The Mountain District Primitive Baptist Association enfolds churches in four counties in the Blue Ridge Mountains-North Carolina's Ashe and Allegheny counties and Virginia's Grayson and Carroll counties. Primitive Baptists are found throughout the United States and are related to the Strict and Particular Baptists of the United Kingdom. They are Calvinists, adhering to the theologies of John Calvin, John Bunyan, and British theologians such as Henry Philpott. As Calvinists, they teach predestination-that before the creation of the Earth, God chose who would be saved and damned. No one knows who is which and no one can change this destiny. Originally published in 1989, Pilgrims of Paradox is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s. Despite what may seem a fatalistic doctrine, Peacock and Tyson show that the Primitive Baptists of this region live vigorous, sturdy lives marked by self-sufficiency and caring for their community. They also inspire others in the area with the beauty of their hymns and ""discourses"" and by accomplishments bounded by humility.

Melody Maxwell's "The Woman I Am "analyzes the traditional, progressive, and potential roles female Southern Baptist writers and editors portrayed for Southern Baptist women from 1906 to 2006, particularly in the area of missions.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) represents the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, yet Southern Baptist women's voices have been underreported in studies of American religion and culture. In The Woman I Am, Melody Maxwell explores how female Southern Baptist writers and editors in the twentieth century depicted changing roles for women and responded to the tensions that arose as Southern Baptist women assumed leadership positions, especially in the areas of missions and denominational support.
Given access to a century of primary sources and archival documents, Maxwell writes, as did many of her subjects, in a style that deftly combines the dispassionate eye of an observer with the multidimensional grasp of a participant. She examines magazines published by Woman's Missionary Union (WMU), an auxiliary to the "SBC: Our Mission Fields "(1906-1914), " Royal Service" (1914-1995), "Contempo" (1970-1995), and "Missions Mosaic" (1995-2006). In them, she traces how WMU writers and editors perceived, constructed, and expanded the lives of southern women.
Showing ingenuity and resiliency, these writers and editors continually, though not always consciously, reshaped their ideal of Christian womanhood to better fit the new paths open to women in American culture and Southern Baptist life. Maxwell's work demonstrates that Southern Baptists have transformed their views on biblically sanctioned roles for women over a relatively short historical period.
How Southern Baptist women perceive women's roles in their churches, homes, and the wider world is of central importance to readers interested in religion, society, and gender in the United States. "The Woman I Am" is a tour de force that makes a lasting contribution to the world's understanding of Southern Baptists and to their understanding of themselves.

Coinciding with the four-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Baptist movement, this book explores and assesses the cultural sources of Baptist beliefs and practices. Although the movement has been embraced, enriched, and revised by numerous cultural heritages, the Baptist movement has focused on a small group of Anglo exiles in Amsterdam in constructing its history and identity. Robert E. Johnson seeks to recapture the varied cultural and theological sources of Baptist tradition and to give voice to the diverse global elements of the movement that have previously been excluded or marginalized. With an international communion of over 110 million persons in more than 225,000 congregations, Baptists constitute the world's largest aggregate of evangelical Protestants. This work offers insight into the diversity, breadth, and complexity of the cultural influences that continue to shape Baptist identity today.

This volume of essays focuses on the thought of John Gill, the doyen of High Calvinism in the transatlantic Baptist community of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Among the topics covered are Gill's trinitarian theology, his soteriological views, his Baptist ecclesiology, and his use of Scripture. Other papers are more focused, examining, for instance, his clash with the Arminian Methodist leader John Wesley over the issues of predestination and election, a clash that decisively shaped Wesley's perspective on Calvinism.
The tercentennial of Gill's birth in 1997 is a fitting occasion to issue this study of a man whose systematic theology and exposition of the Old and New Testaments formed the mainstay of many eighteenth-century Baptist ministers' libraries and who has never been the subject of a major critical study.