Synopses & Reviews
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.
Framing his discussion around three poems by twentieth-century Polish poet Anna Kamienska, Meyers casts the nature of faith as a force that stands against anything and everything that engenders death and indignity. He calls for active—sometimes even subversive—defiance of the ego’s temptations, of what he terms “the heresy of orthodoxy itself,” and of an uncritical acceptance of militarism and capitalism. Each chapter is a poignant and urgent invitation to recover the Jesus Movement as a Beloved Community of Resistance.
Review
“Robin Myers is unsettling, disruptive, even subversive. I find myself imagining a loud buzzer sounding in every seminary classroom and from every pulpit in America: 'We interrupt this normally scheduled programming with a message from the Emergency Broadcast System. This is not a test; it is an actual emergency,' which is followed by a reading of this book."—Brian D. McLaren, author/speaker/activist
Review
“This is Robin Meyers at his pastoral and prophetic best. Read it, and then for the love of God--RESIST!”—Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu
Review
“A challenging and visionary manifesto. When this wind comes sweeping down the plain, it sounds a lot like the creative breath of a Genesis dawn and the fiery spirit of a Pentecost morning.”—John Dominic Crossan
Review
“Spiritual Defiance is a veritable landscape of dramatically beautiful phrases and insights, bon mots and felicitous subtleties. Meyers’s “Resistance To Orthodoxy” section is particularly brilliant, seeming almost to scintillate before the reader. It would be hard, in fact, to imagine a more informing and/or pleasurable treatment than this of clericalism in the contemporary world.”—Phyllis Tickle, author of
The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and WhyReview
“Here is a book that could not be more timely, or more urgent. Robin Meyers has carefully and persuasively sketched out exactly what we most desperately need today to defeat the divisive forces that threaten to shred our communities. Fair and comprehensive, the book is also eloquently composed.”—Harvey Cox, author of
The Future of Faith Review
“Robin Meyers names the factors that are paralyzing the church and making it irrelevant. His witty discerning summons will ring true for many readers.”—Walter Brueggemann
Review
“This is an important and delightful book. Robin Meyers is a modern practitioner of the traditional clergy/scholar model of ministry: wise, learned, witty, but with passion for the church refined by his years of experience as a pastor. At a time when everyone is ready to give up on the institution, he eloquently provides a hopeful, helpful vision for the future. Anyone who cares about the future of the church and the world the church is called to serve, should read this book.”—John M. Buchanan, Publisher/Editor of the Christian Century
Review
“While many are scrambling to find nifty fixes for all that ails the uninspired and uninspiring institutional church, Robin Meyers is looking instead to God’s holy fools, for passionate Don Quixotes of non-compliance, who are as resistant to scriptural and cultural rigidity as they are subversive for the cause of love. Rather than a Christianity that peddles implausible doctrines, Spiritual Defiance calls for a Jesus Ethic that lets go of ‘being right’ and gets on with the more distinguishing work of challenging empires and changing the world.”—The Rev. Dr. J. Bennett Guess, Executive Minister and National Officer, United Church of Christ
Review
“[An] explosive call to religious progressives to resist cultural and economic injustice. . . . Knowledgeable, engaging, and provocative.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Synopsis
"Simplify Your Life" meets "Care of the Soul" in a straightforward, prescriptive book about learning to slow down, live in the moment, and recognize the holiness in everyday things. 12 line drawings.
Synopsis
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 freneticism 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.
Morning Sun on a White Piano is a book about finding joy in the present, about reclaiming the lost art of living, hearing again, in a culture that has gone deaf; seeing again, in a culture that's blinded; and feeling again, in a culture that overstimulates and numbs itself. If simplifying our lives means singing the song, Morning Sun on a White Piano challenges us to learn the dance.
Compact, accessible, gorgeously written, and beautifully designed, here is a book that is a perfect gift for anyone--especially ourselves.
Synopsis
A leading voice of progressive Christianity makes a powerful case for faith as a radical way of being in the world
About the Author
Dr. Robin R. Meyers is Senior Minister of the Mayflower Congregational United Church of Christ Church in Oklahoma City and Professor of Speech and Rhetoric at Oklahoma City University. He lives in Oklahoma City with his wife, a sculptor, and their three children.