Books
A revelatory manifesto on how we can reclaim faith from abstract doctrines and rigid morals to find God in the joys and ambiguities of everyday life, from the acclaimed author of Saving Jesus from the Church.
“In this book of stories from four decades of ministry, Meyers powerfully captures what it means to believe in a God who’s revealed not in creeds or morals but in the struggles and beauty of our ordinary lives. In unrelenting detail, he shows how all of creation is anointed with the presence of God, before leaving us with the hope that such anointing might also include us.”
—Richard Rohr, bestselling author of The Universal Christ
“Several years ago now, Marcus Borg said to me, ‘Keep your eyes on the work of Robin Meyers—he is a forerunner, a man of courage and comment, empathy and compassion.’ In Saving God from Religion, Meyers invites us to re-imagine God as we look around at our web of existence. He never lets us ‘fly off the page’ into some abstract, unwieldy realm but rather calls us to existential trust, where the sacred and profane meet. Meyers insists ours is a life in and with God, a collaborative, elegant, grounded play of awe and wonder in which outcomes are not guaranteed, but the possibility of goodness is endless.”
—Marianne Borg, founding chair of the Marcus J. Borg Foundation
“At the center of our religious language problem is the word God, but too few ministers and theologians have shown the courage to wade into the deep waters of what we mean when we say God. Robin Meyers has that courage, and in Saving God from Religion, he invites us to join him in the deep end. You’ll be glad you did. You might even experience this book as a kind of baptism into a deeper, freer, wider faith.”
—Brian D. McLaren, author of The Galápagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey
“Powerful, persuasive, and provocative...”
Powerful, persuasive, and provocative, this book’s challenge negates both the accepted God of theistic religion and the rejected God of atheistic skepticism. Beyond the interactive irrelevance of both those options, a transcendent vision still glimmers over, under, around, and through our quantum world and our evolutionary universe. Think, with this book, about internal earthly consequences rather than external heavenly punishments; about prayer as contact and empowerment rather than petition and thanksgiving; about the evolutionary arc of the universe bending toward justice. Think!”
—John Dominic Crossan
Spiritual Defiance
During his thirty-year career as a parish minister and professor, Robin Meyers has focused on renewing the church as an instrument of social change and personal transformation. In this provocative and passionate book, he explores the decline of the church as a community of believers and calls readers back to the church’s roots as a community of resistance. Shifting the conversation about church renewal away from theological purity and marketing strategies that embrace cultural norms, and toward “embodied noncompliance” with the dominant culture, Meyers urges a return to the revolutionary spirit that marked Jesus’s ministry.
The Underground Church
The Underground Church proposes that the faithful recapture the spirit of the early church with its emphasis on what Christians do rather than what they believe. Prominent progressive writer, speaker, and minister Robin Meyers proposes that the best way to recapture the spirit of the early Christian church is to recognize that Jesus-following was and must be again subversive in the best sense of the word because the gospel taken seriously turns the world upside down.
Saving Jesus From the Church
From One of America's Leading Pastors, a Bold Call to Restore Christianity's True Mission: Following Jesus. The marriage of bad theology and hypocritical behavior by the church has eroded our spiritual lives. Taking the best of biblical scholarship, Meyers recasts core Christian concepts in an effort to save Christianity from its obsession with personal salvation. Not a plea to try something brand new, but rather the recovery of something very old, Saving Jesus from the Church shows us what it means to follow Jesus's teachings today. About this national bestseller, Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote: “Every once in a while a book comes along that changes everything. This is the book.”
Why the Christian Right is Wrong
Millions of Americans are outraged at the Bush administration's domestic and foreign policies and even angrier that the nation's religious conservatives have touted these policies as representative of moral values. Why the Christian Right Is Wrong is a rousing manifesto that will ignite the collective conscience of all whose faith and values have been misrepresented by the Christian Right.
The Virtue in the Vice
One of America's most thoughtful ministers adds a startling new twist to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Our world is awash in false dichotomies: "You're either for us or against us, good or evil, 'born again' or 'left behind.'" Virtue is virtue, and vice is vice, but is it really that simple? Are the rules of proper conduct that black and white? With extraordinary clarity of thought and word, Dr. Robin Meyers argues that there are seven vital, life-affirming attributes everyone must embrace to lead a full life-and that in fact not only are these virtues not the opposite of evil, but that each is based on urges and instinct that are similar to the Seven Deadly Sins.
Morning Sun on a White Piano
There's a lot of talk these days about slowing down, simplifying, living in the moment, but it isn't really happening. We all talk the talk, but the walk we walk seems to be getting faster and faster, and we seem to be enjoying it less and less. Our problem is that, in search of life, we pass it by. Morning Sun on a White Piano is the perfect tonic for the frantic pace of contemporary life. In twelve lucid, straightforward essays, Dr. Robin Meyers offers a brilliant guide to achieving the simple and sacramental life by recognizing what is holy in the seemingly insignificant details of everyday life: Books. Music. Letters. Children.
With Ears to Hear
What makes a good sermon? And how does it come to be? Appropriating insights from the history of rhetoric and modern communications theory, Robin Meyers proposes that truly effective sermons involve more than moralistic proselytizing or "three points and a joke." Rather the preacher must enter into dialogue--not only with Scripture and the congregation but creatively with him or herself as well. This willingness to overhear one’s own sermons and to create an experience that might persuade even the preacher, offers hope that everyone in the sanctuary might hear the text again as if for the very first time.