Join us for this book launch event featuring Dr. Kavin Rowe (George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School). Dr. Rowe will be sharing about his newly released book Christianity's Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope. This event is co-hosted by the North Carolina Study Center at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Duke Center for Christianity & Scholarship, and College Collective.
Book Description
At its beginning, Christianity was surprising, powerful, creative, world-shaking. Today in the West it is many times familiar, common, and expected, losing its power to surprise and transform. We have developed societal amnesia and ignorance of what Christianity originally was – and what it still can be. We need to recover the surprise of Christianity. We need to ask the same fundamental questions as the early Christians, which will help us rediscover the surprising power of Christianity in our midst.
Focusing on the surprise of the gospel message takes us into the heart of what it is to understand Christianity at all, and thus what it is to remember and relearn the life-giving power and witness that went with being Christian at the beginning. This remembering and relearning can, in turn, surprise us all over again and chart a course for our witness today.