Religious Studies Audiobooks | Religion & Spirituality

A thought-provoking and eye-opening work in the vein of Sapiens, Walking the Bible, and The Language of God that offers a compelling argument for how science is not only compatible with faith, but can enrich it. For more than a century, philosophers and scientists have wrestled with reconciling evolution and religion, a debate that continues today. James Stump, the Vice President at BioLogos—a nonprofit started by Francis Collins, the scientist who led the international Human Genome Project and later served as Director of the National Institutes of Health—is both a man of science and a man of faith. In this moving and deeply thoughtful book, he shows Christians a hopeful way forward out of the morass. The Sacred Chain seeks to open the dialogue between theology and science, to be a bridge to understanding and a view of God and nature that encompasses both. Stump draws on philosophy, theology, and the latest scientific research to tackle some of the biggest questions facing humanity and people of faith today, involving issues such as: How to consider the Bible How to understand the long history of the universe How a mind or soul could have evolved How evolution factors into faith How a species is defined How a good and loving God could create a world rife with pain Deeply researched, wonderfully accessible, and both intellectually and emotionally engaging, The Sacred Chain provides clarity in our uncertain times, revealing a bigger picture of our world and our place within it. It is a panorama consistent with the scientific findings about who we are and where we come from that can actually bolster our faith as it engages our curiosity about ourselves, our universe, and the nature of existence itself. The Sacred Chain is illustrated with 30 black-and-white line drawings.

James Stump, Jim Stump (Author), James Stump, Jim Stump, TBD (Narrator)

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Learning to Disagree: The Surprising Path to Navigating Differences with Empathy and Respect

Are you discouraged by our divided, angry culture, where even listening to a different perspective sometimes feels impossible? If so, you're not alone, and it doesn't have to be this way. Learning to Disagree reveals the surprising path to learning how to disagree in ways that build new bridges with our neighbors, coworkers, and loved ones--and help us find better ways to live joyfully in a complex society. In a tense cultural climate, is it possible to disagree productively and respectfully without compromising our convictions? Spanning a range of challenging issues--including critical race theory, sexual assault, campus protests, and clashes over religious freedom--highly regarded thought leader and law professor John Inazu helps us engage honestly and empathetically with people whose viewpoints we find strange, wrong, or even dangerous. As a constitutional scholar, legal expert, and former litigator, John has spent his career learning how to disagree well with other people. In Learning to Disagree, John shares memorable stories and draws on the practices that legal training imparts--seeing the complexity in every issue and inhabiting the mindset of an opposing point of view--to help us handle daily encounters and lifelong relationships with those who see life very differently than we do. This groundbreaking, poignant, and highly practical book equips us to: - Understand what holds us back from healthy disagreement - Learn specific, start-today strategies for dialoguing clearly and authentically - Move from stuck, broken disagreements to mature, healthy disagreements - Cultivate empathy as a core skill for our personal lives and our whole society If you are feeling exhausted from the tattered state of dialogue in your social media feed, around the country, and in daily conversations, you're not alone. Discover a more connected life while still maintaining the strength of your convictions through this unique, often-humorous, thought-provoking, and ultimately life-changing exploration of the best way to disagree.

John Inazu (Author), John Inazu, Sarah Zimmerman (Narrator)

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Faith Embodied: Glorifying God with Our Physical and Spiritual Health

Scientist, physician, and pastor Stephen Ko explains how to live and worship incarnationally and glorify God with our bodies. Many of us don't see much connection between spiritual and physical health. We say grace before digging into greasy, fatty meals we know are bad for us. We read Scripture on our phones before switching to social media feeds that hijack the neural circuitry in our brains. Or we take our physical health too seriously, distancing ourselves from the sick and the needy whom Jesus embraced. On his journey from pediatrician to public health officer for the CDC to senior pastor of the largest New York Chinese Alliance Church, Stephen Ko has seen that these divisions between physical and spiritual health are artificial. In Faith Embodied, he reminds us that our 'bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit' (1 Corinthians 6:19). Christ incarnate is deity in flesh, and His spirit is incarnate in us. Living and worshiping incarnationally is consciously embracing what the Creator has designed in His image, from the finest, microscopic details to vital organs within our body, enabling the Holy Spirit to work in us. Faith Embodied will teach you to: - Understand subconscious ways that thwart the design of the Creator. - Embrace choices that invite incarnational health, living, and worship. - Experience God in every aspect of your life, from flesh and bone to heart and soul. - View the five senses (sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste) in a different light - Reflect the image of God in the way you breathe, move, create, love, and rest. Weaving together insights from faith, science, and medicine, Ko reveals the marvelous ways in which our physical and spiritual health can prepare us to become instruments of God's healing in the world.

Stephen Ko (Author), Max Newland, TBD (Narrator)

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Religionless Christianity: God's Answer to Evil

Christianity is not about rituals but changed hearts. In the prophetic tradition of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas calls slumbering Christians to battle. Picking up where he left off in his electrifying Letter to the American Church, Eric Metaxas renews and deepens his call to believers not to “practice” their faith but to live it—heroically and with joy. Invoking famous but misunderstood words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he shows that God’s answer to evil is “religionless Christianity”—the rejection of religiosity and the embrace of a living and active faith, one that consumes the whole person and affects every aspect of his life. The awakening of this faith will bring revival, a “new birth of freedom,” and a renaissance of Christian culture.

Eric Metaxas (Author), Eric Metaxas, TBD (Narrator)

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The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics

For all who want to culturally engage but are exhausted by the tension in our families and churches, The After Party reframes our political identity outside partisan divides while rebuilding strained relationships. This paradigm-shifting book complements The After Party Project--a six-part, video-based, highly interactive curriculum that provides churches, small groups, and individuals with an on-the-ground, biblically based approach to a very complex topic. The After Party: Toward Better Christian Politics helps readers who feel despair about political divisiveness: - Engage with others across political differences - Learn specific steps to reframe political identity outside of partisan divides - Focus on how we relate to one another as Jesus teaches before moving to the what of political topics The After Party is ideal for: - Republicans, Democrats, and Independents looking for renewed hope and humility for our nation - Local leaders seeking to counter animosity toward political opponents, susceptibility to lies, and other practices that threaten the common good - Congregations, classes, and small groups watching The After Party video series - Pastors who want to encourage their congregants to trade their partisan mindsets for the mind of Christ It's not too late. In today's political environment, faithfulness to a biblical how of political engagement shines as a radical challenge to both the Right and the Left. If you worry about what politics is doing to your community, your family, and your own well-being, The After Party will transform your political imagination. It's time for us to go beyond party politics and--as Christians--believe in the true 'party' yet to come.

Curtis Chang, Nancy French (Author), Curtis Chang, Greg Stafford (Narrator)

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Attentive Church Leadership: Listening and Leading in a World We've Never Known

The world has changed. The changes around us present daunting challenges to the church, and we minister in places we have never been in before. But there are no one-size-fits-all solutions because every church needs to attend to its specific situation and calling. We need to listen for not only what to do but also what not to do. In a world screaming in a thousand directions for our focus, it's essential for us to become attentive to God, our congregation, and our community. Kevin Ford and Jim Singleton call for attentive churches with attentive leaders who can discern cultural and organizational change and pivot accordingly. Healthy transformation starts with a posture of attention. We need to see what God is already doing in our midst: in our own soul, in our people, and in the communities and culture around us. Chapters explore key questions that attentive leaders ask and offer case studies of attentive churches that have navigated the issues and transitions facing them. As we practice habits of attention, God leads us through the highs and lows of change into the exciting adventure of being on mission with him.

Jim Singleton, Kevin G. Ford (Author), George W. Sarris (Narrator)

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Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History

According to Joseph Smith, in September of 1823 an angel appeared to him and directed him to a hill near his home. Buried there Smith found a box containing a stack of thin metal sheets, gold in color and covered with what appeared to be ancient engravings. Exactly four years later, the angel instructed Smith to translate the plates into English. When the text was published, a new religion was born. The plates have had a long and active life, and the question of their reality has hovered over them from the beginning. Months before the Book of Mormon was published, newspapers began reporting on the discovery of a Golden Bible. Within a few years, over a hundred articles had appeared. Critics denounced Smith as a charlatan for claiming to have a wondrous object that he refused to show while believers countered by pointing to witnesses who said they saw the plates. Two hundred years later, the mystery of the gold plates remains. In this book, renowned historian of Mormonism Richard Lyman Bushman offers a cultural history of the gold plates. Bushman examines how the plates have been imagined by both believers and critics—and by treasure-seekers, novelists, artists, scholars, and others—from Smith's first encounter with them to the present. Why have they been remembered, and how have they been used? And why do they remain objects of fascination to this day? By examining these questions, Bushman sheds new light on Mormon history and the role of enchantment in the modern world.

Richard Lyman Bushman (Author), Kirby Heyborne (Narrator)

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Loose of Earth: A Memoir

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn was the oldest of five children, a twelve-year-old from Lubbock, Texas, whose evangelical family eschewed public education for homeschooling, and wove improbable scientific theories into literal interpretations of the Bible. Then her father, a former air force pilot, was diagnosed with cancer at the age of thirty-eight, and, 'it was like throwing gasoline on the Holy Spirit.' Stirred by her mother, the family committed to an extreme diet and sought deliverance from equally extreme sources: a traveling tent preacher, a Malaysian holy man, a local faith-healer who led services called 'Miracles on 34th Street.' What they didn't know was that their lives were entangled with a larger, less visible environmental catastrophe. Firefighting foams containing carcinogenic compounds had contaminated the drinking water of every military site where her father worked. Commonly referred to as 'forever chemicals,' the presence of PFAS in West Texas besieged a landscape already burdened with vanishing water, taking up residence in wells and in the bloodstreams of people who lived there. An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.

Kathleen Dorothy Blackburn (Author), Tanya Eby (Narrator)

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How Women Invented Christianity

Kathleen E. Corley (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion

Brought to you by Penguin. From fossil-hunting to the end of faith, Impossible Monsters is a gripping narrative history of the culture war that toppled religion and gave birth to our secular age. In 1811, when the self-schooled daughter of a carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from Britain's southern shoreline, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had discovered the 'first' dinosaur, and over the next seventy-five years - as the science of palaeontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited theories of evolutionary biology, and as religious scholars identified the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures - everything changed. By the 1850s, dinosaurs were a prominent feature of the second Crystal Palace exhibition. By the 1860s, when Matthew Arnold stood on Dover Beach and saw faith ebbing away, Britain had plunged into a crisis of religious belief. By the 1870s, T.H. Huxley - Darwin's 'bulldog' - was preaching a new history of the world in which mankind was merely an accident of evolution. By 1886, following a six-year battle which had seen him beaten, imprisoned, and forcibly removed from Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh was able to take his seat in the House of Commons as the first openly atheist MP. Told through the lives of the men and women who found these vital fossils and who fought about their meaning, some humble, some eccentric, some utterly brilliant, Impossible Monsters tells the story of the painful, complicated relationship between science and religion over these seventy-five years, of the growth of secularism, and of the role of dinosaurs and their discovery in changing perceptions about the Bible, history and mankind's place in the world. 'As thrilling as it is sweeping, populated by a brilliantly drawn cast of characters' TOM HOLLAND ©2024 Michael Taylor (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Michael Taylor (Author), James Maccallum, TBD (Narrator)

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Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

'In the beginning was the Word,' says the Gospel of John. This sentence - and the words of all four gospels - is central to the teachings of the Christian church and has shaped Western art, literature and language, and the Western mind. Yet in the years after the death of Christ there was not merely one word, nor any consensus as to who Jesus was or why he had mattered. There were many different Jesuses, among them the aggressive Jesus who scorned his parents and crippled those who opposed him, the Jesus who sold his twin into slavery and the Jesus who had someone crucified in his stead. Moreover, in the early years of the first millennium there were many other saviours, many sons of gods who healed the sick and cured the lame. But as Christianity spread, they were pronounced unacceptable - even heretical - and they faded from view. Now, in Heresy, Catherine Nixey tells their extraordinary story, one of contingency, chance and plurality. It is a story about what might have been.

Catherine Nixey (Author), Lalla Ward, TBD (Narrator)

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The Party Crasher: How Jesus Disrupts Politics as Usual and Redeems Our Partisan Divide

Discover America's four political religions and why Jesus is crashing them all! The political divide is growing. Each side demands ultimate allegiance that's incompatible with the Christian faith. The fervency with which so many advocate their political ideals is best described in religious terms. Four political "religions" are rising in America: • Religion of Progress: "We can change the world." • Religion of Responsibility: "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." • Religion of Identity: "Live your truth." • Religion of Security: "Good fences make good neighbors." In this insightful, nonpartisan work, a respected pastor first exposes the religious nature of these political movements and how they compete for our loyalty to Jesus, and then prescribes ten political commandments for Christlike engagement. Fortunately, Jesus is the ultimate Party Crasher. And he is disrupting politics-as-usual to invite us into a bold vision capable of redeeming our partisan divide.

Joshua Ryan Butler (Author), Joshua Ryan Butler (Narrator)

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Religious Studies Audiobooks in Religion & Spirituality