A Brief Index

Available Titles
(Arranged alphabetically by title)
New Briefs will be published on a regular basis

A Brief Cost: Book Briefs are offered free of charge to those in His service---costing only the time it takes to read one. As long as the Lord wants this service provided, He will keep on providing the needed funds. Any contributions will be gratefully received and used towards providing this service.

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This book explains how the beliefs and values of the wider culture have changed the way people think about spirituality.  Changes in thinking about spirituality have brought about changes in the meaning of spiritual words, resulting in a kind of spiritual language barrier.  This book provides a kind of spiritual up-to-date dictionary.  He describes a practice-oriented spirituality, that cluster of intentional activities relating to the sacred, which takes place in ordinary life and has been part of all religious traditions.

Ken Myers presents a thorough case that popular culture's greatest influence is in the way it shapes how we think and feel (more than what we think and feel) and how we think and feel about thinking and feeling.  He compare pop culture with traditional and folk culture and suggests criteria for aesthetic evaluation beyond individual opinion.

Back to Virtue
by Peter Kreeft

We folk of the twentieth century may be moralistic than were medieval people, in the sense that we fret more about morality, but men and women of the Middle Ages had better moral habits. In medieval times, the seven deadly sins and seven cardinal virtues were known to everyone, while nowadays it is a rare university student who can name them. (Can you name them?)

Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation
by James Davison Hunter

Hunter presents evidence that Evangelicalism is characterized by the same cultural processes at work in the modern world.  This orthodoxy resembles less and less what earlier generations understood it to be.  From a distance, it would appear as though little, if any, change has occurred in the past century., but closer scrutiny reveals qualitatively noteworthy differences.

The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism
by D.A. Carson

The Gagging of God is an important work that should be read by serious Christian leaders. The subtitle to this massive book details the author’s thesis - "Christianity Confronts Pluralism." Highly respected author and scholar D.A. Carson documents how God is being gagged (silenced) both in our society and in the church, through the acceptance of pluralism and postmodernism. Topics covered include the new hermeneutics, secularism, presuppositional vs. evidential apologetics, selfism, God’s sovereignty, inclusivism, Hell, Outcome Based Education, the changing definition of evangelicalism, modern mysticism. Carson addresses the uniqueness of Christ and offers a thoughtful look at how to evangelize in a postmodern generation.

God in the Wasteland
by David Wells

David Wells persuasively argues that "evangelicalism reverberates with worldliness." What is plainly missing is discernment and this has much to do with the fact that the evangelical world has abandoned theology. Unless we recognize the ways in which the world has insinuated its tentacles into the life of the church, the church will wander in the wasteland, weakened and bewildered. To be the church, an alternative to post-modern culture and not a mere echo of it, leaders must learn how to detect worldliness and make a clear decision to be weaned from it.

How Now Shall We Live?
by Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcy

This book is a radical challenge to the church and to all Christians to go beyond salvation---to understand biblical faith as an entire worldview, a perspective on all of life. This book examines the great spiritual battle today---a cosmic struggle between competing worldviews. The authors explain how to be more effective in evangelism and how to contend for the faith in every walk of life.

Losing Our Virtue
by David Wells

David Wells explains the changing spiritual topography of our time and why the Church must recover its moral vision. For over two thousand years, moral conduct was discussed under the language of virtues. In our culture all of the older models of self-understanding are being shelved. We are now framing life in such a way that the most important aspect, that we are moral beings, has been removed from the equation. The author also presents an apologetic which is fitted to the circumstances of the postmodern world.

Moral Choices: An Introduction to Ethics
by Scott B. Rae

Moral Choices includes exposure to various ethical systems and the key historical figures associated with them. The distinctive elements of Christian ethics are outlined. Since the process of making a moral decision can be as important as the decision itself, a model is presented to make sure that the right questions are asked in the process of ethical deliberation.

No Place for Truth
by David Wells

David Wells explores why theology is disappearing and blames modernization for the process by which our culture lost God as its point of reference. Evangelicals quite typically think of culture as neutral. The assumption is challenged and the author shows the manifold ways in which modernity has twisted evangelical faith. He argues that those who are most relevant to this world are those who are judged most irrelevant.

Not the Way Its Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin
by Cornelius Plantinga Jr.

This probes deeply into a grim subject---human sin, in all of its multifarious disguises and stubborn ingenuity. In the present moral climate, with the very reality of sin systematically obscured and denied. Most people have a narrow understanding of the term sin. We tend to think it means that we have broken a few rules, made a few mistakes. So we apologize and get on with our lives, right? Wrong. Sin is much more than breaking the rules. God created an intricate, interwoven cosmos, each part depending on the others, governed by laws of order and harmony. Sin affects every part of that order and harmony---twisting, fracturing, distorting, and corrupting it.

Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down:
A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century-Culture
by Marva Dawn

Marva Dawn pleads for a careful theological reflection concerning the meaning and practice of worship. She challenges us to think more deeply about the issues at stake for the worship and life of the Church and to ask better questions about if, why, and how we might be dumbing down faith.

The Seven Deadly Sins and The Seven Cardinal Virtues
by James Stalker

James Stalker gives believers a guide for facing good and evil in their Christian journey. It has long been believed that there are seven sins from which all other sins grow and the idea of cardinal virtues is an exceedingly old one. But can you name them? Modern-day Christians would benefit from knowing what has been for centuries viewed as foundational and essential.

The Seven Deadly Sins Today
by Henry Fairlie

There have been many tendencies in the modern age that have made us mischievously and destructively egocentric, and even our societies are in danger of being left with no justification or function but to bolster our egotism. Common decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. When we cannot name or identify evil, we lose the capacity to deal with it. The heart of sin is the persistent refusal to tolerate a sense of sin. Who wants to abandon personal preferences and be held accountable to an absolute moral standard for every thought and action? But when we refuse to listen to the true diagnosis of the sickness of the soul, we will not find a true remedy. If we do not understand the existence of sin in us at the root of our natures, and not just our capacity for sometimes doing sinful things, we abandon such resistance as we might offer, even before the struggle has begun.