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CBA, ECPA End Talks on Merging Data Systems
by Lynn Garrett
After a year and a half of negotiations on combining their separate sales data-gathering systems for the Christian market, CBA (the association of Christian retailers) and the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, have announced the abandonment of that plan. A joint statement said, “The two associations had hoped to create a collaborative data flow agreement that would service both CBA’s CROSS:SCAN and ECPA’s PubTrack, but specific agreement details prevented final development of a workable joint business plan." Read the full story... |
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Spotlight On...William Wilberforce |
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Documentary, Book Celebrate Activist’s Legacy
By Juli Cragg Hilliard
William Wilberforce’s battle to end the transatlantic slave trade inspired moviegoers who saw it retold last year in the feature film Amazing Grace. Now a new book and television documentary aspire to use the example of Wilberforce and his Clapham Circle to ignite a new generation of social activism.
The documentary, The Better Hour: The Legacy of William Wilberforce, will air on national public television in early February, in time for Black History Month (check local listings). Paired with the study guide Creating the Better Hour: Lessons from William Wilberforce (Stroud & Hall Publishing), edited by Chuck Stetson and with a foreword by Rick Warren, it is part of a wave of Wilberforce rediscovery during the 2007-2008 celebrations of the 200th anniversary of the end of the slave trade.
Read the full story... |
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| Four Reviews Coming in Publishers Weekly on Monday, January 14: |
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 The New Christians: Dispatches From the Emergent Frontier
Tony Jones. Jossey-Bass, $22.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-7879-9471-6
Jones (The Sacred Way) provides the single best introduction to the Emergent Church movement, of which he is a prominent leader. The mainline denominations are dying and the hyper-individualism of evangelicalism is unsatisfying, so many young evangelicals, Jones explains, have decided to recreate church for post-modern times. Jones credits Brian McLaren’s A New Kind of Christian with raising important questions about sounding the Gospel in an era beset by questions about foundationalism, epistemology, and how to read Scripture. He passionately defends the emergent movement from criticism. In particular, critics are wrong to claim that emergents don’t really believe in the Bible; emergents passionately love the Bible, says Jones,
but also know that finite human beings cannot definitively articulate truth. The strongest sections put flesh on these theoretical bones by taking readers into actual emergent churches, like Jacob’s Well in Kansas City, Mo., where the pastor draws on Catholic practice, engages the visual arts, and sees the church’s job as assisting people on their “pilgrimage” of faith. Jones’s writing is brisk and conversational, but the book gets poor marks for design. Call-out boxes, pull quotes, and frequent font changes, which might be thought to appeal to a younger audience, in fact make for distracting and disjointed reading. (Mar.) |
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 The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life
Austin Dacey. Prometheus, $24.95 (240p) ISBN 978-1-59102-604-4
In a dazzling display of erudition, this book presents a cogent argument for secular liberalism. Dacey, a philosopher who teaches at Polytechnic University and the State University of New York at Buffalo, claims that values and ethics—defining what is right and wrong, good and bad—are not the sole domain of theologians. To contribute to our understanding of enlightened secularism, he cites like-minded thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Dewey, Adam Smith, John Rawls, Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, Plato, John Locke and Baruch Spinoza, among others. Dacey’s presentation is especially timely in view of the emphasis by some current presidential candidates on their religious identity. Not since 1960 when John F. Kennedy, as a Roman Catholic,
argued for church-state separation has the issue of secularism versus religion been so prominent in a national election. Dacey’s analysis helps to put this question into the larger perspective of liberty and conscience. Dacey advocates for democracy over authoritarianism, not hesitating to challenge theocratic Islam, for example, as a “new totalitarianism.” He calls on secular liberals to stand up for “reason and science, the separation of religion and state, freedom of belief, personal autonomy, equality, toleration, and self-criticism.” This is a thoughtful, well-reasoned argument for progressive secularism. (Mar.) |
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 The New Conspirators: Creating The Future One Mustard Seed At A Time
Tom Sine. InterVarsity, $15 paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-8308-3384-9
Organized as a series of conversations, this book explores the “lively edge” of Christianity in the U.S. and the U.K. Sine, who wrote The Mustard Seed Conspiracy in the early 1980s, has always championed Christian subversives and exiles who act in small but significant ways to care for the poor and marginalized. This book begins by delineating four streams of Christian expression that greatly challenge the norms and assumptions of traditional churches. These streams—emerging, missional, mosaic, and monastic—frequently flow into each other, and Sine does a fine job of defining them as separate but interdependent entities. Sine looks to these streams for tentative answers to several difficult questions, such as “Did we get
what it means to be a disciple wrong?” and “Did we get what it means to be the church wrong?” As he explores these questions, Sine considers the context, particularly what he calls “the global mall” in which the church must define and distinguish itself. Sine is unflinching in his assessment of Christian consumerism, but his tone is never angry. Rather, he exudes childlike enthusiasm as he shares example after example of Christians all over the world who are expressing their faith through profoundly countercultural acts of mercy, justice, love and compassion. (Mar.) |
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 Seeds of Faith: Practices to Grow a Healthy Spiritual Life
Jeremy Langford. Paraclete, $15.95 paper (176p) ISBN 978-1-55725-439-9
Langford taps into a renewed interest in such practices as solitude, meditation and spiritual direction in this handbook that employs a gardening theme. Grouping the practices into three metaphorical parts—seeds, roots and branches—the author and director of communications for the Chicago Province of the Jesuits in the U.S. elaborates on tools that, he writes, “help prepare the soil of our lives to receive and nurture God’s seeds of faith.” Langford calls this “soul gardening,” a term employed by a friend who is a minister and gardener. In assembling this guide, Langford quotes extensively from other writers such as Richard Foster (Celebration of Discipline), but he also writes as one who is familiar with the
practices he explains. For example, he tells about how he has used a spiritual director, and in the chapter on walking with the saints, he shares a moving story about praying in the cave in Spain where St. Ignatius went to discern his life’s direction. Besides writing about various practices, Langford includes a list of reflective questions and things to do at the end of each chapter that may be especially helpful for groups reading the book together. (Mar.) |
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| Two Starred Reviews Coming in PW on Monday, January 14: |
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The Open Road: The Global Journey of the XIVth Dalai Lama
Pico Iyer. Knopf, $24 (288p) ISBN 978-0-307-26760-3
This is a brilliant pairing of writer and subject. Iyer has known the Dalai Lama, spiritual and political leader of Tibet, for more than 30 years, thanks to a long-ago connection between the writer’s father, an Oxford don born in India, and a young Dalai Lama. So the acute global observer Iyer, a travel writer, essayist and novelist, has long followed the fortunes of the astute globalist Tibetan Buddhist, who travels the world but can never go home to his Chinese-occupied country. This is not a biography but an extended journalistic analysis of someone deep enough for several lifetimes, as Tibetan Buddhists believe. Iyer organizes his observations by smart descriptions of aspects of the Dalai Lama’s work and character: icon, monk, philosopher,
politician. This allows him to plumb different sides of His Holiness, whom he de-mythologizes even as he expresses a clear-eyed respect for the leader’s achievements. Iyer reminds readers of paradoxes: the Dalai Lama is highly empirical, yet holds beliefs such as reincarnation that defy reason. He is a public figure who is diligent about elaborate and private religious practices. Like its subject, the aim of this book is ultimately simple: behold the man. (Apr. 3) |
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 Encountering the Mystery: Perennial Values of the Orthodox Church
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. Doubleday, $21.95 (302p) ISBN 978-0-385-51813-7
Although the 16-year reign of the Patriarch of the Orthodox Christian communion has largely gone unnoticed in America, this new book should serve to raise his profile considerably. Like some of his Western counterparts, the popes of Rome, Bartholomew has used his position to speak out against the ravages of the global economy and has been an eloquent advocate for environmentalism. In his new book, he mines the mystical theology of Orthodoxy, which relies heavily on saints like Gregory of Nyssa and the New Testament, to paint a picture of a world transformed and renewed by Christianity. The chief principles that underlie this world are prayerfulness, asceticism and humility. Bartholomew understands the cultivation of virtue as having both personal and global
dimensions, as when he writes, “[L]et us treat everything with proper love and utmost care. Only in this way shall we secure a physical environment where life for the coming generations of humankind will be healthy and happy.” As a citizen of Turkey, Bartholomew has also been committed to Christian-Jewish-Muslim dialogue and is believable when he says, “[I]t is not religious differences that create conflict between human beings.” More than anything else, this book shows that all who are committed to social justice have a friend in the Orthodox Patriarch. (Mar. 18) |
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PW RELIGION BESTSELLERS: December |
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Hardcover
- Quiet Strength
Tony Dungy with Nathan Whitaker. Tyndale.
- 3:16: The Numbers of Hope
Max Lucado. Thomas Nelson- Between Sundays
Karen Kingsbury. Zondervan
- Get Out that Pit
Beth Moore. Thomas Nelson/Integrity
- Home to Holly Springs
Jan Karon. Viking
- Breaking Free Day by Day
Beth Moore. B&H Publishing Group
- Become a Better You
Joel Osteen. Free Press
- Jesus
Beth Moore. B&H Publishing Group
- Facing Your Giants
Max Lucado. Thomas Nelson
- Love and Respect
Emerson Eggerichs. Thomas Nelson
Paperback
- 90 Minutes in Heaven
Don Piper with Cecil Murphey. Baker/Revell
- The Parting
Beverly Lewis. Bethany House
- 23 Minutes In Hell
Bill Wiese. Strang/Charisma.
- Breaking Free
Beth Moore. B&H Publishing Group
- The Five Love Languages
Gary Chapman. Moody/Northfield
- The 3:16 Promise
Max Lucado, Thomas Nelson
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In Defense of Israel
John Hagee, Strang/FrontLine
- Just Beyond the Clouds
Karen Kingsbury. Center Street
- Cassidy
Lori Wick. Harvest House
- The Purpose-Driven Life
Rick Warren. Zondervan
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The next issue of Religion BookLine will be January 16. Happy New Year! |
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