Issue 14

Common Good favorite Jordan Raynor argues winsomely that work — your contributions to the world around you, money-making or not — is a central part of God’s plan for the world. It’s both your way to participate and an activity that delights God.

The impetus for Biblical Responsible Investing and the 11 principles that give it shape, reportedly, was an executive brief to help “Wall Street executives” understand Christian approaches to financial decisions. This book presents these principles back to Christians as a model, a framework really, of faithful investing.

In Working from the Inside Out, Jeff Haanen sets out to mend what’s been torn asunder. He works from the idea that, as individuals and as a society, we’re disintegrated  emotionally, relationally, intellectually, and otherwise. A solution? A fully formed embrace of vocation.

The idea is relatively simple: God is in the business of making all things new, and to a lesser degree so are you. Because, argue Chapman and Tafilowski, a full understanding of God’s work in the world reveals his plan for human work — especially how the two fit together.

Everyone dies, we know. Yet few are prepared for death when it comes for a loved one. That’s what happened to journalist and occasional Common Good contributor Whitney Pipkin when her mother received a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Grief both arrived and was yet coming, and Pipkin didn’t find the guidance to help her through.

David Bahnsen is a big voice on work, on television, in the stock market, and behind the scenes with a handful of nonprofits. It’s his life, and in his new book, he suggests work is your life, too. Not the totality of your life, but not an extractable part, either. In Full-Time, Bahnsen suggests that

That the book’s foreword comes from Mark Noll should surprise no one. This new history text forms essentially an American Christianity installment within Noll’s Turning Points universe, established by his ubiquitous book, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity. In Turning Points in American Church History, Elesha J. Coffman of Baylor University offers

In Love Your Neighbor, Ralph Stayer isn’t subtle. He argues forcefully, if at times aggressively, that capitalism is the only economic model that “can end poverty, solve intractable crises, and increase human flourishing.” The book is more or less a sequel to Stayer’s bestseller, Flight of the Buffalo. Stayer is the founder and longtime CEO

All of her stories interact with themes of God, his works and man’s. Her essays, no matter the subject, dwell on theology. And in her new book, Marilynne Robinson the novelist and Robinson the theologian, though never separate, come together unsubtly. In Reading Genesis, Robinson engages the Bible’s literal and literarily foundational text. She writes