Vital Conversations for the Church and the Academy

Strategic Initiatives in Evangelical Theology is a series of scholarly works designed to address topics of strategic importance for both evangelical scholarship and the church.

The series aims to foster interaction within the broader evangelical world while also advancing discussion in the wider academic community around emerging, current, groundbreaking, or controversial subjects.

What you'll find in this series:

• Crossover Preaching — Jared E. Alcántara argues that preachers and homileticians need to develop intercultural and improvisational proficiencies to reach an increasingly intercultural church. Crossover Preaching equips them with concrete practices designed to help them cultivate these competencies and thus communicate effectively in a changing world.
• Addiction and Virtue — Kent Dunnington argues that neither of the two dominant models of the nature of addiction (disease or choice) adequately accounts for the experience of those who are addicted or of those who are seeking to help them. He brings philosophical and theological analysis to bear on the problem of addiction and formulates an alternative to the usual reductionistic models.
• The Triumph of God Over Evil — William Hasker offers a comprehensive exploration of the problem of evil, presenting a defense of free will theism and showing why the evil in the world does not provide evidence of a moral fault in God.
• Theology's Epistemological Dilemma — Kevin Diller examines the intersection of faith and reason by examining Karl Barth's theology of revelation and Alvin Plantinga's epistemology of Christian belief, presenting a unified approach for theological epistemology today.

Praise for Books in the Series

"Dr. Alcántara first makes a convincing claim that worship will continue in America through this century, but our churches will look very different. Then he makes a compelling case that anyone who is going to survive as a preacher has to learn new skills in order to proclaim the gospel to an intercultural society. Best of all, he lets the amazing preacher Dr. Gardner Taylor show us how it is done."

—M. Craig Barnes, president, Princeton Theological Seminary

"Drawing on Aristotle's and Aquinas's accounts of habit, Kent Dunnington has given us an analysis of addiction we have desperately needed. Few are able to combine philosophical analysis with theological insight, but Dunnington has done it in a manner that helps us better understand the nature of addiction and why it is so prevalent in our time. This is a book that needs to be read, not only by those who work in the fields of addictive behaviors but also by philosophers, theologians and pastors. I suspect in a short amount of time, this book will be viewed as something of a classic in the field."

—Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School

"In this groundbreaking study, Kevin Diller addresses a fundamental challenge for the Christian faith, namely, how one can affirm the knowability, universality and warrant of its theological claims while simultaneously recognizing the frailty and fallibility of those who hold them. Drawing on the complementary insights of Karl Barth and Alvin Plantinga, whose approaches are so often mistakenly assumed to be in tension, Diller provides an original, rigorously argued and deeply convincing response to the epistemological grounding problem. This field-changing volume exemplifies analytic theology at its finest."

—Alan J. Torrance, University of St Andrews