Roger Bowen – författare

Preaching can be an extremely daunting experience for many but is an essential part of any service or Christian occasion. It is so important for the preacher to engage with their listeners and present their message clearly. A Guide to Preaching will do just that - an authoritative, comprehensive yet immensely readable book containing a treasure chest of facts, styles, inspiration and lively examples from around the world for old hands or those new to preaching. A Guide to Preaching covers every aspect of the task of preaching, from planning a sermon that takes account of biblical, personal, church and liturgical background through to using stories, imagination, dialogue, drama, news bulletins and much more. An entire chapter is devoted to developing the skills of rhetoric, and it includes plenty of practical advice and examples to help you understand, develop and review your own style. Roger Bowen has edited this guide with contributions from David Edwards, David Gitari, Simea Meldrum, Esther Mombo and Vinoth Ramachandra. ""This is a helpful book from which most preachers will learn something."" Stella Mills, Rural Theology (vol. 5, issue 68)

'If God is on our side, who is against us? - Nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus' - ("Romans" 8.9). "Paul's letter to the Romans" contains some of the most uplifting passages in the New Testament. But it is also a book of vital importance for Christians today seeking to understand and live out their faith. This new edition of Roger Bowen's classic Study Guide offers a lively, helpful and relevant commentary on the letter. Thoroughly revised and updated, the new Guide should continue to be an essential resource for anyone reading Romans for years to come. As with other titles in the series, there are study suggestions and activities at the end of each chapter, suitable for individual work or group discussion.

The ashes of Herbert Norman now lie in the British cemetery at Rome, near those of Shelley and Keats. His distinguished life and tragic death, in April 1957, are recalled and examined in this book by scholars and diplomats from four countries-the United States, Japan, Canada, and Britain.Born in rural Japan the son of a Canadian missionary, Herbert Norman studied at the University of Toronto and went in 1933 to Cambridge University on a scholarship. There, in that intellectual hothouse where it seemed one had to choose politically between communism and fascism as the future of the West, he joined the Communist party-a move that became a crime later in the fixed and ‘sightless’ (as the editor describes them) eyes of his American accusers.According to Edwin Reischauer, later the US ambassador to Japan, ‘his harassment by the American government was unforgiveable.’ His suicide in Cairo, while Canadian ambassador to Nasser’s Egypt during and after the delicate times of the Suez Crisis and the establishment of the UN peace-keeping force, raised broader questions for Lester Pearson-‘the right, to say nothing of the propriety, of a foreign government to intervene’ in Canadian affairs.Norman was also a renowned historian of Japan. His Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State has been called a classic, and between 1946 and 1950, as head of the Canadian Liaison Mission in Tokyo, he was a close and friendly adviser to General Douglas MacArthur in his efforts to reconstitute that country. Both this work and his writings on Japan were sympathetic to human freedoms and democracy, and they too became controversial as sides congealed in the Cold War. Five papers in this book assess Norman’s scholarly work in the historiography of Japan.Four lecture papers by Norman (three previously unpublished) are included which show his change from ‘a doctrinaire Marxist to a Jeffersonian Liberal,’ a change historians can accept as fact whereas intelligence agencies could not and remade Norman into a communist. He was not a spy, the editor concludes, and should be remembered as the hero of a modern tragedy.