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Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
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Publisher's summary
The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped.
Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions - institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology. In this unique exploration of evangelical subculture, Daniel Silliman shows listeners how Christian fiction, and the empire of Christian publishing and bookselling it helped build, is key to understanding the formation of evangelical identity. With a close look at five best-selling novels - Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack - Silliman considers what it was in these books that held such appeal and what effect their widespread popularity had on the evangelical imagination. Reading Evangelicals ultimately makes the case that the worlds created in these novels reflected and shaped the world evangelicals saw themselves living in - one in which romantic love intertwines with divine love, humans play an active role in the cosmic contest between angels and demons, and the material world is infused with the literal workings of God and Satan. Silliman tells the story of how the Christian publishing industry marketed these ideas as much as they marketed books, and how, during the era of the Christian bookstore, this - every bit as much as politics or theology - became a locus of evangelical identity.
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The United States is in the midst of a religious revolution. Or, perhaps it is better to say a non-religious revolution. Around a quarter of US adults now say they have no religion. The great majority of these religious "nones" also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts: think "converts," but from having religion to having none. There are currently about fifty-nine million of them in the United States.
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Deeply Insightful, But …
- By S. J. Young on 12-29-22
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Speaking of Faith
- By: Krista Tippett
- Narrated by: Krista Tippett
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In this illuminating story of her life and conversations, the host of public radio's Speaking of Faith describes her journey of spiritual exploration - a journey shared by countless others.
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Clarity of Faith
- By Charles on 06-01-07
By: Krista Tippett
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A New Kind of Christianity
- Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith
- By: Brian D. McLaren
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in the church. Not since the Reformation five centuries ago have so many Christians come together to ask whether the church is in sync with their deepest beliefs and commitments. These believers range from evangelicals to mainline Protestants to Catholics, and the person who best represents them is author and pastor Brian McLaren. In this much anticipated book, McLaren examines ten questions facing today's church - questions about how to articulate the faith itself, the nature of its authority, who God is....
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Clear, Careful, Considerate Confrontation
- By Celia on 09-10-12
By: Brian D. McLaren
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Philosopher of the Heart
- The Restless Life of Søren Kierkegaard
- By: Clare Carlisle
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 10 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence - how to be a human being in the world? - while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.
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Fatally flawed
- By Citizen M on 02-26-23
By: Clare Carlisle
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Letters to a Young Pastor
- Timothy Conversations Between Father and Son
- By: Eric E. Peterson, Eugene H. Peterson
- Narrated by: Eric E. Peterson
- Length: 4 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Have you ever felt in over your head? When Eric Peterson became the pastor of a brand-new church, he quickly and wisely turned to his dad for guidance. Eugene Peterson, author of more than 30 books, including his best-selling memoir The Pastor and his groundbreaking Bible The Message, here reflects on pastoral ministry in all its complexity - from relationships to administration to the sheer audacity of leading God’s people in a particular place. This is Eugene Peterson at his best - lifelong wisdom written with deep love.
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humanizing
- By Adam Shields on 12-01-23
By: Eric E. Peterson, and others
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God and Ronald Reagan
- A Spiritual Life
- By: Paul Kengor
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 9 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Ronald Reagan is hailed today for a presidency that restored optimism to America, engendered years of economic prosperity, and helped bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet until now little attention has been paid to the role Reagan's personal spirituality played in his political career, shaping his ideas, bolstering his resolve, and ultimately compelling him to confront the brutal - and, not coincidentally, atheistic - Soviet empire.
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Depth of info
- By Jan Waldrep on 09-01-24
By: Paul Kengor
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The Second Mountain
- How People Move from the Prison of Self to the Joy of Commitment
- By: David Brooks
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 12 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Author David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.
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Pursue meaning, reject hyper-individualism
- By Adam Shields on 05-07-19
By: David Brooks
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Sex, Mom, and God
- How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics - and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
- By: Frank Schaeffer
- Narrated by: Frank Schaeffer
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Alternating between laugh-out-loud scenes from his childhood and acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, best-selling author Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs and the paranoid fantasies of the “right-wing echo chamber” are really all about. Here’s a hint: sex.
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Entertaining and enlightening
- By Listens-a-lot on 11-16-11
By: Frank Schaeffer
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Fantasyland
- How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
- By: Kurt Andersen
- Narrated by: Kurt Andersen
- Length: 19 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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A razor-sharp thinker offers a new understanding of our post-truth world and explains the American instinct to believe in make-believe, from the Pilgrims to P. T. Barnum to Disneyland to zealots of every stripe...to Donald Trump. In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen demonstrates that what's happening in our country today - this strange, post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through - is not something entirely new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character and path.
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Bland Title For An Amazing Book!
- By David Larson on 09-07-17
By: Kurt Andersen
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The Next Christians
- The Good News About the End of Christian America
- By: Gabe Lyons
- Narrated by: Gabe Lyons
- Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Turn on a cable news show or pick up any news magazine, and you get the impression that Christian America is on its last leg. The once dominant faith is now facing rapidly declining church attendance, waning political influence, and an abysmal public perception. More than 76% of Americans self-identify as Christians, but many today are ashamed to carry the label. While many Christians are bemoaning their faith’s decline, Gabe Lyons is optimistic that Christianity’s best days are yet to come.
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Optimistic about the church
- By Ellen Gilmartin on 09-12-24
By: Gabe Lyons
What listeners say about Reading Evangelicals: How Christian Fiction Shaped a Culture and a Faith
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Adam Shields
- 11-29-21
Exploration of Evangelical history through novels
I am a Christian fiction skeptic. It is not that I don’t think there are good Christian fiction novels, but experience suggests that those Christian novels that are good, are likely not being published, or not being published by Christian publishers. But I know I have a bias. When I first heard of the concept of Reading Evangelicals, I was hopeful for a guide that might help me be less cynical about an area of the Christian world that I had almost entirely stopped reading ten years or so ago.
Daniel Sillman is very ambitious with Reading Evangelicals. He uses these five books, Love Comes Softly, This Present Darkness, Left Behind, The Shunning, and The Shack, to provide not just an exploration of the novels but of Evangelicalism. The meaning of Evangelicalism is hotly debated. There have been dozens of books debating the meaning and value of the term over the past ten years. Broadly, there are three main ways that Evangelical is defined. One way is a theological definition like the National Association of Evangelicals version or Bebbington’s Quadrangle. The main objection to these is that this is not how many people use the term. The second way that Evangelical is used is as a political identity that roughly means conservative, White republican who cares about abortion, gay marriage, and who was likely to have voted for Trump twice. The objection to this usage is that there is a significant subgroup that does not fall into this category, either because roughly 1/3 of theological Evangelicals in the US are non-White, or that even those that are White, approximately 20-25% do not identify through political means or regularly vote democrat. In addition, this is a very US-centric definition, and many self-identified Evangelicals (using the political definition) rarely, if ever, attend church. The third primary definition of Evangelical is as a consumer definition. This is primarily the definition that Kristen Du Mez uses in Jesus and John Wayne. Even though it isn’t the primary definition here, a significant thread of Reading Evangelicals is about the rise and fall of the Christian books store and publishing industry, contributing to the consumeristic definition of Evangelical.
Love Comes Softly was the first novel that could be called a Christian Romance novel. It was published in 1979 at the start of the growth of local Christian books stores. It was one of the first novels written directly for an Evangelical audience and published by Evangelical presses. I read Love Comes Softly early. Probably as a pre-teen or early teen. As one of the quotes from the book said, I read it because my mom owned them all, and the church library stocked them. There were not a lot of Christian novels that I had access to in the mid-1980s. While Stillman does read the novels closely and discuss themes and the books themselves, the context is to the novels is what I find most helpful. Janet Oke was responding to a turn toward not just explicit sex but sexualized violence in the secular romance novel market in the late 1970s. A common trope at the time was that the protagonist would be kidnapped and/or raped, often more than once, and then she would eventually fall in love with her rapist. Before Love Comes Softly, Christian publishers almost entirely published non-fiction, often academic-leaning books targeted toward pastors and bibles. The rise of local Christian books stores needed products to sell, and novels filled a niche. In addition, the rise of the local Christian book store was necessarily ecumenical in orientation. Many Christian publishers were denominationally rooted, and they needed ways to sell outside of their narrow constituencies without alienating them. Love Comes Softly was a successful proof of concept that Christians would buy novels and that fiction could sell.
This Present Darkness is where politics and fear start to enter the picture. Frank Peretti started as an assistant pastor in an Assembly of God church that his father pastored, but by 1983 he quit the pastorate and started working at a factory. Peretti was influenced both by the storytelling of Stephen King and the cultural commentary and theology of Francis Schaeffer. Crossway Books was looking for a novel that would put into practice the theology of Francis Schaeffer, who Crossway had published. Two years after Shaeffer’s death, in 1986, Crossway published This Present Darkness. It hardly sold until Amy Grant was sent a copy, and she started talking about it in her concerts. After selling 4200 books the first year, it sold approximately 750,000 copies in the first two years after Amy Grant’s promotion. The sequel had 400,000 preorders in 1989. This Present Darkness was built on the early culture war ethos of the Moral Majority and the concerns about ritual child abuse, secular humanism, and the New Age that was throughout the culture at the time.
Part of the value of Reading Evangelicals is that Stillman is not interested in easy complaints about the quality or purpose of the books but interested in understanding the context, the deeper reasons that the books resonated, and the cultural shifts within evangelicalism that marked the rise and fall of the publishing industry. I remember reading This Present Darkness in the middle of high school and the increase in attention to spiritual warfare. Even in my conservative mainline Christian experience, I remember engagement after This Present Darkness with people concerned about attacks by demons and possession. It is easy to be cynical about the ways that white Evangelical culture was presented as under attack in books like This Present Darkness, or about the disbelief of sexual abuse or the casual racist references there, but this history is helpful in reading our recent history in books like Jesus and John Wayne or The Myth of Colorblind Christians.
I am not going to detail the discussion of the last three books in the same way, but each book played a role in the rise and then the downfall of Christian publishing and local Christian book stores. Each book has earned a place in helping to define what it means to be an Evangelical, both by contributing to the theological understanding of the term and by creating a culture that allowed for a communal experience of Christianity that many understand as Evangelical. Daniel Stillman is the news director at Christianity Today. He is intimately familiar with the culture and history, and reality of Evangelicalism. And Reading Evangelicals was both expertly written and deeply informative with a type of care that is difficult to do. I want to read or re-read all of these books again. But I also have a renewed sense of the nuance of the Evangelical story that, even though I experienced it, requires a guide to see into that experience well.
This is not a cheap book on kindle or hardcover. I listened to the audiobook, which for me as a member of Audible was the cheapest method. Trevor Thompson, who narrates many Christian books and who I often think of as Eugene Peterson, CS Lewis, Nicholas Wolterstorff, James KA Smith, Mark Noll, John Fea, and more, did a fine job. There were a couple of mispronounced words as is not uncommon, but the narration was well done.
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