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Awakening Faith: Daily Devotions from the Early Church, by James Stuart Bell
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In simple, updated language, Awakening Faith by James Stuart Bell provides a year of inspiring readings drawn from the earliest teachers and writers of the church―the Church Fathers. In every reflection you will be refreshed by deep wells of wisdom and spiritual insight.
“In the age of Twitter and Facebook, where glib sayings abound, one yearns to read some deeper wisdom about life and faith on a regular basis. Well, here you have it, a compendium of wisdom, devotion, and biblical insight from some of the most thoughtful and faithful Christians from the early eras of the church's history. And in Facebook sized posts. That's a nice change of pace!”
―Mark Galli, editor, Christianity Today�
- Sales Rank: #1326805 in Books
- Brand: HarperCollins Christian Pub.
- Published on: 2013-10-23
- Released on: 2013-10-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.31" h x 1.22" w x 5.75" l, 1.15 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 400 pages
About the Author
James Stuart Bell, Jr., is a former director of religious publishing at Doubleday, executive director of Bridge Publishing, and executive editor at Moody Publishing. The writer, editor, or compiler of more than 140 books, he owns Whitestone Communications, Inc., a literary development agency, and makes his home in the western suburbs of Chicago. Bell is married with four children.
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�Patrick J. Kelly received his bachelor’s degree in english and philosophy from Boston College, and a master’s in systematic theology from Wheaton College. He lives and works in the suburbs of Chicago and is a serving member of College Church in Wheaton, Illinois.
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Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Early Church Devotion
By Joey Parker
Awakening Faith by James Stewart Bell contains 366 daily devotions from multiple early church fathers. This devotion provides insight to readers who may be unfamiliar with early Christianity, allowing them to access the writings of the early church fathers. This devotion covers a broad range of subjects: Jesus Christ, holiness, salvation, the Bible, prayer and devotion, the church, and many more. It features writings from early church fathers, such as: Ambrose, Augustine, Ignatius, Irenaeus, Chrysostom, Justin Martyr, Polycarp, and Tertullian to name but a few.
Each devotion is a page long at the most, giving the reader just a short thought from the author to meditate on for the day. Each day also has a Scripture passage and reference to accompany the writing. I see two great benefits that can come out of this devotional: 1) The reader will gain words of wisdom and insight from many early leaders of the Christian faith, and 2) It may spark a desire in some readers to further pursue some of these early church fathers, and to study church history in more depth.
I do have concern with some of the contributors. The book pulls from a wide range of people, some of whom are not sound theologically. The reader does need discernment and understanding that some of the contributors were on the wrong side of some theological disputes.
I have previously enjoyed From the Library of CS Lewis and From the Library of Charles Spurgeon, both works of James Stewart Bell. This title is more of the same: bringing past writings that many people would be unfamiliar with into an accessible form. Some contributors do need to be further researched by the reader and discernment is necessary.
I received a free copy of the book from Zondervan via CrossFocusedReviews.com in exchange for an honest review.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
I'd like to Introduce You to the Church Fathers…
By A. Wencl
If you can read a blog post or an Internet news article, you can read Awakening Faith: Daily Devotions from the Early Church. This devotional offers 366 passages selected from the first eight centuries of Church history. Most of the writers selected are held in high esteem by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestant churches, and these snippets of their writings are useful for understanding early Christian thought and experience, which parallel our own more often then we might think.
Much can be learned from the early Church, but the time distance between them and us is often a put off for modern readers. It shouldn't, and this devotional may help stimulate the curiosity of modern believers. Each devotion, numbered, but not corresponding to any specific day or month of the year, provides a few paragraphs from these writers. Since many modern-day readers do not know where to start or lack the desire to read a thick tome by Augustine, these blog-sized passages are excellent introductions to these believers and their writings. The range of subjects provides something for everyone, from exhortations to read the Bible, thoughts on baptism, defenses of the gospel, death and funerals, and much more. As a preacher, I found some of these devotions valuable as illustrations.
As a devotional, this book could be improved in a number of ways. First, each day's devotion should include a citation of the work being quoted. Some of these writers had numerous volumes and a mere listing of the author does not help a curious reader pursue further study of a given passage. Second, although the writers are further identified at the end of the book, I would have found an approximate date with each entry helpful. Third, each devotion begins with a short verse from Scripture, but these verses do not always correspond to the subject matter of the devotion. I was able to detect that a writer was commenting on a particular passage from the Bible, but the introductory verse was not in that passage.
I do not normally read devotions. Most start in January and it feels awkward to begin anywhere but the beginning of a book. Because this devotional does not have specific dates listed, it feels much more like an anthology and I can read as much or as little as I want, or look up on the passages from a specific writer. More than once I found myself wanting to know more about a specific writer or writing. The lack of specific citations weakens this book, and I hope that future additions include them. If the intent of this book is to introduce modern believers to the early Church, I believe it has succeeded. If it can add those citations, it will provide a way forward for those curious enough to move forward.
I received this book in exchange for a candid review. The opinions expressed are my own.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Church Fathers for Everyone
By Esteban Vazquez
Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.
The Fathers, I’m afraid, remain an unknown quantity to many, and perhaps most, devout churchgoers. This isn’t only true of Evangelical Protestants, but even of Orthodox and Catholics, who lay claim to patristic theology and spirituality as their own inheritance, and ostensibly consider such an inheritance to be both foundational and authoritative. Part of the problem, of course, is that the body of existing patristic literature is so extensive as to send even the most determined new reader into fits of debilitating fatigue. Moreover, those who might survive a first encounter with a bibliographical listing of patristic works, even only in translation, go on to face various other obstacles: the translation might be so archaic as to be incomprehensible; a deficit in historical and/or theological background might render the basic argument of even a short work inscrutable; and so on. And then there’s the open secret that many people just don’t know how to undertake a serious reading of literary classics, let alone a philosophical or theological treatise. Or, perhaps more distressingly, they’re simply not interested in ever undertaking any such reading.
And yet the Fathers ought to be read, as the introduction to this little book rightly pleads. The Fathers are our forebears in the Faith, and we owe them filial respect. They are authentic teachers and witnesses, the champions of Christian doctrine, who through their struggles, and sometimes even through the shedding of their own blood, handed down to us the deposit of Faith. They teach us to read Scripture anew, and they are sure guides in the path of virtue, in which they exercised themselves. So clearly, again, the Fathers ought to be read. What isn’t so clear is that our average churchgoer must read, e.g., St Ephrem the Syrian with the goal to understand the meter of his Syriac poetry, or St Basil the Great with a view to mastering the multiple facets of his argument for the divinity of the Holy Spirit. That is to say, there ought to be a place for a devotional reading of the Fathers, unencumbered by the business of critical introductions and apparatuses, and with a view to spiritual edification—and, needless to say, this isn’t only true for our average churchgoer, but for initiates of patristic study as well. It is here that Awakening Faith lends us a hand.
The book features 366 page-long selections from early Christian writers from 1st to the 9th centuries. Occasionally a longer reading or narrative will be split into two sections (or, exceptionally in the case of the Martyrdom of St Cyprian, the Conversion of St Augustine, and St John Cassian’s instruction on covetousness, three). The execution of this particular volume, however, is very much in the style of daily devotionals known to Evangelical Protestants: each numbered daily reading is provided with a thematic classification, a title, and a short Scripture quotation to frame the selection. These added editorial aids do feature from time to time some instances of vocabulary more familiar to Evangelicals than to the rest of us (“evangelism,” “plan of salvation,” “witness and testify,” “the lost,” together with the charming warning in the introduction not to be alarmed by the occasional reference to the “Apocrypha”). This does not at all detract from the value of the chosen texts themselves, which to me seem to have been well selected on the whole. I do note that, as is often the case in projects of this nature, “Church Fathers” seems to be understood as basically synonymous with “early Christian writer.” Yet, as least as far as we Orthodox are concerned, not every ancient writer is thereby a Father: certainly, St Theodore the Studite is a Father in a way that Theodore of Mopsuestia can never be. That said, as far as I can tell, no reading in this volume needs extensive qualification, and I appreciate the broader exposure to early Christian literature in both prose and verse that the selections afford. The selections themselves have been edited for syntax and vocabulary, and the editors have laudably resisted the temptation dumb down the texts to the point of banality. Instead, the selections are given in elegant contemporary English. They read quite well, and command one’s full attention.
There is a full listing of all of the early Christian writers featured in the book, from St Ambrose of Milan to St Zeno of Verona, which provides brief bibliographical notes on each author together with a list of their numbered selections as given in the devotional. These notes are succinct and very well done; I do regret the recurring use of the jarring “Antiochean” for “Antiochene” in them, and hope that future editions of this book (of which I hope there shall be many) correct this. Perhaps the most disconcerting omission in this publication is the lack of citations for the chosen selections. Once or twice I have wished to follow up on a reading, and have had to expend considerable effort to find the source. I should like to encourage either the editors or the publisher to make the list of sources available online to those who wish to have it. Surely this is but a minor chore in our age of electronic dissemination.
Another desideratum would be an index of the topics assigned to each of the readings (“Father and Spirit,” “Jesus Christ,” “Holy Days,” “The Bible,” “Holiness,” and so on). With such a tool in hand, one could proceed to navigate this book in one of three ways:
1) In numerical order, from 1-366;
2) In alphabetical or chronological order, by author; or
3) Thematically, by assigned subject.
Each method would only improve and enrich the reading exercise in new ways.
In spite of these rather minor imperfections, I am very pleased with Awakening Faith, and look forward to using it daily for my own enrichment and edification, as I have been doing in recent weeks. I warmly recommend this devotional to one and all.
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