Jon Thompson – författare

Includes free streaming access to a corresponding video series.Many Christians and ministry leaders think that much of what Jesus did on earth was because he was God. When we think this, we neglect Scripture where it tells us that Jesus, though always God, deliberately chose to limit his divine attributes and power.Looking at Jesus's life and ministry Thompson asks, "If Jesus chose to limit his divine attributes and power, how did he do all of this?" Here Thompson finds the convergence of three things that should ultimately shape our own lives:Jesus used spiritual disciplines (or practices) to walk with the Father and to develop and learn as we do.Jesus used spiritual gifts (not his inherent power) to carry out his ministry while on earth.Jesus used the promptings he received from the Father and the Spirit to lead his disciples into moments of revival.In Convergence: Spiritual Gifts, Practices, and Unusual Works of the Spirit you will come to realize that Jesus as God come in flesh isn't just our Savior and our Lord; he is also our model for understanding what the normal Christian life should look like.This comprehensive resource aims at understanding the intersection of spiritual gifts (love, word, and power), spiritual disciplines (or practices), and unusual works of the Spirit (revival) in the life of the local church."Convergence is a powerful book. It beautifully weaves together the gifts and the power of the Spirit and the disciplines of the Spirit in a fresh, holistic, and transformative way. I highly recommend this to you." ––Jon Tyson, Senior Pastor of Church of the City, NY and author of Beautiful Resistance"When I first heard Pastor Jon Thompson, dots began to connect in a powerful way and when we sat together later, he spoke about Jesus not just being our Saviour and Lord, but our Model. Spiritual gifts, spiritual disciplines, spiritual experiences––he gave me handles that I had been looking for. This was the word we all need right now." ––Ann Voskamp, author of four New York Times best-selling books, including The Broken Way

Effective evangelism requires we learn to open all the doors of witness.In this very unique moment where the church is experiencing retreat and revival at the same time how do we keep reaching out well? The answer might not what we think.Whether it's a Muslim having a dream about Jesus, a university student listening to a Christian Oxford professor discussing the historical validity of the resurrection, a sick person being loved, cared for, and prayed over by a Christian nurse, a sermon by the preacher, or a deliverance that breaks the power of darkness, the point is that in a pluralistic, multicultural, and socio-economically diverse world, love, word, and power are the keys to crossing the common ground we share with our neighbors.But what does this feel like on the ground?In Presence, Jon Thompson provides practical steps rooted in biblical story that reorient our lenses of evangelism by pointing to the need for the incarnation to once again become the focal point of our thinking and expression in witnessing, enabling us to reach different people and communities at the same time.This powerful and incarnational approach examines the reasons behind our mixed responses to Christian witness and seeks to ensure that our message is clear and unambiguous, addressing the vital truths of who Jesus is, what the gospel is, and their profound impact on identity. Delving into the themes of love, word, and power, readers will discover that Gods desire for the church has always been to be a hospitable, intellectually engaging movement of encounterism.

Modern art, filled with complex themes and subtle characteristics, is a wonder to view, but can be intimidating and baffling to the casual observer. In this accessible, practical guide, Jon Thompson analyses more than 200 works of modern art, describing each artist’s use of media and symbolism to help the reader unlock the painting’s meaning. The book also offers biographical information on all the featured artists.

'After Paradise: Essays on the Fate of American Writing' lays bare the richness of classic American texts and their fraught relationship with what Jon Thompson sees as a culture of violence and war. Focusing on William Bradford's 'Of Plymouth Plantation', Herman Melville's 'Bartleby the Scrivener', Walt Whitman's 'Specimen Days', Emily Dickinson's 'Letters' and Michael Herr's 'Dispatches', 'After Paradise' offers a series of moving, interconnected reflections upon what Thompson calls "the fate of American writing." Part cultural reflection, part lyrical criticism, part idiosyncratic literary history, After Paradise attempts to restore a sense of the original strangeness of American literature and culture by pushing the boundaries of the essay form.

Studies in Classic American Literature [...] is at once a work of cultural criticism, a study and critique of American myths, a meditation on the relationship between the Old World and the New, a new theory of the self, a theory of textuality (and a fearless demonstration of a radical, self-styled form of psycho-social criticism), a theory of art, a history of America, a critique of the Enlightenment and one of the greatest covert autobiographies in world literature (all the writers in the book represent either versions of Lawrence's self or versions of himself he felt he had to liberate). And, of course, it is a bravura interpretation of "classic" American texts, one of the most innovative and penetrating critical performances of modern times. -from Jon Thompson's Introduction.

Otherworldly, uncanny, melancholy, there like the past, like the present, the place (not the people) remains: a glimpse, a flicker, a trick of light that excavates the dark, the endless accretion of shadows. What is to be found there? "Desire like a dream of paradise." Ekphrasis is rarely this eclectic, this moving. - Eric Pankey

"In Strange Country Jon Thompson addresses the voices, amongst others, of 'the traffic of fear', and bids their speakers join the living. It is also an invitation to the reader to enter a specifically American poetry of the here-and-now. The accomplishment of Strange Country begins with the exact measure of its line and its discovered idiom in the face of what may well be termed the present contradictions of a strange country. What sustains that accomplishment is a poet's attention to a 'wide-open polyphony' equal to the multiple realities of its subject." - Kelvin Corcoran

Organized around three sequences of numbered tercets, Notebook of Last Things maps a city undergoing dynamic, transformative change along with the sense of living that change-its rhythms and patterns, its peculiar commitments, its urgencies and pleasures as well as its inequalities, tensions, and fateful "unsaids." Possessed by the drama of the ephemerality of experience, tuned into the drift of the present, Notebook of Last Things draws on the lyric to meditate on the present, and the powers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, that make it up."Notebook of Last Things is written in dialogue with (or in counterpoint to) Walter Benjamin's Angel of History and his/her/its "unreadable tally of catastrophe." Thompson has an eagle eye for the rips and fissures destroying our social fabric, for the discrepancies that seem ironic and then reveal themselves as tragic, the "Art Deco walkway over the beltline/[ with a] Chain link fence to discourage jumpers." In the quality of his attention, he could be a minimalist version of Ron Silliman or a Basho-inflected George Oppen. His steady gaze is well worth following." -Rae Armantrout

"Intense questioning marks the poems of this deeply engaging collection as it addresses the separations between aspects of the self, between past and present, between one's ideals and the actual world: 'the struggle to find words for what's happened to the country that grows more unfamiliar with time.' Death, war, loss, and confusion run through complex poems that also evoke the contrary in mountains and trees and flowers - the in-betweenness of experience is very much a motif here. The strength of these poems is their clarity and surety while addressing complex issues and the often painful nature of current life. The poems are also deeply aware that all we have to think with is language and the book captures both the slipperiness and beauty of language: 'sentences running together the vowels in a wet shimmer.' With sharp intelligence, The Distances calibrates the distances that separate and haunt us." -Martha Ronk