On Brokenness and Restoration (2023)

Plantak, Zdravko, ed. Restored!: Mediating Wholeness in a Broken World. Westlake Village, CA: Oak and Akorn, 2023. 354 pp.

“The world is, without a shadow of a doubt, broken. We can see it and testify to its brokenness in personal, communal, relational, and environmental ways, both locally and globally. One only needs to see the morning news to be convinced that we are not living in a peaceful world, a world without pain and suffering. Death, illness, disasters, and wars increase around us—and are very close to home for many of us. Divisions in politics and in social relations remind us daily that suffering and pain are too familiar to ignore.
Members of the Adventist Society for Religious Studies (ASRS)decided to address such issues from their respective disciplines. In November 2022, they met in Denver, Colorado, at the annual ASRS conference to share their papers; to invite a robust conversation about the obviously malfunctioning world, ancient and contemporary; to see how God has desired to restore the brokenness and chaos; and to ask how we may be involved as participants in such wholeness-building. They now share those presentations in a more formal way through this book.
Contributors to this volume offer a polyphony of voices coming from various perspectives and disciplines within religious studies—from theological, historical, ethical, philosophical, and practical theology—and explore through multiple genres the importance of the wholeness that God desires and what it may look like in a broken world. These are not utopian or programmatic essays; rather, they are attempts to paint a picture of what God intends for the suffering and imperfect world here and now and how we can become more motivated to participate with God in such restoration.”

Description from Amazon.com.

A book review was published by Spectrum Magazine, 22 December 2023.