First Light: Jesus and the Kingdom of God is a 12-episode DVD study of the historical Jesus and the Kingdom of God with John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, two of the world’s leading Jesus scholars, on location throughout the Galilee and Jerusalem, now available in a Home Edition for personal home viewing.

Join preeminent New Testament scholars Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan on location in Turkey as they trace the Apostle Paul’s footsteps throughout the Roman Empire in Eclipsing Empire Home Edition. This 12-episode DVD program explores fresh insights into Paul’s message of the Kingdom of God, its challenge to Roman imperial theology, and the apostle’s radical relevance for today.

Saving Jesus Redux Home Edition is a 12-episode video exploration of a credible Jesus for the 21st Century. Join 25 experts for a conversation around the relevance of Jesus for today. Already utilized by hundreds of progressive Christian communities, Saving Jesus is now available in a Home Edition licensed for private home viewing. Two DVD discs with twelve 30-minute episodes.

Living the Questions 2.0 Home Edition brings together over thirty highly acclaimed scholars, theologians and other experts in a video exploration of an open, inclusive, broad-minded Christianity. Already utilized by thousands of progressive Christian communities, LtQ2 Home Edition is licensed for private home viewing and includes three DVD discs with twenty-one 20-minute episodes.

Surveys of biblical theology as presented by historians of Christianity soon reveal many and varied types of previous theologies (but no thealogies!), which have been explored and expressed by many thinkers in various schools of thought and practice during the past 2,000 years. In this brief article, my glimpse into the past can only include (1) Revealed Trinitarian Theology, (2) Natural Theology and (3) Deistic Theology.

In this groundbreaking work, John Hick refutes the traditional Christian understanding of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, the divine incarnation, he explains, is best understood metaphorically.

John Hick, an influential theologian and philosopher who died earlier this year, was drawn to issues that transcend any particular tradition—the question of evil, the meaning of suffering, life after death, and religious diversity.

Students of the history and legacy of the West’s Protestant Reformation over its past millennium or thousand-year period can in contrast observe that “RiP” can have another connotation, which implies and express a less peaceful changing of attitudes and chain of events. What emerges is not a single “Reformation” but at least five “Re-formations” or modifications and amendments of attitudes, belief-systems and doctrinal confessions.

The first thing that strikes you when looking atFrequencies is the scope of the project and the breadth of contributions it includes. The breadth of the essays is truly amazing—people, events, places, books, a CD, ideas. The project covers a lot of ground. And just for the pleasure of reading some of these essays, I’m grateful and moved.

Bellah’s grand argument is complex but elegant: social cohesion constitutes, simultaneously, a functional mechanism for group survival and an incubator of more complex forms of social evolution; these various forms of social cohesion, in a certain evolutionary stage of social development, crystallized in institutional “religion”; religion became a generalized means of generating social capacities that increase in every new stage of cultural evolution; failing to develop such patterns (a very real possibility) means the neutralization of the evolutionary process itself; and religion, even in its most domineering forms, entails moral reflexivity and social criticism, based upon the crucial distinction between reciprocal hierarchies and brute exercise of domination.

Are you religious? Your answer will depend a lot on what your questioner meant by the concept of “religion” and how you view this concept.

THE true story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth has never been unfolded to the world, either in the accepted Gospels or in the Apocrypha, although a few stray hints may be found in some of …

The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.
—Albert Einstein The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.
—Steven Weinberg When an interviewer for the Atlantic Monthly blog asked me “What prompted …

To be a progressive Christian involves affirming “God in all things and all things in God.” Progressive theology asserts that we live in a lively, evolving, and visionary universe in which God’s presence touches every moment and every life.

I believe that progressive Christians need to reclaim and redefine the healings of Jesus as part of their embrace of today’s growing movements in global and complementary medicine. Healing can be understood as natural, rather than supernatural, and can involve the transformation of energy in the dynamic interdependence of mind-body-spirit rather than the violation of predictable causal relationships.

Davies does not presuppose students knowledge of biblical text or points of view, and he carefully explains topics such as how New Testament authors selected, edited and embellished sources to address concerns raised by their various communities.

One of the more notable – or should I say “noted”? – deaths during this year just now passing was that of polemicist Christopher Hitchens.