Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers by Shane Claiborne, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

From the Publisher

Activists Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove show how prayer and action must go together. Their exposition of key Bible passages provides concrete examples of how a life of prayer fuels social engagement and the work of justice.

Publishers Weekly

This latest publication from the new monasticism movement is the third book each for the two young Christian activist-authors, and it offers fresh insight on the well-worn topic of prayer. Some themes are repeated from earlier works, but the book deftly succeeds in drawing the reader out of the weeds of daily life and into a more spacious field. The text is structured around three New Testament prayers: the Lord's Prayer, Christ's intercessory prayer in Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John and Paul's prayer in the first chapter of Ephesians. From the very first pronoun of the familiar Lord's Prayer ("our"), the authors extract a compelling sermon on the power and centrality of community in Christian life and thought. The dominant theme-that prayer invites human beings into a partnership with God in answering prayer-is enlivened with earthy tales from the authors' own lives, wrenching stories of service and redemption from the people they know and lesser-known anecdotes from Christian history and sociology. Readers will never see prayer or community in quite the same way again. (Oct.)

Graham Christian - Library Journal

Sometimes spiritual writers make their mark by demystifying the mystical. Warner's (Hardcore Zen) effort goes beyond rendering Zen Buddhism itself accessible to showing how his own unglamorous and knockabout life indicates that special reverence for Zen "masters" is misplaced. Becoming the Answer is by two Christian activists whose work, together and separately, emphasizes the radical and communitarian aspects of Jesus's message; along the way, they offer new insights into the Lord's Prayer, John 17, and Ephesians 1:15-23.

Fatica, the controversial speaker and focus of the HBO documentary Hard as Nails, espouses a more athletic, theologically conventional Christianity in his ministry. His is an evangelical Catholicism with a hectoring overtone that reinvents "muscular Christianity" for today's adolescents. Here he mixes memoir, story, example, and anecdote to drive his message of heart-conversion home. All are for most collections.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents