In its various forms, speech is integral to Christian mission. The gospel is a message, news that must be passed on if it is to be known by others. Nevertheless, the reality of God cannot be exhausted by Christian knowledge, and Christian knowledge cannot be exhausted by our words. All the while, the philosophy of modernity has left Christianity an impoverished inheritance within which to think these things. In 'Speak Thus', Craig Hovey explores the possibilities and limits of Christian speaking. At times ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical, these essays go to the heart of what it means to be the church today. In practice, the Christian life often has a linguistic shape that surprisingly implicates and reveals the commitments of people like those who care for the sick or those who respond as peacemakers in the face of violence. Because learning to speak in one way as opposed to another is a skill that must be learned, Christian speakers are also guides who bear witness to the importance of churches for passing on a felicity with Christian ways of speaking. Through engagements with interlocutors like Ludwig Wittgenstein, George Lindbeck, Jeffrey Stout, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Thomas Aquinas, and the theology of Radical Orthodoxy, Hovey offers a challenging vision of the church able to speak with confidence that comes from deep attentiveness to its own limitations, while also able to speak prophetically in a world weary of words. Craig Hovey offers us a book of Christian manners. Just as manners are the skills and practices we require to be at home in social contexts, so Hovey shows how the gospel equips us to be at home wherever God s mission takes us, because we are always at home with the Lord. Hovey maintains Christians have not been told what to say, but have instead been shown how to speak. In this book he continues his emergence as a profound and penetrating scrutiniser of what it means to speak, witness, and confess the Christian faith. This book is a masterclass in learning to speak simple truth amid a cacophony of contemporary cleverness. Canon Sam Wells, Dean of Chapel, Duke University; Research Professor of Christian Ethics Hovey s finely crafted collection of essays both persuasive and contentious combines great clarity with nuance. Apparently opposed positions are shown to share common presuppositions, with Hovey frequently providing an alternative positive conception or perspective. In an un-showy but impressive way, Hovey s writing is richly informed by the tradition and practices to which he is committed. The voice that emerges is passionate, urgent, and wry. Christopher Insole, Department of Theology, Durham University CRAIG R. HOVEY (PhD, Cambridge) teaches religion and ethics at the University of Redlands and Fuller Theological Seminary Extension in Southern California.

An Eerdmans Reader in Contemporary Political Theology gathers some of the most significant and influential writings in political theology from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Given that the locus of Christianity is undeniably shifting to the global South, this volume uniquely integrates key voices from Africa, Asia, and Latin America with central texts from Europe and North America on such major subjects as church and state, gender and race, and Christendom and postcolonialism. Carefully selected, thematically arranged, and expertly introduced, these forty-nine essential readings constitute an ideal primary-source introduction to contemporary political theology -- a profoundly relevant resource for globally engaged citizens, students, and scholars. CONTRIBUTORS: Nicholas Adams Rafael Avila Karl Barth Richard Bauckham Dietrich Bonhoeffer Walter Brueggemann Ernesto Cardenal J. Kameron Carter James H. Cone Dorothy Day Musa W. Dube Jean Bethke Elshtain Eric Gregory Gustavo Guti rrez Stanley Hauerwas George Hunsinger Ada Mar a Isasi-Diaz Emmanuel M. Katongole Rafiq Khoury Kosuke Koyama Brian McDonald Johann Baptist Metzv Virgil Michel N stor O. Miguez John Milbank John Courtney Murray Ched Myers H. Richard Niebuhr Reinhold Niebuhr Arvind P. Nirmal Oliver O'Donovan Catherine Pickstock Kwok Pui-lan A. Maria Arul Raja Walter Rauschenbusch Joerg Rieger Christopher Rowland Rosemary Radford Ruether Alexander Schmemann Carl Schmitt Peter Manley Scott Jon Sobrino Dorothee Solle R. S. Sugirtharajah Elsa Tamez Mark Lewis Taylor Emilie M. Townes Desmond Tutu Bernd Wannenwetsch Graham Ward George Weigel Delores S. Williams Rowan Williams Walter Wink John Howard Yoder Kim Yong-Bock

How can Christians live with a surprising God? How can we know and trust God without taming God or reducing God to an idol? Is knowing God the same thing as being open to God? Is God's freedom to act independently of our knowing him actually how we know him most genuinely and deeply? In Unexpected Jesus, Craig Hovey explores in depth the idea that the Christian gospel is a surprising encounter that calls for people to risk living with a God who shows up in unexpected ways. The Gospels often portray Jesus Christ as elusive and difficult to grasp. Hovey helps the reader to "un-expect" Jesus--to preserve Jesus's reality as a surprise rooted in the resurrection. As living and free, the joyous presence of Christ in the world is also unfathomable and uncontainable. Jesus's being free and surprising--unexpected--strengthens Christians' trust in God and helps them to live in God's world.

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD is an adult and child neurologist who has made "disease" (brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) vs. "no disease" (emotional, psychiatric) diagnoses daily and has discovered and described real diseases. Herein he describes the difference between psychiatry/psychology, on the one hand, and neurology and all organic medicine, on the other, and why ADHD and all of psychiatry's "chemical imbalances" are not diseases at all--but fraud. Referring to psychiatry, he states: "They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive-termed them" diseases"/ "chemical imbalances" each needing/requiring a "chemical balancer"- a pill." In 1970, when "hyperactivity"/"minimal brain damage" (forerunners of ADHD) was first represented to Congress to be a brain disease, only 150,000 had it. Today, not by science or truth, but the "big lie" -saying it is a disease often enough, 6 million have it! Nor is ADHD the only "chemical imbalance." They give us conduct disorder (CD), oppositional-defiant disorder (ODD), major depressive disorder (MDD), OCD, PTSD, GAD, SAD, etc., a total of 374 psychiatric disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV-TR) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), said to be "chemical imbalances" needing "chemical balancers" --pills! In 2003 Congressional hearings it was said that 17% of the nation's school children, 8.8 million, were labeled and drugged by psychiatry. Today it is 20%; one in five; over 10 million! How better to sew the seeds of our own destruction? As if this were not enough, the President's New Freedom Commission onMental Health is set to foist compulsory, government-mandated, mental health screening on all 52 million US schoolchildren. When normal people are lied to, told they have a "disease" to make "patients" of them, their right to informed consent has been abrogated and they no longer live in a democracy. When, pursuant to that lie, they are drugged, what we have is not "treatment" but poisoning. This is the greatest health care fraud in modern medical history.