News

New Book Releases – Week of 20 January 2025 – Ched Myers, more…

Here are a few new book releases from this week that are worth checking out…

(Where possible, we have also tried to include a review/interview related to each of the new book releases)


Get our picks of the week’s best books
in your inbox every week!

SIGN UP NOW for our weekly email newsletter!


***Our Starred New Book of the Week:

<<<<<< Last Week’s Starred New Release… 
 

Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics

Ched Myers

( Fortress Press )

Myers brings a well-honed interpretive eye to a thematic study of Luke’s Gospel. He reads synoptically the crisis of socioeconomic disparity in Jesus’s world and ours, and proposes powerful analogies that can build social imagination and animate personal and political practices for systemic change and justice among communities of faith today.

There has been a revival of interest over the last half century in the Third Gospel’s focus on issues of poverty and wealth. However, most exegetical or homiletic work by scholars and preachers of the Global North has been constrained by middle-class social assumptions, which inevitably domesticate Jesus’s radical teaching and practice. To counter this, Myers argues that Luke’s literary arc and individual representations are best interpreted through the lens of “Sabbath Economics” in the Hebrew Bible. He then brings socio-literary analysis and engaged commentary to bear on Luke’s wise old stories, correlating his narrative structures and symbols to systemic political and economic issues then and now.

Luke’s unique material, and how he redacts Mark and Q, reveals his unequivocal critique of socioeconomic disparity. Myers closely examines footprints and “demonstration projects” of Sabbath Economics in the first half of Luke, then considers archetypal characters, somatic representations, and socially contrasting scenarios of rich and poor in the second half. His approach deploys sociological exegesis, literary analysis, and liberation hermeneutics to recover Luke’s story of Jesus in its historical context and its relevance to ours. A small-town prophet struggles against an imperial political-economic system that is bringing the extractive, exploitive rule of Mammon to occupied Palestine, and shows and tells how regular people can resist the rule of the one percent by embracing “the Great Economy.” Myers includes suggestions for preaching Luke in Year C, and offers resources on economic equity organizing for our own Gilded Age.


***READ an excerpt from this book

 

NEXT BOOK >>>>>

ADVERTISEMENT:


 
RFTCG
FREE EBOOK!
Reading for the Common Good
From ERB Editor Christopher Smith


"This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church."
-Karen Swallow Prior


Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook!
We respect your email privacy


In the News...
Christian Nationalism Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide]
Most AnticipatedMost Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
Funny Bible ReviewsHilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles


Comments are closed.