Rita Nakashima Brock

Rebecca Ann Parker

A fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity asks how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, restoring the idea of paradise to its rightful place at the center of Christian thought.

How Christianity Traded Love of this World for Crucifixion and Empire

Saving Paradise

Rebecca Parker was a young minister in Seattle when a woman walked into her church and asked if God really wanted her to accept her husband's beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. Parker knew, at that moment, that if she were to answer the woman's question truthfully she would have to rethink her theology. And she would have to think hard about some of the choices she was making in her own life. When Rita Nakashima Brock was a young child growing up in Kansas, kids taunted her viciously, calling her names like "Chink" or "Jap." She learned to pretend that she did not feel the sting of scorn and the humiliation of contempt. The solitude and silence of her suffering-decreed by both her mother's Japanese culture and her father's Christian heritage-kept the wound alive. It was the gap between knowledge born of personal experience and traditional theology that led Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker to write this emotionally gripping and intellectually rich exploration of the doctrine of the atonement. Using an unusual combination of memoir and theology in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, they lament the inadequacy of how Christian tradition has interpreted the violence that happened to Jesus. Ultimately, they argue, the idea that the death of Jesus on the cross saves us reveals a sanctioning of violence at the heart of Christianity. Brock and Parker draw on a wide array of intimate stories about family violence, the sexual abuse of children, racism, homophobia, and war to reveal how they came to understand the widespread damage being done by this theology. But the authors also undertake their own arduous and unexpected journeys to recover from violence and to assist others to do so. On these journeys they discover communities that begin to give them the strength to question the destructive ideas they have internalized, and the strength to seek out an alternative vision of Christianity, one based on healing and love. Proverbs of Ashes is both a condemnation of bad theology and a passionate search for what truly saves us.

Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us

Proverbs of Ashes

John A. Buehrens

For over a generation now, conservative religion has seemed to be dominant in America. But there are signs of a liberal religious renaissance. For it to flourish, laypeople need a sense of their theological heritage. A House for Hope lays out, in lively and engaging language, the theological house that religious liberalism has inherited—and suggests how this heritage will need to be spiritually and theologically transformed. With chapters that suggest liberal religious commitment is based on common hopes rather than adherence to religious creeds, ask why human beings gather in communities with spiritual goals in the first place, discuss the importance of social and cultural context, and seek a Spirit that moves within us and among us, A House for Hope will provide religious liberals not only a theological but also a spiritual foundation for the years ahead.

The Promise of Progressive Religion for the Twenty-first Century

A House for Hope

Rebecca Parker was a young minister in Seattle when a woman walked into her church and asked if God really wanted her to accept her husband's beatings and bear them gladly, as Jesus bore the cross. Parker knew, at that moment, that if she were to answer the woman's question truthfully she would have to rethink her theology. And she would have to think hard about some of the choices she was making in her own life. When Rita Nakashima Brock was a young child growing up in Kansas, kids taunted her viciously, calling her names like "Chink" or "Jap." She learned to pretend that she did not feel the sting of scorn and the humiliation of contempt. The solitude and silence of her suffering-decreed by both her mother's Japanese culture and her father's Christian heritage-kept the wound alive. It was the gap between knowledge born of personal experience and traditional theology that led Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker to write this emotionally gripping and intellectually rich exploration of the doctrine of the atonement. Using an unusual combination of memoir and theology in the tradition of Augustine's Confessions, they lament the inadequacy of how Christian tradition has interpreted the violence that happened to Jesus. Ultimately, they argue, the idea that the death of Jesus on the cross saves us reveals a sanctioning of violence at the heart of Christianity. Brock and Parker draw on a wide array of intimate stories about family violence, the sexual abuse of children, racism, homophobia, and war to reveal how they came to understand the widespread damage being done by this theology. But the authors also undertake their own arduous and unexpected journeys to recover from violence and to assist others to do so. On these journeys they discover communities that begin to give them the strength to question the destructive ideas they have internalized, and the strength to seek out an alternative vision of Christianity, one based on healing and love. Proverbs of Ashes is both a condemnation of bad theology and a passionate search for what truly saves us. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Rebecca Ann Parker

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