New Library Books in Theology

Title God With Us: Divine Condescension and the Attributes of God
Author K. Scott Oliphint
Publisher Crossway
Call Number BT103.O39 2012
Synopsis from Publisher

For the Christian mind seeking to understand the nature of God, one fundamental paradox poses a philosophical stumbling block: how can God be both a wholly independent, eternal being yet also an interactive force in the temporal plane of creation? The desire to harmonize God's actions and his attributes has challenged laymen and scholars through the ages. In God With Us, K. Scott Oliphint finds an answer in the person of Jesus Christ incarnate-the manifestation of God and the cornerstone of creation. Where other theological efforts view the study of Jesus as simply one branch of a systematic approach, Oliphint puts a primary focus on the understanding of the Son of God as both the quintessential revelation of God's character and the explanation of how he relates to us. This book leads the reader to think biblically about who God is and how he in his eminence can condescend to us in our finite surroundings. Oliphint's unique approach to the attributes of God will appeal to anyone desiring a biblical perspective on God's nature, whether for academic reasons or personal advancement.

Title The Trinitarian Theology of Jonathan Edwards: Text, Context, and Application
Author Steven M. Studebaker & Robert W. Caldwell III
Publisher Ashgate
Call Number BT109.S748 2011
Synopsis from Publisher

While Jonathan Edwards scholars have increasingly recognized the central role that the Trinity played in his thought, no work brings together Edwards' central texts on the Trinity and interprets and applies them to contemporary theological issues.This book reveals how the doctrine of the Trinity transformed Edwards' ministry and how the Trinity can inform current evangelical thought, life, and ministry. Key primary texts, interpretation, and application of Edwards' trinitarian theology are all presented here. Part one features Edwards' chief trinitarian writings and provides an in-depth analysis on his doctrine. Part two sets Edwards' trinitarianism in historical context. Part three demonstrates how Edwards employed the Trinity in his sermons, in spiritual formation, and in other areas of doctrine.

 

Title The Way of Jesus: To Repair and Renew the World
Author Bruce Chilton
Publisher Abingson
Call Number BT205.C49 2010
Synopsis from Publisher
The way of Jesus means that despite our tears and scars, we can become vessels of divine light. A young man loses his wife while their babyescapes without injury. In abject grief he reaches out to a friend for solace. Whatwords of comfort are even possible? How can Jesus repair and renew these lives inthis world Author Bruce Chilton begins in the everyday. Heshows how following Jesus not only repairs shattered lives, but renews them. Whileno broken life is ever simply reassembled and although there is no magic going backto the pristine, repair and renewal will empower us to truly live and love again. But our path requires something from us--mindful practice of Jesus' teachings aboutthe soul, spirit, kingdom, insight, forgiveness, mercy, and glory.

Title Christian Peace and Nonviolence: A Documentary History
Author Michael G. Long, Ed.
Publisher Orbis
Call Number BT735.4.C443 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
From the Sermon on the Mount to the twenty-first century, this comprehensive reader recounts the Christian message of peace and nonviolence. Through testimony by the confessors and martyrs of the early church, the voices of medieval figures like St. Benedict and St. Francis, as well as Erasmus, Lollards, Anabaptists, and Quakers abolitionists, Christian Peace and Nonviolence presents a coherent story in which the peace message of Jesus is restored to central place. Later sections highlight many of the great prophets of modern times, including Tolstoy, Dorothy Day, A.J. Muste, Thomas Merton, Daniel Berrigan, and Oscar Romero. Their challenge remains timely and urgent. As John Haynes Holmes observed, "If war is right then Christianity is false, a lie." Christian Peace and Nonviolence is not only intellectually compelling but also inspirational. It is more than a reference work. It is a witness

Title The Age of Doubt: Tracing the Roots of Our Religious Uncertainty
Author Christopher Lane
Publisher Yale
Call Number  BT771.3.L35 2011
Synopsis from Publisher

The Victorian era was the first great “Age of Doubt” and a critical moment in the history of Western ideas. Leading nineteenth-century intellectuals battled the Church and struggled to absorb radical scientific discoveries that upended everything the Bible had taught them about the world. In The Age of Doubt, distinguished scholar Christopher Lane tells the fascinating story of a society under strain as virtually all aspects of life changed abruptly.
In deft portraits of scientific, literary, and intellectual icons who challenged the prevailing religious orthodoxy, from Robert Chambers and Anne Brontë to Charles Darwin and Thomas H. Huxley, Lane demonstrates how they and other Victorians succeeded in turning doubt from a religious sin into an ethical necessity.
The dramatic adjustment of Victorian society has echoes today as technology, science, and religion grapple with moral issues that seemed unimaginable even a decade ago. Yet the Victorians’ crisis of faith generated a far more searching engagement with religious belief than the “new atheism” that has evolved today. More profoundly than any generation before them, the Victorians came to view doubt as inseparable from belief, thought, and debate, as well as a much-needed antidote to fanaticism and unbridled certainty. By contrast, a look at today’s extremes—from the biblical literalists behind the Creation Museum to the dogmatic rigidity of Richard Dawkins’s atheism—highlights our modern-day inability to embrace doubt.

New Library Books in Education

Title Feel-Bad Education : And Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling
Author Alfie Kohn
Publisher Beacon
Call Number LA217.2.K64 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
Arguing that our schools are currently in the grip of a “cult of rigor”—a confusion of harder with better that threatens to banish both joy and meaningful intellectual inquiry from our classrooms—Alfie Kohn issues a stirring call to rethink our priorities and reconsider our practices.

Kohn’s latest wide-ranging collection of writings will add to his reputation as one of the most incisive thinkers in the field, who questions the assumptions too often taken for granted in discussions about education and human behavior.
Title Does God Make a Difference?  Taking Religion Seriously in our Schools and Universities
Author Warren A. Nord
Publisher Oxford
Call NumberLB1027.N67 2010
Synopsis from Publisher
In this provocative book Warren A. Nord argues that public schools and universities leave the vast majority of students religiously illiterate. Such education is not religiously neutral, a matter of constitutional importance; indeed, it borders on secular indoctrination when measured against the requirements of a good liberal education and the demands of critical thinking.

Title Schools for All Kinds of Minds: Boosting Student Success by Embracing Learning Variation
Author Mary-Deen Barringer
Publisher Jossey-Bass
Call Number LB1051.B2494
Synopsis from Publisher
This book shows how schools can--and must--develop expertise in "learning variation" (understanding how different kinds of minds learn) and apply this knowledge to classroom instruction in order to address the chronic learning challenges and achievement gap faced by millions of students. Barringer shows how using what we know about learning variation with a focus on discovering learning strengths, not just deficits, can help schools create plans for success for those students who often find it elusive. The book specifically addresses how school leaders can incorporate this knowledge into instructional practice and school-level policy through various professional development strategies.  

Title Tyranny of the Textbook: An Insider Exposes how Educational Materials Undermine Reforms
Author Beverlee Jobrack
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Call Number  LB3047.J64 2012
Synopsis from Publisher
Educational reforms and standards have been a topic of public debate for decades, with the latest go-round being the State Common Core Curriculum Standards. But time and again those reforms have failed, and each set of standards, no matter how new and different, has had little impact on improving student achievement. Why? The textbooks. Textbooks sell based on design and superficial features, not because they are based on the latest research on how children learn and how well they promote student achievement. In Tyranny of the Textbook,

New Library Books in Business and Economics

Title Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Author Richare P. Rumelt
Publisher Crown Business
Call Number HD30.28.R854 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official. Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” He debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.”

Title Real Leadership: How Spiritual Values Give Leadership Meaning
Author Gilbert W. Fairholm
Publisher Praeger
Call Number HD57.7.F3523 2011
Synopsis fro Publisher

Aperson's values are the most powerful factor defining his or her actions; everyone has a value system or a spiritual component that triggers their behaviour. Our personal values are a more powerful force upon individual action than corporate policy, procedures, tradition or peer pressure. Since the work environment is where the typical worker will spend the most time - more than at home with family, with friends, or at church - it is reasonable that workers will have spiritual demands as well as eco Real Leadership argues that values-based (i.e. spiritual-leadership) is the only way to do leadership in today's globalized, multi-differentiated world. The author traces the development of real leadership through five generations of theory, then builds a strong case for the values leadership strategy because of its ability to unify workersż and because it allows them to find personal meaning in the workplace task at hand. Details correct at time of going to print and subject to change without notice nomic needs from their work lives. Unfortunately, this is a task managers are not prepared to meet

 

Title Corporate culture: The Ultimate Strategic Asset
Author Eric G. Flamholtz & Yvonne Randle
Publisher /Stanford
Call Number HD58.7.F585 2011
Synopsis from publisher
Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive.

Title More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting
Author Thomas A. King
PublisherWiley
Call Number HF5616.U5 K53 2006
Synopsis from Publisher
The world certainly suffers no shortage of accounting texts. The many out there help readers prepare, audit, interpret and explain corporate financial statements. What has been missing is a book offering context and discussion for divisive issues such as taxes, debt, options, and earnings volatility. King addresses the why of accounting instead of the how, providing practitioners and students with a highly readable history of U.S. corporate accounting. More Than a Numbers Game: A Brief History of Accounting was inspired by Arthur Levitt's landmark 1998 speech delivered at New York University. The Securities and Exchange Commission chairman described the too-little challenged custom of earnings management and presaged the breakdown in the US corporate accounting three years later.
Somehow, over a one-hundred year period, accounting morphed from a tool used by American railroad managers to communicate with absent British investors into an enabler of corporate fraud. How this happened makes for a good business story. This book is not another description of accounting scandals. Instead it offers a history of ideas.


Title The Accountant's guide to the Universe: Heaven and Hell by the Numbers
Author Craig Hovey
Publisher St. Martin's Press
Call Number HF5636.H68 2010
Synopsis from Publisher

This is an entertaining book on accounting written for a general audience. It opens with a wild premise: Heaven and Hell have been outsourced to a giant company in a distant galaxy and they are now in charge of determining who goes where after death. The entire universe is scoured for an objective system that can be adapted to the task, and it is found, in the form of accounting, in the least civilized backwater of the universe, Earth! The book is also a morality tale. It demonstrates how financial scandals (a la Bernie Madoff and many others) can be pulled off with "creative accounting," and how much a person adds or subtracts from the universe by their actions. Written for anybody who has taken an accounting class, practices it for a living, or is simply interested in seeing how a system designed to record finances can also be used to judge the entire universe will be enlightened by this book.

New Library Books in Art

Title Bernini: His Life and His Rome
Author Franco Mormando
Publisher University of Chicago Press
Call NumberNB623.B5 M57 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the Baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists.

Title Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter A life
Author Patrica Albers
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Call Number ND237.M53 A85 2011
Synopsis excerpts from Publisher
“Gee, Joan, if only you were French and male and dead.” —New York art dealer to Joan Mitchell, the 1950s
Joan Mitchell is the first full-scale biography of the abstract expressionist painter who came of age in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s; a portrait of an outrageous artist and her struggling artist world, painters making their way in the second part of America’s twentieth century.

Title Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome
Author David Franklin and Sebastian Schutze
Publisher Yale
Call Number ND623.C265 A4 2011
Synopsis from publisher
The Italian artist Caravaggio (1571-1610) had a profound impact on a wide range of baroque painters of Italian, French, Dutch, Flemish, and Spanish origin who resided in Rome either during his lifetime or immediately afterward. This captivating book illustrates the notion of "Caravaggism," showcasing 65 works by Peter Paul Rubens and other important artists of the period who drew inspiration from Caravaggio. Also depicted are Caravaggio canvases that fully exhibit his distinctive style, along with ones that had a particularly discernible impact on other practitioners.

Title Modigliani
Author Meryle Secrest
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Call NumberND623.M67 S43 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso.

New Library Books in Literature

The Synopsis is removed to accommodate more titles.

Title The Oxford Handbook of Children's Literature
Author Julia L. Mickenberg & Lynne Vallone, Eds.
Publisher Oxford
Call Number PR990.O94 2011

Title Beowulf: And Other Old English Poems
Author Craig Williamson, Ed.
Publisher University of Pennsylvania
Call Number PR1583.W55 2011

Title Verdi's Shakespeare: Men of the Theater
Author Garry Wills
Publisher  Viking
Call Number PR2880.V4 W56 2011

Title Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God
Author Ralphg C. Wood
Publisher Baylor University Press
Call Number PR4453.C4 Z885 2011

Title Dickens: His Parables, and His Reader
Author Linda M. Lewis
Publisher University of Missouri
Call Number PR4592.B5 L49 2011

Title T.S. Eliot in Context
Author Jason Harding, Ed.
Publisher Cambridge
Call Number PS3509.L43 Z87256 2011

Title Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961
Author Paul Hendrickson
Publisher Alfred A. Knopf
Call Number PS3515.Z628 2011

Title The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love
Author: Fritz Oehlschlager
Publisher University of Kentucky
Call Number:  PS3552.E75 Z79 2011

Title Higher Gossip: Essays and Criticism
Author John Updike
Publisher Knopf
Call Number PS3571.P4 A6 2011

Five New Library Books in Church History

Title: The Unintended Reformation: How a Religiouis Revolution Secularized Society
Author Brad S. Gregory
Publisher Harvard
Call Number BL2747.8.G74 2012
Synopsis from Publisher
In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.

Title:  The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America
Author Steven K. Green
Publisher Oxford
Call Number BR516.G65 2010
Synopsis from Publisher

Debates over the proper relationship between church and state in America tend to focus either on the founding period or the twentieth century. Left undiscussed is the long period between the ratification of the Constitution and the 1947 Supreme Court ruling inEverson v. Board of Education,which mandated that the Establishment Clause applied to state and local governments. Steven Green illuminates this neglected period, arguing that during the 19th century there was a "second disestablishment." By the early 1800s, formal political disestablishment was the rule at the national level, and almost universal among the states. Yet the United States remained a Christian nation, and Protestant beliefs and values dominated American culture and institutions. Evangelical Protestantism rose to cultural dominance through moral reform societies and behavioral laws that were undergirded by a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law. Simultaneously, law became secularized, religious pluralism increased, and the Protestant-oriented public education system was transformed. This latter impulse set the stage for the constitutional disestablishment of the twentieth century. The Second Disestablishmentexamines competing ideologies: of evangelical Protestants who sought to create a "Christian nation," and of those who advocated broader notions of separation of church and state. Green shows that the second disestablishment is the missing link between the Establishment Clause and the modern Supreme Court's church-state decisions.

Title: The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts
Author Margot E. Fassler
Publisher Yale
Call Number BR848.C47 2010
Synopsis from Publisher

Medieval Christians knew the past primarily through what they saw and heard. History was reenacted every year in ritual observances particular to each place and region and rooted in the legends of local saints.This richly illustrated book explores the layers of history found in the cult of the Virgin of Chartres as it developed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Focusing on the major relic of Chartres Cathedral, the Virgin’s gown, and the Feast of Mary's Nativity, Margot Fassler employs a wide range of historical evidence including local histories, letters, obituaries, chants, liturgical sources, and reports of miracles, leading to a detailed reading of the cathedral's west façade. This interdisciplinary volume will prove invaluable to historians who work in religion, politics, music, and art but will also serve as a guidebook for all interested in the history of Chartres Cathedral.

Title: Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China
Author Lian Xi
Publisher Yale
Call Number BR 1288.L55 2010
Synopsis from publisher
This book is the first to address the history and future of homegrown, mass Chinese Christianity. Drawing on a large collection of fresh sources—including contemporaneous accounts, diaries, memoirs, archival material, and interviews—Lian Xi traces the transformation of Protestant Christianity in twentieth-century China from a small, beleaguered “missionary” church buffeted by antiforeignism to an indigenous popular religion energized by nationalism and millenarianism. Lian shows that, with a current membership that rivals that of the Chinese Communist Party, and the ability to galvanize China’s millions into apocalyptic convulsion and messianic exuberance, the popular Christian movement channels the aspirations and the discontent of the masses and will play an important role in shaping the country’s future

Title: From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism
Author D.G. Hart
Publisher Eerdmans
Call Number BR 1642.U5 H3745 2011
Synopsis from Publisher
 From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin provides an iconoclastic new history of the entrance of evangelical Christians into national American politics. Examining the key players of the Religious Right Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Chuck Colson, James Dobson, Pat Robertson, and many others D. G. Hart argues that evangelicalism is (and always has been) a bad fit with classic political conservatism.

New Library Books in Science and Medicine

In order to show more new books, the synopsis section has been removed. 

Title: The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World
Author Laura J. Snyder
Publisher Broadway Books
Call Number Q141.S5635 2011

Title: The Book of Universes: Exploring the Limits of the Cosmos
Author John D. Barrow
Publisher Norton
Call Number QB981.B2796 2011

Title: The Quantum Story: A History in 40 moments
Author Jim Baggott
Publisher Oxford
Call Number QC173.98.B34 2011

Title: Roald Hoffmann on the Philosophy, Art, and Science of Chemistry
Author Jeffrey Kovac & Michael Weisberg, Eds.
Publisher Oxford
Call Number QD6 .H64 2012

Title: Pox: An American History
Author Michael Willrich
Publisher Penguin Press
Call Number RA644.S6 W55 2011

Title: Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America
Author Sara Dubow
Publisher Oxford
Call Number RG600.D33 2011