At a time when many people practice their faith in extremes - either publicly, with a legalistic, combative tone that creates division, or privately, to the point that their faith becomes functionally irrelevant - award-winning author Greg Paul casts a new light on religion that is beneficial for believers and the world.
Using the book of James as a guide and the streets of Toronto as a proving ground, Greg Paul demonstrates that true religion is not a necessary evil, but the way we put flesh on the bones of our faith. Resurrecting Religion is a convicting and inspiring vision for a world-changing faith.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- Bad Religion
- Spiritual or Religious?
- Dry Bones
- Bad Religion Can Feel so Good
- Believe It or Not
- Living the Beatitudes
- The Leveling Effect
- Watch Your Mouth!
- The Surprise in Submission
- A Twenty-first-century Reformation
Appendix: The Beatitudes, paraphrased
ENDORSEMENTS:
Unless our faith is rooted in and structured around practices and pathways that have stood the test of time - unless it is, in some real and deep sense, religious - it will not hold together. Indeed, the root of the religion is exactly that: to re-ligament, to tie broken things back together. Greg Paul's book Resurrecting Religion comes just in the nick of time. Greg speaks winsomely, urgently, convincingly about our need to reclaim our religious identity and heritage, while also doing what Jesus and the prophets did: rejecting all bad religion. - Mark Buchanan, Author of Your Church Is Too Safe.
It's easy to criticize religion. It's an entirely different thing to offer thought-provoking insights of your own religious practice from the trenches. Deep inside the muck and mire of human existence is where the gospel first gave light and the religious impulse was born anew - one that would care for widows and orphans in their distress and spark a living faith in a living God. Greg Paul lights up the dark realities of our post-religious talk with the hope of a religion that matters in real life to real people, right now. - Danielle Strickland, Author of The Ultimate Exodus.
In this book, Greg Paul speaks an urgently contemporary word about the church. He knows its faults: excessive accommodation to culture, privatism that is mostly irrelevant, and intellectual schemes remote from reality. But he also knows better than that. His pages teem with testimony about "the other shoe" of gospel obedience that lives in the real world, that moves in ways of mercy, compassion, and justice, and that heals and transforms. Paul is a story teller; he has rich, concrete, compelling tales about real people living out gospel lives. His book is a treasure house of evidence that there is a way that need not yield to "bad religion". - Walter Brueggemann, Columbia Theological Seminary.
