Religion Saves

Grace is amazing. About this all Christians agree. Yet nearly all forms of Christianity put significant limits on grace. In Grace Saves All, David Artman argues that grace saves alone and goes to all. This inclusive approach to Christianity is variously called universal reconciliation, universal salvation, or perhaps most accurately, Christian universalism. He contends that the inclusive/Christian universalist approach is necessary because it offers the only Christian theology that successfully defends the goodness of God.

April 7, 1944 - This date marks the successful escape of two Slovak prisoners from one of the most heavily-guarded and notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. The escapees, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, fled over 100 miles to be the first to give the graphic and detailed descriptions of the atrocities of Auschwitz. Originally published in the early 1960s, I Escaped from Auschwitz is the striking autobiography of none other than Rudolf Vrba himself. Vrba details his life leading up to, during, and after his escape from his 21-month internment in Auschwitz.

Couples can get beyond their old marriage and its destructive habits and build a brand-new one with the same spouse. And they can do it in just 90 days, even if only one spouse is committed to change. Thousands of couples in marriages that are on the brink of divorce will never enter a therapist's office. For more than 20 years, David Clarke has seen marriages turn around in just three months. In I Don't Want a Divorce, he takes his practical plan and presents it using wit, Scripture, and personal stories to help couples turn difficult marriages into great ones.

In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that had fallen into obscurity. The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the incredible story of how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist and historian from the legendary city of Timbuktu, later became one of the world's greatest and most brazen smugglers.

In February 2005, more than 10,000 people in Bakersfield, California, watched as Brian “Head” Welch—the former lead guitarist of the controversial rock band Korn—was saved by Jesus Christ. The event set off a media frenzy as observers from around the world sought to understand what led this rock star out of the darkness and into the light.

In our image-conscious culture, life can become a never-ending performance. The perfection we feel pressured to project to those in our social sphere comes at the expense of our emotional, spiritual, and mental well-being. In the end, we are left exhausted and unfulfilled. How do we flip the script and feed ourselves rather than simply adding to our feeds? In Soul Care to Save Your Life, author, speaker, and recovering performer Manda Carpenter offers an invitation to shift your focus from performing to purposeful living from the inside out.

In Beauty Will Save the World, Brian Zahnd presents the argument that this loss of beauty as a principal value has been disastrous for Western culture, and especially for the church. The full message of the beauty of the Gospel has been replaced by our desires to satisfy our material needs, to empirically prove our faith, and to establish political power in our world - the exact same things that Christ was tempted with and rejected in the wilderness.

The American church is at a critical crossroads. Our witness has been compromised, our numbers are down, and our reputation has been sullied, due largely to our own faults and fears. The church's ethnocentrism, consumerism, and syncretism have blurred the lines between discipleship and partisanship. Pastor Eric Costanzo, missiologist Daniel Yang, and nonprofit leader Matthew Soerens find that for the church to return to health, we must decenter ourselves from our American idols and recenter on the undeniable, inalienable core reality of the global, transcultural kingdom of God.

Ten years ago, Hosanna Wong packed her life into suitcases and started traveling the country to talk to people about Jesus. She quickly discovered lies she had believed that held her back from actually sharing God’s love.

It turns out, believing lies that you’re not enough, your story doesn’t matter, and there’s no way for you to make an impact… that’s how not to save the world.

Following the death of his little sister and the publication of his New York Times best-selling memoir The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher found himself living in the small community of Starhill, Louisiana, where he grew up. But instead of the fellowship he hoped to find, he discovered that fault lines within his family had deepened. Dreher spiraled into depression and a stress-related autoimmune disease.

Journey with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem with these reflections for Lent by Sinclair Ferguson. As you walk through the second half of Luke’s Gospel, you'll meet the people Jesus encountered on the way to the cross and prepare your heart to appreciate his death and resurrection afresh. Pithy yet profound, these devotions will hold up a mirror to your own heart and, more importantly, give you a window into the heart of the Lord Jesus - the one who came to seek and to save the lost at Easter.

Every excuse, reason, and roadblock for not coming to Christ is examined and duly dealt with. If you think you may be too bad, or if perhaps you really are bad and you sin either openly or behind closed doors, you will discover that life in Christ is for you too. You can reject the message of salvation by faith, or you can choose to live a life of sin after professing faith in Christ, but you cannot change the truth as it is, either for yourself or for others.

Bring Me the Rhinoceros is an unusual guide to happiness and a can opener for your thinking. For fifteen hundred years, Zen koans have been passed down through generations of masters, usually in private encounters between teacher and student. This book deftly retells more than a dozen traditional koans, which are partly paradoxical questions dangerous to your beliefs and partly treasure boxes of ancient wisdom. John Tarrant brings the heart of the koan tradition out into the open, reminding us that the old wisdom remains as vital as ever.

There is a church not too far from us that recently added a $25 million addition to their building. Our local newspaper ran a front-page story not too long ago about a study revealing that one in five people in our city lives in poverty. This is a book about those two numbers. It's a book about faith and fear, wealth and war, poverty, power, safety, terror, Bibles, bombs, and homeland insecurity, It's about what happens when Christians support, animate, and participate in the very things Jesus came to set people free from.

In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing. The four writers were Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.

The Last Arrow is your road map to a life that defies odds and alters destinies. Discover the attributes of those who break the gravitational pull of mediocrity as cultural pioneer and thought leader Erwin McManus examines the characteristics of individuals who risked everything for a life they could only imagine. Imagine living the life you were convinced was only a dream.

If you’ve ever wanted to say, “I can’t do this anymore!” out of frustration with your marriage, you’re definitely not alone. In this practical and insightful guide, former divorce attorney Toni Nieuwhof shows that even if you feel disconnected or stuck in your troubled marriage - and worry about its impact on your kids - there is a way forward.

When did kindness become a sign of weakness? These days we view kindness as an inert act based solely on the absence of being a jerk, or as heroic and herculean, beyond the reach and capability of mere mortals. But what if kindness actually had the power to save the world? In his engaging new book In Defense of Kindness, leadership coach and pastor Bruce Reyes-Chow shows how being kind (which is different than being nice) has the power to transform our relationships in all arenas of our lives.

In Why Government Can't Save You: An Alternative to Political Activism, John MacArthur illustrates through Scripture that regardless of the numerous immoral, unjust, and ungodly failures of secular government, believers are to pray and to seek to influence the world for Christ by godly, selfless, and peaceful living under that authority, not by protests against the government or acts of civil disobedience.

Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us: Fear is wisdom. Vanity is virtuous. Violence is peace. In Between the Listening and the Telling, author and activist Mark Yaconelli leads listeners into an enchanting meditation on the power of storytelling in our individual and collective lives. We tell stories to remember who we are. We tell stories to savor the pleasure of living.