Looking Before and After: Testimony and the Christian Life (Stob Lectures 2006) [Paperback]

Alan Jacobs (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2008 | Series: Stob Lectures 2006

In the work of Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Hauerwas, Gerald Laughlin, and many others, the Christian story is a communal one: the life of the individual Christian, on this account, achieves meaning only through participation in this communally recounted narrative. These thinkers, says Alan Jacobs, do not deny that the Christian faith makes propositional claims, but they do tend to understand such propositions as having their proper force only within the context of Gods overarching narrative of human history. While a tremendously important movement, Jacobs acknowledges, something has perhaps been neglected in the development of this narrative theology - the narrative dimension of individual Christian lives. Jacobs employs a critical approach to literary narratives, especially autobiographies and memoirs, to help us think theologically about the shape of personal lives. Looking Before and After encourages us to ask how individual lives can, in a specifically Christian sense, be meaningful, how we can discern and rightly interpret those meanings, and how we might tell our own stories in ways that avoid the dangers of presumption and despair. This book reinvigorates narrative theology and helps to demonstrate the power of individual life stories when they are properly told and properly understood.

Product Details

• Paperback: 114 pages
• Publisher: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (April 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802849814
• ISBN-13: 978-0802849816
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,008 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in Alabama, attended the University of Alabama, then got my PhD at the University of Virginia. Since 1984 I have been teaching at Wheaton College in Illinois. My dear wife Teri and I have been married for thirty years. Our son Wes begins college this fall, and to our shock, decided to go to Wheaton. I think he will avoid Dad, though.

My work is hard to describe, at least for me, because it revolves around multiple interests, primary among them being literature, theology, and technology. I also watch soccer and write about it, but that's purely recreational.

You can find out a lot more about me online: Twitter, Tumblr, my blog, my home page. Google is the friend of inquiring minds.