Nurturing the Nations

by Stan Guthrie

Our world is filled with nations that are impoverished largely because half of their people—the female population—are disenfranchised. But this is not just a book about women; it is a book that deals with the intersection of three seemingly very different women, poverty, and world view.
Nurturing the Nations explains how the ideas that societies embrace create healthy or impoverished cultures and supports that theory with information regarding domestic violence, murder, and pornography. The book addresses one of the greatest causes of worldwide poverty, the lie that men are superior to women. In noting that the world view of a culture frames how it understands women and men, various paradigms are studied, such as Hinduism and Animism, showing how they lead to the abuse and hatred of women.
This topic cannot be addressed without studying the Trinity as a model for male-female relationships. Servanthood, submission, and the transcendence of sexuality are all discussed based on the idea that male and female were created equal in being, but different in function. The book concludes with a look at the history of women in the Old and New Testament—how they were established as the co-laborers of men in the development of creation and the liberating challenge Jesus issued to the sexist culture of his day.
Nurturing the Nations is for Christians who are interested in the issue of poverty; missionaries; relief and development workers; and Christians who are working with poor and abused women.

275 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2008

About the author

Stan Guthrie is an editor at large for Christianity Today magazine and hosts a weekly podcast with John Wilson of Books & Culture. Stan writes for BreakPoint.org and ChristianHeadlines.com and is author of All That Jesus Asks, A Concise Guide to Bible Prophecy, and Missions in the Third Millennium. He is coauthor of The Sacrament of Evangelism. He lives near Chicago.