Featured Titles: January 13, 2026

Here is a selection of titles recently added to our collection.

 A short guide to spiritual formation : finding life in truth, goodness, beauty, and community /Alex Sosler ; foreword by Russell Moore.  Weaving together church history, theology, and devotional practice, this introductory guide to spiritual formation retrieves the traditions rooted in truth, goodness, beauty, and community to help students follow the way of Jesus.

Daily doctrine : a one-year guide to systematic theology /Kevin DeYoung.  A year-long daily devotional that sets forth foundational systematic theology that is approachable and accessible.

Don’t look away : saying yes to the one /Don Brewster ; foreword by Mira Sorvino. The extent and depth of evil confronting us on a daily basis can be overwhelming, so overwhelming we can be tempted to look away from it. After all, with evil lurking around every corner, what difference can a single person make? In fighting the evil of child sex trafficking in Cambodia, and focusing on one life at a time, God has taken Don and Bridget Brewster’s seemingly insignificant and unqualified efforts to transform a community known for trafficking all its girls, to one that loves and protects all children. As the Brewsters took the lonely first steps of faith, God brought along others to serve with them. Through the telling of their story, the hope is that you will be challenged and inspired not to look away, but to say yes to fighting evils that surround us. In addition, you will find principles from their successes and warnings from their failures that can be used to fight evil anywhere.

 Evangelicals and abortion : historical, theological, practical perspectives /J. Cameron Fraser ; foreword by Kristy L. Johnson.  Evangelicals and Abortion traces the history and theological development of evangelical involvement in the abortion issue, and recommends some models of a biblically based response, with particular attention to the United States in the wake of the reversal of Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Jesus and Paul in the context of Judaism and early Christianity : collected essays /Donald A. Hagner.  In the late nineteenth century, Jewish scholars began to be interested in Jesus and eventually Paul as important figures in the history of the Jewish people. Rightly understood, they argued, Jesus and Paul belonged more to Judaism than to Christianity, as even radical-critical Christian scholars were concluding. The earliest believers in Jesus were exclusively Jews, forming something like a new sect within Judaism. The emergence of the Christianity of the New Testament soon became a focus of attention for Jewish scholars, and with this a host of questions arose, such as about the influence of Hellenism, the parting of the ways, the widespread Christian misperception of Judaism, the tragedy of anti-Semitism, and the identity of Jesus as Messiah and Lord. The present essays address these and other issues, maintaining throughout the tension of continuity and discontinuity, and stressing the underappreciated radical newness of the New Testament.

 Reading the Old Testament as Christian scripture : a literary, canonical, and theological survey /Mark S. Gignilliat and Heath A. Thomas.  This survey textbook presents the Old Testament and major Old Testament topics effectively for contemporary undergraduate students.

 The great open dance : a progressive Christian theology /Jon Paul Sydnor. The Great Open Dance offers a progressive Christian theology that endorses contemporary ideals: environmental protection, economic justice, racial reconciliation, interreligious peace, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ celebration. Just as importantly, this book provides a theology of progress–an interpretation of Christian faith as ever-changing and ever-advancing into God’s imagination. Faith demands change because Jesus of Nazareth started a movement, not a tradition. He preached about a new world, the Kingdom of God, and invited his followers to work toward the divine vision of universal flourishing. This vision includes all and excludes none. Since we have not yet achieved the world that Jesus describes, we must continue to progress. The energizing impulse of this progress is the Trinity: Abba, Jesus, and Sophia, three persons united by love into one perfect community. God is fundamentally relational, and humankind, made in the image of God, is relational as a result. We are inextricably entwined with one another, sharing a common purpose and a common destiny. In this vision, we find abundant life by practicing agape, the universal, unconditional love that Abba extends, Jesus reveals, and Sophia inspires.

 The Kingdom of God is among you : lectures to my students on New Testament theology /Gordon D. Fee and Cherith Fee Nordling ; foreword by Craig S. Keener.  In this exciting volume, a renowned New Testament scholar provides his lectures on New Testament theology and provides us a window on his approach on a variety of issues. He describes the task as follows: “New Testament theology is the art of giving coherence to the collective witness of the twenty-seven New Testament documents as they attest to the Christian faith while not sacrificing the historical particularity of any one text or author within the canon, and to do this as clearly as possible and with as much consistency and unity as possible . . . New Testament theology deals with all the New Testament. We must resist the tendency to find a canon within the canon or to neglect some lesser figures in the New Testament canon . . . New Testament theology is first of all a descriptive task–i.e., we must first try to describe what is there. But given our stance toward Scripture, what we describe also becomes prescriptive or normative . . . We must never forget that the writings of the New Testament are ad hoc documents, written in each and every case to speak to a specific need. Thus, rather than careful, systematic presentations of theology (such as in a book or a lecture), the earliest Christian theology is worked out in the marketplace, as it were. Therefore, we must be careful not to force the New Testament writers to answer all of our questions, nor even to use our logic or thought forms.”–Excerpted from chapter 1.

The rabbinic parables and Jesus the parable teller /David Flusser ; translated by Timothy Keiderling.  First published in German as Die rabbinschen Gleichnisse und der Gleichniserzähler Jesusin 1981–and now translated into English for the first time–this seminal work by Professor David Flusser remains an important  contribution on Jesus as a storyteller in the Jewish rabbinic tradition. Using a literary approach to study extant rabbinic parables, he argues that Jesus’ parables belong to a genre that exists only in rabbinic literature and the New Testament. In order to analyze the theology behind Jesus’ parables, we need to understand them as a first-century literary art form.

 Writing and rewriting the Gospels : John and the Synoptics /James W. Barker.  A compelling reappraisal of the relationships between the canonical gospels   Biblical scholars have long debated the Synoptic problem and the literary relationship between the Gospel of John and the Synoptics. During the twentieth century, the consensus shifted decisively to the Two-Source hypothesis for the Synoptic problem along with the view that John’s Gospel was independent of the Synoptics. In recent decades all consensus has dissolved–yet these questions retain currency and significance.   James W. Barker takes up these questions and reappraises the evidence. Drawing on his expertise in ancient compositional practices, he makes a persuasive case for a snowballing trajectory, whereby each canonical gospel drew upon other canonical gospels. Thus, Mark was written first; Matthew draws on Mark; Luke draws on Mark and Matthew; and the last of the four, John, is dependent on all three Synoptics and was meant to be read alongside them.   This judicious and ambitious study will be of interest to New Testament scholars as well as general readers who want to know more about the literary relationships between the gospels.