Peter Goodwin Heltzel is associate professor of theology and director of the Micah Institute at New York Theological Seminary. Author of Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics (Yale, 2009) and coeditor of the Prophetic Christianity series, he is also assistant pastor of evangelism at Park Avenue Christian Church in New York City.
Cornel West
-- Union Theological Seminary
"Peter Heltzel is a jazz-infused theologian par excellence! Don't
miss this gem of a book." Shannon Craigo-Snell
-- Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary
"Jazz musicians can improvise because they are so rooted in musical
traditions, because they know the standards so well. This grounding
allows for the freedom to create something that is both continuous
with the past and open to a new future. Theology, claims Peter
Heltzel, should be like improvisational jazz -- various traditions
coming together in an ongoing continuity that is always new. In
Resurrection City Heltzel performs just this kind of theology.
Deeply grounded in Scripture, history, music, and the struggle for
justice, Heltzel improvises a prophetic Christian theology of hope.
Both scholarly and accessible, Resurrection City is a virtuoso
performance." Eldin Villafañe
-- Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary
"This is an informative, provocative, and timely book -- a gift to
the church as it seeks the shalom of the city." George E. Lewis
-- Columbia University
"Heltzel's extraordinary theology prophetically re-imagines the
future of Christianity through improvisation, the lifeblood of
creative music around the world, enacting a clarion call to
assembly that exhorts us toward a spiritual practice affirming the
twinned imperatives of justice and love." J. Kameron Carter
-- Duke University Divinity School
"Inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and the notion of 'Resurrection
City, ' Peter Heltzel, a leading thinker of his generation of
American evangelicals, presents here arguably the most cogent
theological engagement with race and the American evangelical world
available today, even as he locates his engagement within a wider
frame -- a vision for an evangelicalism of the future. This,
Heltzel lyrically argues, will be an evangelicalism that dares to
love as God loves. It is a jazz-inflected, musical evangelicalism
-- an evangelicalism that engages its past, that negotiates the
present with improvisational verve (the inspiration here is John
Coltrane's sermonic anthem A Love Supreme), and that consequently
can receive the future. I heartily recommend this book."
Interpretation
"A highly creative contribution that brings together conversations
around missional church, racial and social justice, and
postcolonial hermeneutics. As an academic, pastor, community
organizer, musician and poet, Heltzel offers a rare book that will
inspire Christians to re-envision the church as a community of hope
and justice." Choice (American Library Association)
"This work draws heavily on themes from liberation and black
theologies. . . . Heltzel challenges the contemporary church to
take up this historic message in the contemporary context and to
engage in the struggle for justice and social reform articulated in
these prior voices. Recommended." Books & Culture
"Heltzel offers a new book that inspires hope amid troubled times.
. . . It pulsates with both the prophetic rage and redemptive joy
that Heltzel finds in the Bible and especially its central figure,
the Jewish Jesus. . . . To read Resurrection City is to hear the
jazzy theological ruminations of a white man resurrected by the
black freedom struggle and the Occupy Movement."
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