Study Guides by
Brennan Manning
2 discussion guides available
Abba's Child
Brennan Manning's Abba's Child is a soul-searching invitation to abandon the exhausting performance of the "impostor" — the false self we construct to earn love, manage impressions, and hide our brokenness — and to rest instead in the radical, unearned love of God the Father. Drawing on Scripture, the desert fathers and mothers, contemplative prayer, and his own hard-won experience of grace, Manning argues that the single most transforming truth a person can internalize is this: God loves you as you are, not as you should be. The title comes from the Aramaic word Abba — the intimate, tender address Jesus used for his Father — and Manning contends that claiming our identity as Abba's children is not spiritual sentiment but the most courageous and countercultural act a broken human being can make.
View Discussion GuideThe Ragamuffin Gospel
Brennan Manning's The Ragamuffin Gospel is a passionate, unflinching meditation on the grace of God — a grace so extravagant, so unconditional, and so scandalous that most of us spend our lives half-believing it. Manning's central thesis is simple but revolutionary: God's love for us is not earned, managed, or maintained by our performance. It is freely given to the bedraggled, the beat-up, and the burnt-out — to ragamuffins. The book is both a theological argument and a personal confession, drawing on Manning's own struggle with alcoholism, self-contempt, and the long journey toward receiving rather than just preaching grace. It challenges the comfortable Christianity of the respectable and invites broken people to sit down at the table they feared they'd been excluded from.
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