Description: This volume provides a collection of prayers and artwork based on the New Testament texts, inviting readers to join in the Spirit's moving through words, figures, and colors. Yeo and Matheny offer this resource to worship leaders, those interested in spirituality, prayers, and artistic expressions of the New Testament. The process of praying and painting the New Testament allows the Spirit to intercede for God's will in the world and incarnate peace in our lives that surpasses all understanding. Endorsements: ""Yeo, ably matched by Claire Matheny, lets the text surge into contemporary life with its ample measure of loss and pain, of wonder and possibility. The 'connect' that the Spirit makes between Scripture and contemporary faith is accomplished in the rich and daring utterance of prayer. The author has probed deeply into the human condition and lets it intersect with the biblical text in compelling ways. The book is a model for the interaction that faith and culture must always undertake anew, an interaction that at its best evokes human dignity among us. The interplay of utterance and image in this volume make for a powerful invitation."" --Walter Brueggemann, author of Praying the Psalms, 2nd ed. ""In The Spirit Intercedes: The New Testament in Prayers and Images, K. K. Yeo brings together his excellence as a New Testament scholar with his lively Christian faith to craft inspiring prayers for biblically literate Christians. The prayers, which draw richly on biblical narratives and imagery, will lead those who pray them more deeply into Scripture. They are appropriate both for Bible study and for worship. Dr. Yeo's book, enriched by evocative pictures by Claire Matheny, is an important contribution to the spiritual tradition of praying the Scriptures."" --Ruth Duck, Professor of Worship, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary About the Contributor(s): K. K. Yeo is Harry R. Kendall Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary and Visiting Professor at Peking University. He is the author of Musing with Confucius and Paul. S. Claire Matheny is a Chaplain Resident in the Clinical Pastoral Education Program at The Johns Hopkins Hospital. From designing bulletin covers at an early age to her present prayer journaling, Claire has long sought to enliven art through faith.

Description: The book is a manifesto or apologia for Chinese Christians. It seeks to articulate how it is possible to maintain a Chinese identity and a Christian identity at the same time without capitulating to some western or other cultural model of Christian identity. To be a Chinese Christian is to adopt a distinctive, unique identity that owes much to both traditions but is sui generis. Providing great resources for the construction of a Chinese Christian theology, Confucius and Paul converge across a surprisingly broad front. Yet, the Christ of the Cross completes or extends what is merely implicit or absent in Confucius; and Confucius amplifies various elements of Christian faith (e.g., community, virtues) that are underplayed in western Christianity. The Christ of God as found in Paul's letter to the Galatians brings Confucian ethics in the Analects to its fulfillment while protecting the church from the aberrations of Chinese history and while protecting China against the aberrations of Christian history in the west. Chinese Christianity has something to give the church that needs to be heard. China can develop its distinctive vision of Christianity for the sake of the church universal. Chinese Christianity will have its global mission if it can find its own authentic Chinese-Christian identity. Insofar as that identity brings the best of the Confucian tradition into the Christian story, it will help revivify global Christianity. Endorsements: ""This brilliant book confronts two fundamental challenges for culture and faith in the globalizing world of the twenty-first century: how can the Chinese honor their rich Confucian heritage yet be transformed by Jesus Christ? And how can the church universal be reformed through its encounter with a Chinese Christian theology? Yeo's immensely creative juxtaposition of core Confucian concepts with key elements of Christian theology persuade us that Chinese Christians must not jettison in toto their Chineseness . . . Yeo writes with a sociological sensibility that infuses the entire volume and engages the most vexing social problems of our time. He offers wonderfully nuanced and evocative theological reflections on the self, trust, social identity, civil society, social harmony, inequality, and political domination. Read this book imaginatively . . ."" --TERENCE C. HALLIDAY Co-Director, Center on Law and Globalization ""With his expertise in Paul and Confucius, K.-K. Yeo has produced a brilliant inter-textual study of Galatians and the Analects. By putting these two works in dialogue with each other, he illuminates each in fresh ways by mutual interpretation, enhancement, and correction. Through autobiographical reflection, he combines the complementary strengths of both writings to forge a creative and innovative Chinese-Christian theology. The result is a profoundly liberating vision of communal life in which unity does not compromise difference as a blessing. Yeo models for all of us the truly cross-cultural nature of all interpretation. Scholars, pastors, students, and general readers will find this volume to be a fascinating and worthwhile study."" --DAVID RHOADS The Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago About the Contributor(s): K. K. Yeo is Harry R. Kendall Professor of New Testament at Garrett-Evangelical Seminary, an advisory faculty member of the Graduate School of Northwestern University, and a Visiting Professor of Peking University. He is the author of Rhetorical Interaction in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10 (1995), What Has Jerusalem to Do with Beijing? (1998), and Chairman Mao Meets the Apostle Paul (2002). He is also the editor of Navigating Romans through Cultures (2004).

The apostle Paul was a cross-cultural missionary, a Hellenistic Jew who sought to be "all things to all people" in order to win them to the gospel. In this provocative book Charles Cosgrove, Herold Weiss, and K. K. Yeo bring Paul into conversation with six diverse cultures of today: Argentine/Uruguayan, Anglo-American, Chinese, African American, Native American, and Russian. No other book on the apostle Paul looks at his thought from multiple cultural perspectives in the way that this one does. From the introduction outlining the authors' cultural backgrounds to the conclusion drawing together what they learn from each other, "Cross-Cultural Paul" orients readers to the hermeneutical struggles and rewards of approaching texts cross-culturally.

Navigating Romans Through Cultures contains eight chapters of critical and contextualized readings of Paul's letter to the Romans by scholars from Europe, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Asia. It provides an interpretive voyage into how the gospel of Paul, as contained in his letter to the Romans, fulfills its original vision of "making known the gospel of Christ in all nations" (Rom 16:26). The challenge of the contributors is to express Paul's gospel in terms of their own cultures. The book is the latest installment in the Romans Through History and Culture series, edited by Daniel Patte and Cristina Grenholm. This journey around the world took no less than four years. Each contributor is familiar with the culture they worked with, since many lived in that culture. Each "travel-log" is not just a report of how we steer the ship (letter to the Romans) through the water of a particular culture (or a sea of cultures for many of us); it is also a life changing critical reflection on our reading and interpretative process. Thus charting a new course involves more than offering new ways of reading Romans; it also involves clarifying the rationales for this new reading, in the light of the contextual, analytical, and hermeneutical frames of Scripture Criticism. In their challenging readings of Romans, the contributors have wrestled with: x an understanding of culture; x the cultural background and mission of Paul; x cultural and theological conflicts in the letter of Paul to the Romans; x cultural interpretations of Paul; x and navigating equipments in steering Romans through cultures. Contributors include Florin T. Cimpean; Herold O. Weiss; Jonathan A. Draper; Gerald O. West; Mark D. Baker; J. Ross Wagner; James D. G. Dunn; Juan Escarfuller; Elsa Tamez; Monya A. Stubbs; Kathy Ehrensperger; Daniel C. Arichea, Jr; Douglas A. Campbell; Revelation Enriquez Velunt; Troy A. Martin; Brian K. Blount; Charles H. Cosgrove; K.K. Yeo