Holiness and hedonism. Lonesomeness and community. Tradition and progress. Highly regarded commentator on Christianity and popular culture Rodney Clapp argues that these great tensions form the bedrock of American history and our current culture. Utilizing the life and music of Johnny Cash to illustrate these and other American contradictions, he probes these phenomena with sharp theological questions--seeking the language and knowledge that will enable us to reach across political and cultural divides and encourage a more graceful and constructive negotiation of current contradictions.

Voted one of Christianity Today's 1997 Books of the Year Christians feel increasingly useless, argues Rodney Clapp, not because we have nothing to offer a post-Christian society, but because we are trying to serve as "sponsoring chaplains" to a civilization that no longer sees Christianity as necessary to its existence. In our individualistic, technologically oriented, consumer-based culture, Christianity has become largely irrelevant. The solution is not to sentimentally capitulate to the way things are. Nor is it to retrench in an effort to regain power and influence as the sponsor of Western civilization. What is needed is for Christians to reclaim our heritage as a peculiar people, as unapologetic followers of the Way. Within the larger pluralistic world, we need to become a sanctified, subversive culture that develops Christian community as a truly alternative way of life. Christians must learn to live the story and not just to restate it. Writing inclusively with considerable verve, Clapp offers a keen analysis of the church and its ministry as we face a new millennium.

"Scant decades ago most Westerners agreed that . . . Lifelong monogamy was ideal . . . Mothers should stay home with children . . . premarital sex was to be discouraged . . . Heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm . . . popular culture should not corrupt children. Today not a single one of these expectations is uncontroversial." So writes Rodney Clapp in assessing the status of the family in postmodern Western society. In response many evangelicals have been quick to defend the so-called traditional family, assuming that it exemplifies the biblical model. Clapp challenges that assumption, arguing that the "traditional" family is a reflection more of the nineteenth-century middle-class family than of any family one can find in Scripture. At the same time, he recognizes that many modern and postmodern options are not acceptable to Christians. Returning to the biblical story afresh to see what it might say to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Clapp articulates a challenge to both sides of a critical debate. A book to help us rethink the significance of the family for the next century.

A message to stir the embers of a dying faith. Given the number of people who’ve been “saved,� you’d think the world was becoming a brighter place. It could be, too, if more people would grasp the joy of losing themselves in service to God and each other. People like Christoph Blumhardt, who, in his quest to get to the essentials of faith, burns away the religious trappings of modern piety like so much chaff. Blumhardt writes with unabashed fervor, but his passion encourages rather than intimidates. His witness influenced theological giants like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth. But Action in Waiting is not theology; it is too blunt, too earthy, too real. Its “active expectation� of God’s kingdom shows us that the object of our hope is not relegated to some afterlife. Today, in our world, it can come into its own – if only we are ready.