamed and unexamined problems surrounding surrogacy within a theological framework.Tumminio Hansen begins by investigating the primacy of the biological family and the profound influence it has had on how infertility and reproductive loss have been understood culturally. By using the United States, Israel, and India as case studies, Tumminio Hansen profiles the cultural constructions of surrogacy and the complications surrounding it in places where the biological family is considered the norm. Through a theological lens, Conceiving Family analyzes what is at stake for the self, family, and society in surrogacy; through a close reading of the Bible it proposes that surrogacy is only as healthy for the individual as society's views allow. Tumminio Hansen shows how a cultural misconception of surrogacy isolates the parents, surrogates, and children involved through self-alienation, community alienation, and divine-human alienation. She concludes that surrogates and intended parents must therefore construct their relationships in terms of social belonging, and that this process affords human dignity to those involved by expanding community beyond the simple science of biological connection.In Conceiving Family Tumminio Hansen ultimately reclaims surrogacy as an act that exists both within and beyond the reproductive realm, concluding that surrogacy has the potential to transform the identities of parenthood and community, re-conceiving family in the process.

Explores a series of core questions that arise when Christology and soteriology are deliberately brought together. Trevor Hart addresses contemporary questions through a series of incisive engagements with Christian theologians spanning both centuries and ecclesial traditions.

The Gospel of John has long been understood as a sectarian text, one that reinforces the social and religious isolation of a Johannine community. Savior of the World directly challenges this reading, arguing that John's Jesus does not belong to just one community. John's Jesus came for all and spans the universe.

Melissa Rogers - former Special Assistant to President Barack Obama and Executive Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships - explores the role of religion in the public square and focuses on principles that define the relationship between government and religion.

Bates applies his method to both oft-referenced and underutilized passages in the writings of Paul and suggests a new model for Pauline hermeneutics that is centered on the apostolic proclamation of Christ.--Michael J. Gorman, Dean, Ecumenical Institute of Theology "St. Mary's Seminary & University"

With its origins in the author's experience of adjusting to the challenges of quadriplegia, "Crippled Grace" considers the diverse experiences of people with a disability as a lens through which to understand happiness and its attainment.

It is a road map to the emerging American political and cultural landscape.--Patrick J. Deneen, David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies, University of Notre Dame

A reliable companion for both personal and classroom study, the Baylor Annotated Study Bible follows in the long-standing mission of Baylor University: to serve as a faithful witness to the liberating, transformative good news of the gospel.

Interreligious Relationships and Theological Questioning.

Traces the history of public school prayer in America and the legal debates since the 1962 Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the practice. The book makes available the historical and legal information from which readers can draw their own conclusions about this sensitive issue.

"Jacob Arminius' Declaration of Sentiments was delivered orally in Dutch before the States of Holland in October 1608"--Introduction.

One hundred and fifty years of archaeological investigation has yielded a more complete picture of the ancient Near East. This book combines the most significant of these archaeological findings with those of modern historical and literary analysis of the Bible to recount the history of ancient Israel and its neighbouring nations and empires.

"A century ago it was true that if you wanted to understand the ancient Israelites you had to read the Bible, the Old Testament. Today, if you want to understand the Old Testament, you need to study the history and archaeology of the ancient people of Israel"--Preface.

Offers the first book-length exploration of Kierkegaard's views on knowledge, an epistemology that M.G. Piety argues is both foundationalist and nonfoundationalist, substantive and procedural, and includes both internalist and externalist theories of belief justification.

Provides a foundational analysis of the Greek text of Matthew 1-14. Olmstead's analysis is a convenient pedagogical and reference tool that explains the form and syntax of the biblical text, offers guidance for deciding between competing semantic analyses, and engages important text-critical debates.

Evans' analysis of Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript introduces even the nonspecialist to two of Kierkegaard's most challenging works without minimizing the complex nature of his philosophy.

John's theological obsession with Christology might suggest that history counts for little in the Gospel. But, as Jorg Frey argues, the Gospel's clear and central claim is that John narrates the story of Jesus of Nazareth, his ministry, and his death, as "factual," and that this narrated "history" is foundational for the Christian message.

In honour of Daniel Aleshire's decades of leadership over the Association of Theological Schools, the essays in this book propose methods for schools of various denominational backgrounds to restructure the form and content of their programs by resourcing their own distinctive Christian heritages.