In the book, Vanishing Grace, Phillip Yancey seeks to explore and understand what has caused a dramatic plunge in the favorable impression of Christianity. He seeks to understand why Christians stir up such hostile feelings, and what, if anything, we should do about it. Yancey’s thesis is that hostile feelings, and a plunge in general perceptions and attitudes about Christian stems from a lack of grace. Yancey decided to write this book after viewing survey results from George Barna. As he states, “A few telling statistics jumped off the page. In 1996, 85 percent of Americans who had no religious commitment still viewed Christianity favorably. Thirteen years later, in 2009, only 16 percent of young ‘outsiders’ had a favorable impression of Christianity, and just 3 percent had a good impression of evangelicals.” Throughout the book, Yancey uses interactions with a book club that he belongs to in Colorado. The members of the club are a potpourri of religious and social …show more content…
Yancey even quotes that when he asks people to, “Tell me the first word that comes to your mind when I say Christian, not one time has someone suggested the word love.” He goes on by saying, “The more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God - who, after all, loves ornery creatures like us. I’ve yet to meet someone who found their way to faith by being criticized.” I also, have never met someone who found their way to faith by being criticized. Our little church, like most around it, didn’t grow much at all. When we did grow, it was because another church had a split or some sort of disagreement, and we inherited several of their disgruntled members. It wasn’t because we were friends of sinners showing the love and grace of the good news to them. In fact, after a handful of years, our small church also experienced a split over some weird regulation. A few months later, we closed our doors. Not a great resemblance of
In the novel, Saving Grace, author Lee Smith follows the life of a young woman who was raised in poverty by an extremely religious father. In this story Grace Shepherd, the main character, starts out as a child, whose father is a preacher, and describes the numerous events, incidents, and even accidents that occur throughout her childhood and towards middle age, in addition, it tells the joyous moments that Grace experienced as well. Grace also had several different relationships with men that all eventually failed and some that never had a chance. First, there was a half brother that seduced her when she was just a child, then she married a much older man when she was only seventeen, whose “idea of the true nature of God came closer to my own image of Him as a great rock, eternal and unchanging” (Smith 165). However, she succumbs to an affair with a younger man that prompted a toxic relationship. What caused her to act so promiscuous and rebel against everything she had been taught growing up? The various men in Grace 's life all gave her something, for better or worse, and helped to make her the person she became at the end of the novel.
Overall, this book is an exceptional example of critiquing our culture with a firm grasp of the philosophies of the day. Our culture is rampant with idols that need to be destroyed. Twenty years have only made the idols more pronounced. This book ought to be required reading in Christian secondary education across the country.
· Lewis, CS. Mere Christianity. New York: Doubleday, 1982. · McBride, David. The Story of the Church.
The American Evangelical Story: A History of the Movement, by Douglas A. Sweeney. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2005. 208 pages. Reviewed by Susan L. Schulte.
Nancy Ammerman writes Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life to convey her findings of studying spirituality and religion in the ordinary life of her sample population. The inspiration for this book came from previous data about Christians and the “Golden Rule,” the concept of treating everyone how you would like to be treated (3). In order to understand this concept better, Ammerman decided to study religion and spirituality in everyday life. Her population included 95 people from the Boston and Atlanta areas. These participants came from “Catholic, liberal Protestant, conservative Protestant, African American Protestant, Jewish”, Mormon, Wicca and Neopaganism as well as an internet chat group (11). Unaffiliated participants were also
Jenkins, Phillips. The Lost History of Christianity. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008. Print. Phillips, Jonathan.
Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America: How a "Christian Country" Has Now Become the World's Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001. Print
Union between two quarrelsome objects can be the most amazing creation in certain situations, take for instance, water. Originally, water was just hydroxide and hydrogen ions, but together these two molecules formed a crucial source of survival for most walks of life. That is how marriage can feel, it is the start of a union that without this union the world would not be the same. A Hmong mother, Foua took it upon herself to perform a marriage ceremony for the author of “The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down”, Anne Fadiman. In this miniscule event, two cultures with completely conflicting ideas came together to form a union. In this union, an American was celebrating an event in a Hmong way, truly a collision of two cultures.
Religion plays an important role in political modifications during the 1980s. The Moral Majority was an evangelical Christian political action committee who had a major part in Reagan's election victory. This caused tension wit...
Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace is a work of historical fiction that has drawn upon several historical sources. As Atwood states these sources are often contradictory to each other and their creators have their own motives and biases in producing them. Atwood uses these contradictory versions of the same events very cleverly to underline the fact that the truth of Grace Marks’ guilt or innocence is no clearer now then it was at the time of her conviction. The novel also provides an interesting look at the historical records of women from different classes and circumstances. Alias Grace shows that history cannot always be discerned from the records and that the truth is often lost between them. When looking at records left behind by various classes of women in the novel the records of the lower class women are not simply statistics as would be expected. The reason that anything is known about Grace Marks or Nancy Montgomery is due to being a convicted murder and a victim respectively, in the Kinnear-Montgomery murders.
Christianity has its challenges. It places demands on us that set us apart from the rest of our world. The bible calls us a peculiar people, who navigate the challenge of living IN the world, without being OF the world. When we say ‘no’ to temptations that are enjoyed by the masses, we are labeled as self-righteous snobs, religious weirdoes, or worse. But we persevere, and we press toward that invisible line the Apostle Paul drew in the sands of time…for the high calling in Christ Jesus.
In Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace, he examines the lives and experiences of many children living in the Bronx. In all cases, they lived in run-down apartments surrounded by violence, drugs, and hopelessness. His main argument was that the poor people of this area were not treated well by the city, and the society tried to hide and forget about them. The second chapter of his book have several examples of this practice.
Paul Tillich. “What Faith Is”. The Human Experience: Who Am I?. 8th ed. Winthrop University: Rock Hill SC, 2012. 269-273. Print.
Redemption can be explained as gaining possession of something in exchange for payment. In order to achieve something, one must do something in return. The end result of redemption may be unknown to the person and what their payment is may be a sacrifice. This motif is relayed in the short story, “Cathedral,” by Raymond Carver, by a man who gains new vision from an unlikely source.
Boyd, Gregory A., and Paul R. Eddy. Across the Spectrum: Understanding Issues in Evangelical Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009.