Lipscomb Faculty Reading Room
Keely Hagan | 615-966-6491 |
With the start of the vacation season, May is a great time to check out recently released, or soon to be released, books by Lipscomb faculty. The sampling of faculty books listed below by genre provides interesting topics to explore and fill up your summer reading list. All books are available to purchase or preorder on Amazon, or check with your favorite local bookstores for availability.
Memoir
The Bookroom: Remembrance and Forgiveness–A Memoir
Dr. C. Leonard Allen (Lipscomb Dean of the College of Bible)
Leafwood Publishers, 2024, publication date: May 7, 2024
Noted theologian Allen’s memoir begins at age eight in his father’s bookroom—and with an emerging cluster of questions about the faith he inherited. The search for answers led him on a long journey, including a harrowing desert season, then a season of newness he had not imagined.
The characters in this story are easy to relate to—the humor, the joy, the grief. Readers will get glimpses into the rich texture of their lives—the power of memory, the struggles with selfhood, the need for forgiveness and the surprises of grace.
Randy Harris wrote: “Leonard Allen’s moving memoir weaves together personal experience, theological reflection and spiritual pilgrimage… It’s a splendid recounting of his journey and a welcome companion on our journeys. It makes for deeply engaging reading.”
Allen has taught theology, ethics and philosophy at the graduate and undergraduate level for more than 20 years, serving as visiting professor at Biola University, adjunct professor at John Brown University and Fuller Theological Seminary and professor at Abilene Christian University before taking on the deanship at Lipscomb. He has lectured widely on college campuses and in churches over the past 40 years on biblical, historical and theological themes. The central focus of his work has been opening up the riches of the Christian tradition across the ages to believers old and young.
Allen is the author, co-author or editor of 15 books, including In the Great Stream: Imagining Churches of Christ in the Christian Tradition; Poured Out: The Spirit of God Empowering the Mission of God; The Cruciform Church: Becoming a Cross-Shaped People in a Secular World; Distant Voices: Discovering a Forgotten Past for a Changing Church; and Things Unseen: Churches of Christ in (and after) the Modern Age.
Public Policy
Faith in Foreign Aid: Religious Organizations’ Engagement with USAID
Dr. Susan Turner Haynes (Lipscomb associate professor in political science)
Routledge, 2024, publication date: July 12, 2024
The United States contributes more foreign aid than any other state in the world, and it is often recognized as a leader in engaging religious organizations in aid delivery. Faith in Foreign Aid is the first book to closely examine how the relationship between religious organizations and USAID plays out in practice.
Relying on financial data collected by more than three dozen Lipscomb undergraduate students, Faith in Foreign Aid traces faith-based funding patterns in U.S. foreign aid from 2001-2021. It also relies upon a survey of over 400 humanitarian organizations and interviews with over 40 religious organizations to highlight the voices and experiences of faith-based organizations that have relied exclusively on private funding and those that have received grants from the U.S. government.
Haynes’ research provides new empirical evidence that can help inform and shape USAID’s new Strategic Religious Engagement Policy.
The book will be of interest to researchers across public policy, development, religion and political science, as well as to practitioners at USAID and development organizations.
Haynes is also the author of Chinese Nuclear Proliferation: How Global Politics Is Transforming China's Weapons Buildup and Modernization, which explores why China, the only nuclear weapon state recognized under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that continues to pursue advancements to its nuclear force.
American History
The Mexican-American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals
Dr. Timothy D. Johnson (Elizabeth Gentry Brown Chair in History)
LSU Press, 2004, publication date: October 2024
Johnson’s eighth book focusing on military history is a collection of 12 essays by a dozen noted Civil War scholars examining the lessons 12 generals learned in the Mexican-American War that influenced their later Civil War decision-making.
Johnson, who has written extensively on the war with Mexico, solicited and edited the essays. The contributing historians are from the University of Virginia, University of North Carolina, Oklahoma State, Arizona State, the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Naval Academy and other research institutions. Essay topics consist of six Union generals and six Confederate generals, and the list includes Ulysses S. Grant, Joseph Hooker, Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and James Longstreet.
Johnson, who wrote the introduction, proposes that the earlier war, fought from 1846 to 1848, was a laboratory of experiential learning which helped mold leadership characteristics in the areas of strategy, tactics, logistics and interpersonal relationships played out during the Civil War.
The publication is the first scholarly effort to bridge the two wars, and it is part of LSU’s “Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War” series.
Johnson, who joined Lipscomb’s history faculty in 1991, has appeared on The History Channel and C-SPAN’s Book TV. His work has been nominated for various awards including the Lincoln Prize, the Society of Military History Book Award and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Prize. He was a finalist in 2019 for the Army Historical Foundation’s Distinguished Writing Award. He has also been a research fellow at the Virginia Historical Society and at Yale University.
Johnson’s previous books include: For Duty and Honor: Tennessee’s Mexican War Experience, Memoirs of Lieut. Gen. Winfield Scott, A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico City Campaign and Winfield Scott: The Quest for Military Glory.
Travel Literature
Bible Land Adventures: The Essential Travel Guide for Serious Disciples
Dr. W. Scott Sager (Vice President for Spiritual Development and Church Services)
Marshal Press (2023)
Sager, a faculty member in the College of Bible and Ministry, first walked the old city of Jerusalem as a student more than 30 years ago. Now, he leads Lipscomb students to the Bible Lands to help them grow as disciples.
Traveling to Israel, Palestine, Jordan or Sinai is not a vacation, he says, it’s a pilgrimage. Time in the Holy Lands teaches serious disciples how to read the Bible with their feet, their hands and their hearts.
Sager draws on insights from seasoned guides and archaeologists to provide all the essential details at each site as well as the back stories every disciple needs to get the most out of their visit. Filled with maps, charts and archaeological images, the travel guide gives readers tools unavailable at most sites. In addition, key Scripture references, space for notes and notes on special site features enable users to make this book a treasured keepsake combining site details with personal experiences, insights and meditations.
Since July 2011, Sager has strategically reached out to and served numerous churches as Lipscomb’s vice president for church services and currently serves as teaching minister at the Green Hills Church of Christ. Previously, he served for 15 years as senior minister of the Preston Road Church of Christ and was the campus minister at the University of Texas in Austin.
Sager serves on the board of the Christian Relief Fund where his focus is on supporting AIDS orphans in Africa. In Dallas, he serves on the board of Christ’s Family Ministries, a fully functioning health clinic he founded that serves the working poor.
Sager’s other books include Jesus in Isolation: Lazarus, Viruses and Us and Disciple Making: The Core Mission of the Church.
Christian History
Reviving the Ancient Faith, 3rd ed.: The Story of Churches of Christ in America
Dr. Richard T. Hughes (scholar in residence at Lipscomb since 2015) and James L. Gorman
Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
In this balanced, well-documented history of the Churches of Christ in America, readers will be challenged to learn the historical basis of the Church of Christ identity and beliefs. Students of the history of the Church of Christ and American religion will derive from its pages a more holistic and informed understanding of the tradition.
New to the third edition, the final chapters bring the history of Churches of Christ from the 1960s up to 2022, analyzing the growing diversity of the movement amid intradenominational “culture wars.”
The Churches of Christ is a denomination defined by not being a denomination. These communities intended to restore a primitive Christianity, undivided by historical quarrels.
Despite this ideal, the Churches of Christ in America have a surprisingly complex history dating back to the nineteenth century. Gorman’s fresh edition of Hughes’s classic work, Reviving the Ancient Faith, illuminates the movement started by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.
The authors trace the movement’s sociological transformation into a denomination from the 1830s into the twentieth century. Four developments forged this new identity: the premillennialist controversy, the divide over institutions, the racial segregation of congregations and schools, and the fight over liberalism in the 1960s.