CTS Library

New Arrivals

Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza (2025)

What explains the fervent support among America’s Christians for Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza’s Palestinians? Dying children cry beneath the rubble; doctors testify to atrocities; journalists and medics face sniper fire; experts cry genocide; Jewish Americans decry Israel’s ethnic cleansing; protesting college students jeopardize their careers. Yet millions of Americans who profess allegiance to Jesus continue defending the desolation of Gaza, or refuse to speak against it. In these essays you will read stories and hear cries from Christians—American, Latin American, Jewish, Palestinian—who have spent years listening, laboring, and praying for a durable, equitable peace between Palestinians and their Jewish neighbors. Their perspectives have formed over years in the land, through lingering encounters, hard conversations, and troubling personal experiences. Disagree with them if you must, but first hear them out, and consider why so many of Israel’s Christian partisans have confused a love for the Jewish people with a defense of the apocalypse Israel has unleashed since October 7, 2023. It may be too late to save Gaza’s millions from starvation, amputation, displacement, and death. Is it too late to repent of our complicity? Too late to save our own souls? How should we be Christian after the desolation of Gaza?

Theology and Ethics of Oppressed and Marginalized Peoples: Social Ethics and Agency in World Christianity (2025)

The book focuses on both historical and theological developments in world Christianity and social ethics, especially ethical challenges and opportunities that face minorities, oppressed, marginalized, and discriminated groups in any country or region of the world as we look to the future. It addresses the issues of methods and practices in social ethics, culture, and morality in Christian communities and theological discourse, and the virtues of Christian friendship in philosophical and practical terms. All these engagements are geared toward deepening our knowledge about the ethical dimensions of world Christianity.

Preaching Black Earth: Sermons, Meditations, and Conversations on African American Environmental Justice and Ecowomanist Spirituality (2025)

Preaching Black Earth is a groundbreaking collection of sermons, meditations, poems, and interviews that illuminates the powerful intersections of environmental justice, racial justice, and faith. With contributions from Bible scholars, pastors, ecowomanist thinkers, and political activists, this volume offers a profound exploration of how Black, Indigenous, and ally communities can craft new theologies to confront the urgent challenges of climate change.

The sermons, thoughtfully composed by those living out an earth-honoring faith, call readers to engage in environmental justice through everyday practices. The poetry inspires with its messages of cherishing the earth amid environmental crisis, serving not only as a source of hope but also as a model of contemplative writing practices that can be used as teaching tools in the classroom. The meditations and interviews foster creativity and renew the passion for justice among those committed to the intertwined struggles for earth and social equity.

This volume highlights the disproportionate impact of environmental degradation on communities of color, where landfills, toxic waste sites, and other forms of pollution often encroach on Black and Indigenous neighborhoods. It showcases the historic connection between Black preaching traditions, activism, and stewardship of the land, as well as the ecowomanist focus on the interrelatedness of injustices. By centering the voices, wisdom, and methods of women of African descent, Preaching Black Earth offers readers an interdisciplinary, intersectional framework for understanding environmental ethics and promoting social and environmental justice.

Whether you are an educator, faith leader, activist, or seeker, Preaching Black Earth is an essential resource that equips communities to navigate the intersection of environmental justice, faith, and activism, ensuring that both humanity and the earth not only endure but thrive.

Contributors and conversation partners include Stacey Abrams, Sofia Betancourt, Heber Brown III, Christopher Carter, Elonda Clay, Katie Commons, Frances Roberts Gregory, Frederick Douglas Haynes III, John W. Kinney, Otis Moss III, Kenneth Ngwa, Liv Parson, Larry Rasmussen, and Gina M. Stewart.

Chaplaincy for a Plural World: Humanistic Perspectives (2026)

Chaplaincy for a Plural World provides a theoretical foundation for an inclusive understanding of chaplaincy and lays out key chaplaincy methods for providing spiritual care in a modern context. Inspired by recent humanist chaplaincy in the Netherlands and based on the interdisciplinary science of humanistic studies, the book explains chaplaincy as a multifaceted profession in which supporting people’s search for meaning in life is intertwined with the pursuit of humanizing organizations and society.

The book offers a wide range of methods and practical tools for use by a diverse group of readers: chaplains, other professionals or volunteers, and students in higher education who prepare themselves for spiritual care work in secularizing and pluralizing societies. These methods include such key areas of work as individual counseling, group work, ritual, educational activities, supporting the moral development of individuals, teams, and organizations, conducting research, and doing sociopolitical work. The book fills the meaning gap that secularization has left in Western societies and offers a hopeful perspective for all who strive for a humane and meaningful world.

Preaching Jesus: Postcolonial Approaches (2024)

How can postcolonial approaches make a difference in preaching Jesus? The many postcolonial approaches used in this book will help preachers reinterpret the stories, metaphors, and characters in the Bible and create new images of Jesus rooted in his historical identity as a colonized person. Preaching Jesus with new images that are totally different from the traditional colonial ones, not only challenges listeners to reconsider their individual and communal identities as followers of Jesus, but also provides them with theological and ethical guidance for living out those identities in daily life. Ultimately, preaching Jesus through postcolonial approaches is a prophetic ministry that awakens listeners and their communities to seek reconciliation between colonized and colonizers, and suggests a common ground of faith and hope for the life-enhancing future of all people living in the twenty-first century.

The five chapters of this book employ diverse postcolonial hermeneutical and homiletical methods across a broad disciplinary spectrum. This range includes intersectional and interdisciplinary studies with historical, literary, and cultural approaches, in dialogue with phenomenological philosophy, a postcolonial practical theological method, postcolonial feminist interpretation, postcolonial biblical hermeneutics, and postcolonial intertextuality. All these approaches invite the colonized and their descendants to be conversation partners and reflect their lived experiences in the reimagining the identity of Jesus. Moreover, the theological and homiletical insights gained through such postcolonial approaches will help preachers invite their listeners into a partnership with the triune God in order to participate in God’s reconciling work. The postcolonial approaches used in this book contest the dominance of traditional assumptions and practices of preaching Jesus, and propose a new homiletical paradigm that makes it possible for Christian preaching to contribute to the transformation of our present world into a life lived together in justice and peace, with the new images of Jesus as postcolonial self, postcolonial song, postcolonial child, postcolonial body, and postcolonial friend.

Food Theology: Nourishing Faith in Local Communities (2025)

From biblical times to today, Christ's gospel has gone through real stomachs to nourish people with fullness, fellowship, abundance, and joy. By weaving together scriptural reflection, compelling stories, best practices, and satisfying recipes, Food Theology introduces a gospel-centered food theology and provides a user-friendly "how to" guide for those who want to explore and deepen the role of food in their mission and ministry.

Food Theology invites eaters to a consideration of food itself as a primary communicator of God's love, grace, and sustenance for all creation. While many people know that food is a gift from God, the rich insights of food theology have not been widely shared with congregational audiences and church practitioners in a single, digestible resource. Lisi and Lohrmann draw upon theological grounding and ministry experience to introduce readers to the blessings of intentionally connecting food and faith.

Each chapter of this book provides readers with clear, practical, and adaptable suggestions for how to expand existing food ministries or start new ones. Through easy-to-follow recipes and guides, readers will be able to sense for themselves the exciting possibilities that come with increased attention to local food ministries and eating in community. Food Theology shifts our attention to the transformative power of food, giving readers the knowledge and resources to practice sharing God's goodness.

Asian Christianity and Theology: Inculturation, Interreligious Dialogue, Integral Liberation (2022)

This book provides a comprehensive exploration of Asian Christianity and Theology, with emphasis on how it has developed in different parts of the continent and in the different eras, especially since the end of colonialism in Asia.

Asian Theology refers to a unique way of theological reflection characterized by specific methodologies that evolved in postcolonial Asia. Premised on the thinking of Asian Church leaders and scholars, its focus is on the dialogue with the many cultures (inculturation), many religions (interreligious dialogue), and many poor (integral liberation) of Asia. The book looks at each of these ministries in detail, foregrounding Asian biblical hermeneutics, Christianity’s engagement with Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islam, Asian Women’s Theology, and the rise of Pentecostalism.

The volume is valuable reading for scholars of religious studies, theology, world Christianity, Asian religions, and Asian studies.

Interreligious Dialogue Models from the Life of the Prophet Muhammad (2024)

How did the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) converse and engage with other religious believers? Did he start off with prejudice and mistrust? Or was he convivial and open-minded? This book analyses six models of the dealings in the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), specifically, but not restricted, to the siblings of Abrahamic religious believers.

The six models of dialogue analysed in the book are dialogue with Ashamah, Najashi of Abyssinia, delegation of Najran Christians, different Jews of Yathrib, and emperors of Byzantine and Sassanid. The analysis applies Ibn Khaldun’s (d. 1406) historical approach which the author termed as Khaldunian Hermeneutics due to the similarity between his ideas to that of Johann Gustav Droysen (d. 1884), a German philosopher, in historical hermeneutics. As such, the analysis goes beyond the dialogue content, taking into consideration the immediate and larger contextual settings, and changes of the contexts due to the passage of time. It critically considers the suitability of each model due to the difference in times and contexts.

The book serves as a reference for Muslim dialogue advocates and practitioners, to provide substantial evidence of the dialogue application by the role model of Muslims – the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) whom they hold very dear to their hearts.

Singing through Struggle: Music, Worship, and Identity in the Postemancipaton Black Church (2025)

Singing through Struggle: Music, Worship, and Identity in Postemancipation Black Churches offers an innovative look at the vital role music and worship played in nurturing Black citizenship and identity during the Reconstruction era. In such border cities as Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia, the church was where newly emancipated migrants and members of the free Black community merged identities, priorities, and experiences through a process of cultural negotiation. Music, as a sign of Black achievement and as a genuine expression of identity, produced both bastions and battlegrounds in the fight for democracy.

The music of Black churchgoers, singing together in sanctuaries as well as in homes, schools, and outdoors, expressed resistance to uplift ideologies within and to white supremacy without. Even while using hymns and music of the European sacred tradition, members infused the songs they chose with new meanings relevant to their evolving concerns and situations. Drawing on fresh archival sources, Singing through Struggle sheds light on the unexplored gap in the study of African American religious music between slavery and the Great Migration, demonstrating the continuous stream of Black creativity and dignity that existed in religious music making between gospel music and the spirituals.

This close-up investigation of three Black congregations draws out previously forgotten stories of men and women who understood church music as key to shaping a collective purpose and civic identity. Their stories demonstrate how faith, music, and ritual gave the Black community means for exploring a deeply complex and ever-changing reality.

We Have Plenty: A Womanist Theology of Communical Abundance for the Black Church (2025)

The Black church often maintains an allegiance to white, Western approaches to wealth and material acquisition. In doing so, it can ignore Jesus's teachings on poverty, wealth, and materialism. The church's ambivalence toward Jesus's understandings of poverty and wealth uniquely impacts the spiritual and material well-being of Black women and the Black community. As a womanist theologian, Lorena Parrish argues that the Black church needs a new, liberative way forward.

In We Have Plenty, Parrish traces the history of theologies of prosperity to help scholars and practitioners understand the long-standing appearance of prosperity gospels in the Western church. In doing so, she explores selected sermons and writings of St. Augustine, John Calvin, John Wesley, and Walter Rauschenbusch to show how theologies of prosperity have long been embedded in mainline Christianity, sometimes imperceptibly so. Parrish argues that recognizing these trajectories is critical for the Black church's capacity to foster pathways toward communal liberation and wholeness.

Parrish offers a womanist theology that hearkens to the liberative work of Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm Collective and illumines contemporary initiatives that cultivate pathways toward Black communal abundance. Parrish shows how equipping Black church pastors and community leaders with tools to build similar strategies better positions the church and community, in turn, to promote more equitable human relations and communal asset-building and sharing. We Have Plenty offers a moral imagination for theologians, church leaders, and community activists to envision Black communal abundance and thriving in light of Jesus's teachings.

The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion (2024)

Recent decades have ushered in a profound transformation within the American religious landscape, characterized by an explosion of religious diversification and individualism as well as a rising number of “nones.” The Contemporary Black Church makes the case that the story of this changing religious landscape needs to be told incorporating more data as it applies specifically to African Americans.

Jason E. Shelton draws from survey data as well as interviews with individuals from a wide variety of religious backgrounds to argue that social reforms and the resulting freedoms have paved the way for a pronounced diversification among African Americans in matters of faith. Many African Americans have switched denominational affiliations within the Black Church, others now adhere to historically White traditions, and a record number of African Americans have left organized religion altogether in recent decades. These changing demographics and affiliations are having a real and measurable effect on American politics, particularly as members of the historic Black Church are much more likely than those of other faiths to vote and to strongly support government policies aimed at bridging the racial divide.

Though not the first work to note that African Americans are not monolithic in their religious affiliation, or to argue that there is a trend toward secularism in Black America, this book is the first to substantiate these claims with extensive empirical data, charting these changing dynamics and their ramifications for American society and politics.

Out of Focus: My Story of Sexuality, Shame, and Toxic Evangelicalism (2023)

A blend of heart-wrenching memoir and astute cultural analysis, Out of Focus will help heal individuals harmed by evangelicalism’s toxic influence and inspire Christian communities to pursue a path of love and inclusion.

When a mass shooter killed five people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, grieving people graffitied James Dobson’s Focus on the Family headquarters with the words “Their blood is on your hands.” Such an accusation against evangelicalism comes as no surprise to Amber Cantorna-Wylde, whose father is a Focus on the Family executive and cast Amber out of her family when she came out in 2012.

From severed family ties to hate crimes, such enmity is the fruit of a religious movement that considers it more faithful to reject your child or even to kill than to accept and love LGBTQ+ people. Evangelical organizations like Dobson’s, along with pastors like Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, and Robert Jeffress, built an empire out of their conservative Christian beliefs and convinced millions of Americans that sexual purity, patriarchal families, and militaristic nationalism were God’s priority. Cantorna-Wylde shows readers how the political and personal intertwine to cause shame and suffering that Jesus would never desire, including the long-term effects of identity-repression, trauma, and family estrangement.