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About Brazos Press

As legend has it, Brazos is the Spanish name explorers gave to a prominent Texas river upon seeing how its winding water sustained fertile soil in an arid land. They christened this life-giving channel the Brazos River, the "arms of God." True to our name, we seek to be faithful to the wide and deep embrace of God, publishing out of and to all the major streams of the historic Christian tradition. At both the popular and academic levels, we publish books by evangelical, Roman Catholic, Protestant mainline, and Eastern Orthodox authors. Our authors engage such topics as spirituality, the arts, the economy, popular culture, theology, biblical studies, the social sciences, and more.
 
Our logo connotes a river with multiple currents all flowing in the same direction, just as the major streams of the Christian tradition are various but all surging from and to the same God. The logo's three "streams" also reflect the Trinitarian God who lives and gives life at the heart of all true Christian faith.

Brazos Press: The Tradition Alive

The onset of the twenty-first century finds the Western world in the midst of transition at a seismic level: from Christendom to post-Christendom, from industrialism to post-industrialism, from modernity to postmodernity, from colonial hegemony to multicultural pluralism, and so forth. It is at the same time a period of the rediscovery and reaffirmation of classical, creedal, and confessional Christianity. Some find the current ferment chaotic and threatening. While recognizing the gravity of the ongoing "culture wars," Brazos Press responds constructively in a setting of monumental flux and transition.

Brazos Press seeks as authors scholars and thinkers capitalizing on and promoting the rediscovery and reaffirmation of classical Christianity. Our books encourage Christians to speak as Christians in and to the public square and to extend the vital roots of the ancient Christian tradition into the twenty-first century.

Our chosen name, Brazos Press, resonates on all these counts. As legend has it, Brazos is the Spanish name explorers gave to a prominent southwestern river upon seeing how its winding water sustained fertile soil amidst scrub-brush land. They christened this life-giving stream the Brazos River, "the arms of God." It denotes the wide-open, inviting embrace of God, always big enough to contain the complexities of diverse human experience. As Anglicized Spanish, Brazos represents the meeting and mingling of two cultures and so, indirectly, the multicultural and transnational composition of the church. As the name of a river, it calls to mind the surging currents of a waterway, headed in a common direction yet ever moving, crossing existing borders and itself defining new ones. And as the Brazos River flows from fertile to arid regions of the Southwest, Brazos Press embraces an affinity with the ancient desert fathers, recognizing with them that the work of the church can flourish at the margins, as Christians are pushed out of the centers of worldly power.

Unapologetic Theology

Brazos Press is a publisher of unapologetic theology and theologically-based cultural criticism, grounded in and growing out of the Great Tradition common to Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anabaptist, confessionally oriented mainline Protestant, and Protestant evangelical Christianity.

By unapologetic theology, we mean a theology that is distinctly, particularly, and unashamedly Christian and considers no other narrative or tradition more basic to its identity than the Christian narrative and tradition. Brazos understands theology as an intellectual but also as a practical endeavor. Christian theology is life lived, known, reflected on, and cherished in the light of the revelation of the God known in Israel and in Jesus Christ. Thus theology is sometimes (and necessarily) specialized, erudite, and conceptually rigorous. But behavior and thought are no less theological when the comprehensive Christian endeavor is extended into such areas as pastoral care, politics, social action, the popular and fine arts, worship, and economics. Brazos Press is inspired by and draws on a rich variety of contemporary thinkers and practitioners who base their work on just such an unapologetic theology. In brief, unapologetic theology might be defined as theology that is radically and constructively Christian, practiced in keen awareness that centuries-old traditions of modernity are now exhausted and dying. (It is especially well-represented in the schools of thought labeled postliberalism and postconservative evangelicalism, the newly emerging movement of radical orthodoxy, and in many Roman Catholic circles.)

In the sense that modernity is near or past its limits, we live in a postmodern world. But it is also, in North America and Europe, a post-Christian world, in that Christian institutions and customs are no longer assumed as foundational to the general social, political, and cultural order. In this setting, the Western church can depend less than it has on its host societies for the Christian formation of its members. Yet again, we live in a post-secular world in which the secular gods of scientism and inevitable moral and material progress are exposed to corrosive suspicion and criticism. All these developments make the present a time ripe for profound creativity, supple rethinking, and imaginative redefinition. In this welter, Brazos Press seeks not merely to serve as a gatekeeping publisher, bound to one or another status quo, but to help shape and promote serious and constructive conversation on the most important questions of the day.

In short, Brazos Press is staked on the discernment that while various existing Christian categories (liberal and conservative, mainline and evangelical, even Catholic and Protestant) prove increasingly unserviceable, there is at the same time occurring a robust renewal of classical, orthodox Christianity across many of the old lines or borders. Brazos Press exists to encourage and stimulate that renewal--across ecclesial lines, across the stubborn boundaries separating academic disciplines, across ethnic borders, and across the specious division of high (or elite) and low (or popular) culture. At the same time, we are mindful of the necessity of institutions for keeping Christian traditions alive in and through history. So Brazos also exists to encourage and stimulate renewal within given, concrete traditions. We do not promote a kind of abstract theological Esperanto, but come alongside Roman Catholic, mainline, and evangelical churches, schools, and other institutions to aid them in being more faithfully and thoroughly Catholic, mainline, or evangelical.

Theologically-Based Cultural Criticism

The commitment of Brazos Press to publishing both within and across boundaries signals its intention to serve the church across the breadth of its mission to and for the world. Because the church has a crucial witness to offer in all the arenas of human endeavor, Brazos does not restrict its publishing to books by theologians and biblical scholars, or academics in general.

This is what it means to say that Brazos Press publishes unapologetic theology and theologically-based cultural criticism. We agree with Raymond Williams that culture is one of the most complex words in the English language--and for good reason. Culture is nothing less than ways of life; it is ways of thinking, feeling, dreaming, acting on, organizing, categorizing, and understanding all human experience. So, as the anthropologist Renato Rosaldo declares, "Culture encompasses the everyday and the esoteric, the mundane and the elevated, the ridiculous and the sublime. Neither high nor low, culture is all-pervasive."

Accordingly, cultural criticism in the sense intended here includes critical thought on political issues and policy, arts considered "popular" or "fine," media, economic issues, historical studies, and much else. The focus of our publishing comes not from restriction to certain academic disciplines or predetermined market demographics or ideological identifications, but from the theological basis for engagement and criticism of all sorts of cultures and cultural manifestations. That theological basis, again, is one of unapologetic Christian particularity--but not thereby limiting or "sectarian," since Christian mission is to the entire world and Christians in fact inhabit all kinds of human conditions.

Based in Catholic and Evangelical Christianity

The theological basis of Brazos Press is lent substance by its grounding in the Great Tradition of catholic and evangelical Christianity. Thus Brazos affirms the necessity and riches of tradition. But we do not understand tradition as something static, monolithic, and determined once-for-all. Rather, Brazos embraces tradition in the MacIntyrean sense of tradition as living and dynamic--a "socially embodied argument" extended over time. Accordingly, Brazos is concerned with how the living tradition that is Christianity engages, influences, and adapts to contemporary issues, debates, and concerns.

Brazos affirms and emphasizes particularly the following roots and sources as integral to the Great Tradition of catholic and evangelical faith:

• Holy Scripture
• The apostolic regula fidei (rule of faith) for interpreting and embodying that biblical taproot
• The ancient and creedal catholic church--especially of the first five centuries--which developed and extended the regula fidei for Christian faith and practice
• The evangelicalism of the Reformation and Radical Reformation, understood not as a rejection of the catholic, or historical, whole, and universal church, but as a renewal, recovery and "retraditioning" of that church
• The confessional Christianity of the modern era, which nurtured and hearkened back to the particularities of this catholic and evangelical tradition even in the face of the severe challenges of the Enlightenment
• And now, Christian movements and schools of thought that seek to respond to the profound transitions of our time by claiming and extending this biblical, apostolic, catholic, evangelical tradition amid the particularities and exigencies of our time

We are convinced there already exists a large pool of writers sympathetic to the grounding purposes and aims of Brazos Press. We know many authors are, in fact, weary of existing categories and wish their work would not be limited, say, only to evangelical or only mainline Protestant readers. Like Brazos Press, they are eager to cross borders.
Interested authors should address proposals or queries to:

Rodney Clapp
Editorial Director Brazos Press
P.O. Box 4287
Wheaton, IL 60187
rclapp@brazospress.com

The Brazos Press Editorial Advisory Board

A.K.M. Adam, Seabury Western-Theological Seminary
Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Kalamazoo Christian College
M. Craig Barnes, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Frederick Bauerschmidt, Loyola College in Maryland
Michael Budde, DePaul University
William Cavanaugh, University of St. Thomas
Ellen Charry, Princeton Theological Seminary
David Cunningham, Hope College
Stanley Grenz, Carey/Regent College
Christopher Hall, Eastern University
Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
Willie James Jennings, Duke University
Sylvia Keesmaat, The Institute for Christian Studies
Philip Kenneson, Milligan College
J. Richard Middleton, Roberts Wesleyan College
Nancey Murphy, Fuller Theological Seminary
William Placher, Wabash College
Vince Rocchio, Lawrence, Massachusetts
Brian Walsh, University of Toronto
John Wright, Point Loma Nazarene University
Scott Young, InterVarsity Campus Ministry, University of Southern California