Here are some excellent new theology books * that will be released in July2025 :
* broadly interpreted, including ethics, church history, biblical studies, and other areas that intersect with theology
*** Love Theology Books?
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Søren Kierkegaard (Bruce H. Kirmmse, trans.)
(Liveright)
A founding figure of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard is perhaps best known for his writing on anxiety and despair, particularly in such works as Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Anxiety, and The Sickness unto Death. Yet love, too, is a common theme in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre, underlying his various collections of edifying discourses, as well as Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, Christian Discourses, and especially Works of Love.
First published in 1847, Works of Love is the most important explicitly religious work Kierkegaard published under his own name. Intended to awaken rather than convince―replicating, in Socratic fashion, the stinging, impatient character of a “gadfly”―the book consists of two sets of “deliberations” on love, the first set addressing love as a duty, and the second examining the applications of love. Throughout, Kierkegaard contrasts romantic love and love of one’s friends with the selfless Christian love, or agape, of the New Testament, ultimately contending that the only way to purge self-interest from love is to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and oneself as one’s neighbor, who is “indeed unconditionally every person.”
Although careful to distinguish his “deliberations” from clerical “sermons,” Kierkegaard insisted that in order to grasp the full meaning of the texts that constitute Works of Love, one must hear them. Kierkegaard makes this point repeatedly in his journals, and indeed, the preface of a work he published a few years after Works of Love begins with the words: “My dear reader! If possible, read aloud! If you do so, let me thank you for it.” While previous translations have not given sufficient attention to this critical aural aspect of the text, Bruce H. Kirmmse’s translation preserves it, thus making the same request of its readers that Kierkegaard once made of his―to hear the argument by reading it aloud.
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Barry Harvey
( Baylor UP )
According to some of the most influential thinkers of the modern era, it is madness to subordinate all one’s aims to one end. Such thinkers believe that the church in particular should limit itself to matters of religion, spirituality, and moral values, but in other areas of life submit itself to modern society. Madness, Theocracy, and Anarchism contends instead that the church should refuse to mind its assigned place or restrict its attention to a delimited sphere of activity.
The mission, calling, and purpose of the church cannot rightly be thought of or treated as a function of any other social grouping, be it family, region, state, culture, race, or class. Its mission is to cultivate a new and distinct society to act both amidst the old and as a contrast to it, displaying the form of social life intended for all humankind in Christ. The church is thus called to a different understanding of politics having to do with the practices that order the common life and relations of a people, forming the members of this community to live according to this order and to embody these relations for the whole world.
Barry Harvey examines those points where the church’s practice of politics directly challenges the many ways Christians have put national and tribal loyalties ahead of our inclusion in the pilgrim people of God, and those places where the social activities, structures, and imaginative tales animating the Western world in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries challenge the faithfulness of the Christian community. The analysis of the dominant social order is not to understand it for its own sake, but to spell out the context of the church’s worship, collective life, and testimony.
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