In this new biography, students will follow Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu from her humble Albanian birth to worldwide celebrity as Mother Teresa. The nun who attended to the dying and diseased in Calcutta, India, and established her Missionaries of Charity around the world is revealed to have a singular determination from a young age. As a woman in the patriarchal Catholic system, she had to prove to the hierarchy, even the Vatican, that she was capable of handling each project she proposed. Her vision to live and work among the poorest of the poor as one of them led to the founding of a new order that tended to society's outcasts. The narrative chronicles the expansion and success of the order and the eventual attention that was showered on her efforts. This increasing attention led to scrutiny and criticism of ideology, methods of care, and financing. Why did she reject better medical equipment for her patients yet receive the latest treatment and best care when she herself was ailing? Why did she take money from and try to help Charles Keating, a major player in the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s? The accusation of hypocrisy, among others, are discussed as is her controversial beatification. Readers will be challenged to consider for themselves whether Mother Teresa deserves to be sainted. Mother Teresa is characterized as being ordinary and her life as mundane. The biography suggests that she transcended her ordinariness with a singular belief that she was called to life's work. When this work brought fame, which she never sought, she used it to further her causes. In a global age, celebrity worship allowed her to work the system. She became an icon of service and selflessness, but her human flaws remained behind the saintliness.

The Budapest Scottish Mission with its two-fold aim, mission to the Jews and initiating an Evangelical revival in the largest Protestant body had played a remarkable, decisive and unique role in the « long 19th century of the Hungarian Kingdom. This study focuses on how the Scottish Mission implanted British Evangelicalism, German Pietism, voluntary organisations such as YMCA, IFES, WSCF, Sunday School, Women's Guild, social outreach, medical missions, home mission, personal piety, concepts of mission and evangelisation through their Scottish Presbyterianism into Hungary. The study presents the interaction of Scottish Presbyterians, Orthodox, Neolog (Reform and Conservative) and Status Quo Ante Jews of Hungary, and the Hungarian Reformed Protestants. It also discusses their attitudes to conversion, mission, proselytising, education, assimilation, and nationalism. While discussing the Mission's aims, the book pays careful attention to church, institutional, and religious histories. In addition to these, local theologies, ideologies and world-views of the people are scrutinized. Through these issues this study introduces the reader to the daily life of a multicultural community gathered around the Scottish community.

Social movements inspired by powerful ideological beliefs continue to define global and national politics. In Yugoslavia, civil war is justified in the name of religion and ethnic identity. The Arab-Israeli conflict rages on, fuelled on either side by a conviction of indisputable ideological truth. Closer to home, American religious organizations consistently challenge political authority in the name of a higher morality. Existing theories either ignore the role of religion in social movement formation or discredit the claim that religious convictions can directly lead adherents to engage in political action. Through a detailed analysis of American and British evangelical Christians, J. Christopher Soper here demonstrates that religious commitments were, in fact, crucial in promoting political activism in both countries. Evangelical Christianity in the United States and Great Britain is the first book to provide such a comparative perspective.

Focussing on the temperance movement and the politics of abortion, Soper highlights the similarities, and equally intriguing differences, between British and American political/evangelical structures. Using interviews and literature gathered from evangelical organizations on both sides of the Atlantic, he paints a fascinating picture of a hitherto neglected aspect of social movement theory. Evangelical Christianity in the United States and Great Britain is an invaluable new resource for scholars of religious studies, political science and sociology alike. Soper provides a unique model with which to view a dominant political trend: the mobilization of collective action groups around a set of powerful beliefs. His research can thus be applied beyond the boundaries of his chosen topic, and will be an important contribution to the study of any movement in which ideology assumes a significant role.

This book brings together lectures and articles by the renowned historian of world Christianity, making them available, many for the first time, to scholars and students of world mission. While examining the many aspects that have characterized mission, indigenous Christianity, and colonialism in modern Africa, The Missionary Movement in Christian History has a far broader reach. Essays such as "The Gospel as the Prisoner and Liberator of Culture" reveal the paradoxes of the Christian movement as a whole in discussing how different primitive Mediterranean Christianity is from early Catholicism, from Celtic monasticism, from Reformation Protestantism, and from Nigerian Spirit Christianity. Andrew Walls shows how the central question for Christianity has always been one of identity in many different forms, a phenomenon revealed at each stage of its history by the missionary movement. What this means for theology, however, has hardly been explored. This is the subtext of Walls' work, providing extraordinary insights and successful counters to secular critiques of world Christianity.

In The Great Omission, respected missions thinker Robertson McQuilkin answers the question, "How is it--with so many unreached peoples, there are so few Christians going?" He investigates the reasons so few attempt to carry the message of Christ to the multitudes who have never heard of him. Not only is McQuilkin well-versed on trends and strategies in world missions, he also knows how to present the challenge of world evangelism in an unforgettable way.

The Emerging Church movement developed in the mid-1990s among primarily white, urban, middle-class pastors and laity who were disenchanted with America's conservative Evangelical sub-culture. It is a response to the increasing divide between conservative Evangelicals and concerned critics who strongly oppose what they consider overly slick, corporate, and consumerist versions of faith. A core feature of their response is a challenge to traditional congregational models, often focusing on new church plants and creating networks of related house churches. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, James S. Bielo explores the impact of the Emerging Church movement on American Evangelicals. He combines ethnographic analysis with discussions of the movement's history, discursive contours, defining practices, cultural logics, and contentious interactions with conservative Evangelical critics to rethink the boundaries of "Evangelical" as a category. Ultimately, Bielo makes a novel contribution to our understanding of the important changes at work among American Protestants, and illuminates how Emerging Evangelicals interact with the cultural conditions of modernity, late modernity, and visions of "postmodern" Christianity.

We are enamored with stories about cops, but rarely do we get a chance to walk in the shoes of one while reading about the personal and spiritual battles waged when one is fighting crime. Jim's narrative will pull you into the moment of each crisis. These stories are the material of movies but they happened in real life. Jim will weave his experiences into the truth taught in Scripture. Whether or not you are part of the law enforcement community, you will be entertained by the adventures. Regardless of your relationship with Christ, you will be challenged to do something with the claims made by Jesus. There is engaging action in this book, but the serious purpose is that it will serve as a challenging devotional guide and bring you closer to Christ.

A 2001 Christianity Today Award of Merit winner "Arguably, the church's greatest challenge in the next century will be the problem of the scandal of particularity. More than ever before, Christians will need to explain why they follow Jesus and not the Buddha or Confucius or Krishna or Muhammed. But if, while relating their faith to the faiths, Christians treat non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church's message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism. "Recent evangelical introductions to the problem of other religions have built commendably on foundations laid by J. N. D. Anderson and Stephen Neill. Anderson and Neill opened up the "heathen" worlds to the evangelical West, showing that many non-Christians also seek salvation and have personal relationships with their gods. In the last decade Clark Pinnock and John Sanders have argued for an inclusivist understanding of salvation, and Harold Netland has shed new light on the question of truth in the religions. Yet no evangelicals have focused--as nonevangelicals Keith Ward, Diana Eck and Paul Knitter have done--on the revelatory value of truth in non-Christian religions. Anderson and Neill showed that there are limited convergences between Christian and non-Christian traditions, and Pinnock has argued that there might be truths Christians can learn from religious others. But as far as I know, no evangelicals have yet examined the religions in any sort of substantive way for what Christians can learn without sacrificing, as Knitter and John Hick do, the finality of Christ. "This book is the beginning of an evangelical theology of the religions that addresses not the question of salvation but the problem of truth and revelation, and takes seriously the normative claims of other traditions. It explores the biblical propositions that Jesus is the light that enlightens every person (Jn 1:9) and that God has not left Himself without a witness among non-Christian traditions (Acts 14:17). It argues that if Saint Augustine learned from Neo-Platonism to better understand the gospel, if Thomas Aquinas learned from Aristotle to better understand the Scriptures, and if John Calvin learned from Renaissance humanism, perhaps evangelicals may be able to learn from the Buddha--and other great religious thinkers and traditions--things that can help them more clearly understand God's revelation in Christ. It is an introductory word in a conversation that I hope will go much further among evangelicals." (Gerald McDermott, in the introduction toCan Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?

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Read the Introduction.

aEspecially valuable for religious studies and womenas studies scholars and sociologists of religion interested in gender and/or women in religious movements.a
--"Nova Religios"

"It is the trend in scholarship these days to argue that women find empowerment in restriction. Ingersoll argues, however, that an alternative interpretation may be that subordinate living may empower a form of relational power."
--"Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion"

"The feminist resistance [Ingersoll] documents, if able to assert itself, could have profound consequences not only for evangelical women but for the rest of us as well, by opening up the door for a detente in our current culture wars."--"The Women's Review of Books"

aIngersoll has done the sociology of religion an enormous service by providing a more nuanced description of the ongoing personal and institutional struggles of the minority of conservative Protestants who identify themselves both evangelical and feminist.a."-- Sally K. Gallagher, Oregon State University

"This highly accessible book should be required reading across all denominations."
--"Christianity Today"

Evangelical Christian Women draws on two years of ethnographic research nationwide to shed new light on the gender conflict faced by women in evangelical Christianity. Julie Ingersoll goes beyond previous attempts to find avenues of empowerment for fundamentalist women to offer a more nuanced look at the challenges they face when they occupy positions of leadership which violate traditional gender norms. She looks where other studies do not--at women who, while remaining entrenched in andcommitted to evangelical Christianity, are also resisting accepted gender roles.

Evangelical Christian Women offers a look at conservative women who challenge gender norms within their religious traditions, the fallout they experience as part of the ensuing conflict, and the significance of the conflict over gender for the development and character of culture. In the face of a growing number of scholarly studies of conservative religious women that argue that submission is somehow "really" empowerment, this book seeks to get at the other side of the story; to document and explore the experiences of the women caught in the middle of the conservative Christian culture war over gender.

"No other man in history was so mightily used of God in revival as Asahel Nettleton. He labored amidst more revivals of religion than Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield One can learn much about how God moves in revival by studying Nettleton's life, therefore this book will be a useful tool for any serious student of revival. Secondly, the role that Nettleton played as a defender of the faith against the 'New Measures' and the 'New Haven Theology' reveals how theology in America shifted from its Puritan roots of Calvinism to a more Federalized man-centered theology" (from Introduction by author E.A. Johnston).