William Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, Christian apologist, author and Wesleyan theologian who upholds the view of Molinism and neo-Apollinarianism. He is Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University and research professor of philosophy at Biola University's Talbot School of Theology. Craig has updated and defended the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God. He has also published work where he argues in favor of the historical plausibility of the resurrection of Jesus. His study of divine aseity and Platonism culminated with his book God Over All.
Philip Yancey is an American author who writes primarily about spiritual issues. His books have sold more than fifteen million copies in English and have been translated into forty languages, making him one of the best-selling contemporary Christian authors. Two of his books have won the ECPA's Christian Book of the Year Award: The Jesus I Never Knew in 1996, and What's So Amazing About Grace? in 1998. He is published by Hachette, HarperCollins Christian Publishing, InterVarsity Press, and Penguin Random House.
Lee Patrick Strobel is an American Christian author and a former investigative journalist. He has written several books, including four which received ECPA Christian Book Awards and a series which addresses challenges to the veracity of Christianity. He also hosted a television program called Faith Under Fire on PAX TV and runs a video apologetics web site.
Paul Wilson Brand, was a pioneer in developing tendon transfer techniques for use in the hands of those with leprosy. He was the first physician to appreciate that leprosy is not a disease of the tissue but of the nerves: it is the loss of the sensation of pain which makes sufferers susceptible to injury and leads to tissue rotting away, especially in the extremities. Brand contributed extensively to the fields of hand surgery and hand therapy through his publications and lectures, and wrote popular autobiographical books about his childhood, his parents' missionary work, and his philosophy about the valuable properties of pain. One of his best-known books, co-written with Philip Yancey, is Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants (1993), republished in 1997 as The Gift of Pain.
Walter Ralston Martin was an American Baptist Christian minister and author who founded the Christian Research Institute in 1960 as a parachurch ministry specializing as a clearing-house of information in both general Christian apologetics and in countercult apologetics. As the author of the influential The Kingdom of the Cults (1965), he has been dubbed by the conservative Christian columnist Michael J. McManusthe "godfather of the anti-cult movement".
Norman Leo Geisler was an American Christian systematic theologian and philosopher. He was the co-founder of two non-denominational evangelical seminaries.
The Christian Research Institute (CRI) is an evangelical Christian apologetics ministry. It was established in October 1960 in the state of New Jersey by Walter Martin (1928–1989). In 1974, Martin relocated the ministry to San Juan Capistrano, California. The ministry's office was relocated in the 1990s near Rancho Santa Margarita. In 2005, the organization moved to its present location in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The lordship salvation controversy is a theological dispute regarding a soteriological question within Christianity on the relationship between faith and works. This debate has been notably present among some non-denominational and Evangelical churches in North America at least since the 1980s.
Eugenia Price was an American author best known for her religious and self-help books, and later for her historical novels which were set in the American South.
In Christianity, missional living is the adoption of the posture, thinking, behaviors, and practices of a missionary in order to engage others with the gospel message. The missional church movement, a church renewal movement predicated on the necessity of missional living by Christians, gained popularity at the end of the twentieth century due to advocates like Tim Keller and others in the Gospel and Our Culture Network. Advocates contrast missional living with the concept of a select group of "professional" missionaries, emphasizing that all Christians should be involved in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
Robert Holmes Bell Jr. is an American author, speaker and former pastor. Bell founded Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, and pastored it until 2012. Under his leadership, Mars Hill was one of the fastest-growing churches in America. Bell is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Love Wins and the writer and narrator of a series of spiritual short films called NOOMA. In 2011, Time named Bell on its list of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. He has since become a freelance writer and speaker appearing on various talk shows and national speaking tours on topics related to spirituality and leadership. He also hosts a popular podcast called The Robcast. In 2018, a documentary about Bell called The Heretic was released.
John Dickson is an Australian author, clergyman and historian of the ancient world, largely focusing on early Christianity and Judaism. He currently teaches at the graduate school of Wheaton College (Illinois).
Rachel Held Evans was an American Christian columnist, blogger and author. Her book A Year of Biblical Womanhood was a New York Times bestseller in e-book non-fiction, and Searching for Sunday was a New York Times bestseller nonfiction paperback.
The Jesus I Never Knew is a popular 1995 Christological book by the American Christian author Philip Yancey. It won the Gold Medallion Book Award and ECPA Christian Book of the Year 1996: it is a book that appeals to the wider Christian public for its personal approach to the figure of Jesus, with a fresh and vivid portrayal extracted from a dynamic reading of the four canonical gospels.
What's So Amazing About Grace? is a 1997 book by Philip Yancey, an American journalist and editor-at-large for Christianity Today. The book examines grace in Christianity, contending that people crave grace and that it is central to the gospel, but that many local churches ignore grace and instead seek to exterminate immorality. What's So Amazing About Grace? includes Bible stories, anecdotes from Yancey's life, accounts of historical events and other stories. These include a modern retelling of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, an account of Yancey's friendship with Mel White who came out as gay, a comparison of the teachings of early Christians Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo, and a summary of Karen Blixen's short story "Babette's Feast".
Reaching for the Invisible God: What Can We Expect to Find? is a book written by the evangelical writer Philip Yancey and published by Zondervan in September 2000. The popularity of Yancey's 1997 book What's So Amazing About Grace? helped boost the sales of Reaching for the Invisible God to the point that it appeared on religion bestseller lists immediately upon publication. Within a month, Zondervan reported sales of 94,000 copies. While preparing to write the book, Yancey asked several people how they knew that their trust in Jesus had changed their lives, and one Christian radio host responded, "I have no trouble believing God is good. My question is more, what good is he? ... I cry out to God for help, and it's hard to know just how he answers". Reaching for the Invisible God includes discussion of Yancey's bad experiences of growing up in a very judgmental church, a theme that he had previously discussed in The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace? and later returned to in Soul Survivor. In November 2000, Reaching for the Invisible God became the first print book to be released as an e-book by Zondervan, appearing on Microsoft Reader.
Soul Survivor is a spiritual autobiography by Philip Yancey, a prominent Christianity Today columnist. With the subtitle How My Faith Survived the Church, the book was published in 2001 by Doubleday, which marketed it as a mainstream book. A five-hour-long, three-audio-cassette audiobook edition read by Yancey was also released that year with the same subtitle. In the United Kingdom, the book was published by Hodder & Stoughton with the subtitle Searching for Meaningful Faith. Random House published a paperback edition in 2003 with the subtitle How Thirteen Unlikely Mentors Helped My Faith Survive the Church.
If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat is a 2001 book written by John Ortberg that uses the New Testament account of Jesus walking on water as a conceptual framework for discussing leaps of faith and encouraging readers to make them. It became a bestseller. In March 2003, If You Want to Walk on Water was the third-best-selling religious book in Britain and the fourth-best-selling religious book in Scotland. In his book God Can't Sleep: Waiting for Daylight On Life's Dark Nights, Palmer Chinchen writes that If You Want to Walk on Water is an "excellent book on faith". Religion News Service journalist Jonathan Merritt called the book a modern classic book. In 2002, If You Want to Walk on Water received the Christianity Today Book Award in the Christian Living category. Carol Rodman of The Commercial Appeal called the book "challenging". Willow Creek Community Church placed the book on its Essential Reading List. Mary Milla of St. Paul Pioneer Press said that If You Want to Walk on Water is "a must-read for anyone considering a career change ... It gives you the confidence you need to make a change, but without taking chances that wouldn't be the right fit for you".
The Great House Of God: A Home for Your Heart is a Christian religious book written by Max Lucado and published by Word Publishing in 1997. Terry Burns of the Pembroke Daily Observer called The Great House of God "an excellent book on the Lord's Prayer". The Christian Science Monitor listed The Great House of God fifth on its quarterly list of hardcover religion bestsellers in December 1997. In a Publishers Weekly review, Henry Carrigan writes that, although the thoughts in the book "might be powerful in their spoken form, the brevity and the shallowness of their written form abandons readers in the foyer". In a Booklist article, Ray Olson compares the book to Philip Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace?, which was also published in 1997, and argues that, although Lucado and Yancey have each written several bestselling Christian books, Yancey's book is better edited.
