A blend of understandable explanations and real-life stories. "Why I Am a Lutheran explores the foundational teachings of the Christian church. In each chapter, Daniel Preus calls upon more than 20 years of pastoral experience to reveal Jesus as the center of the Christian faith. As he addresses central doctrines such as sin and grace, Law and Gospel, the person and work of Jesus Christ, worship, the Sacraments, and the office of the ministry, Preus keeps the focus on Jesus Christ--who is "always and only at the center of all Christian teaching."

This 2nd edition of Gathered Guests explores the elements that compose the broad category of Lutheran worship, including the historic nature of and current structure of the Divine Service, prayer offices, and festival, and occasional services used in the Church; the combination of music, the arts, and worship; and the role of liturgy, rite, and ceremony in the Divine Service. Special features include: glossary and topical and Scripture indexes, targeted information for lectors and worship leaders, and family and small-group devotional outlines

Barnett traces the Christian critique of the Church and its history in Protestant (English) and Catholic (Italian) thought from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. More than 150 years of bitter polemic between the two great confessions and their religious dissidents produced an unprecedented, comparative historical and sociological anticlericalism. In the last decades of the 17th century, English dissenting thought was pregnant with a critique of the Church, which came to be termed the "Deist" view of Church history: by 1700 the cornerstone of high "Enlightenment anticlerical thought" was in ascent. This work is intended for departments of history (courses in early modern European history, intellectual history), religious studies and philosophy.

This Volume explores the enormous impact the ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades: secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos - the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life - came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. This text demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history.

This book about Luther's theology is written out of a two-fold conviction. First, that many of our problems have arisen because we have not really understood our own traditions, especially in the case of Luther; and second, that there is still a lot of help for us in someone like Luther if we take the trouble to probe beneath the surface. It is an attempt to interpret Luther's theology for our own day. The fundamental theme of the book is the "down-to-earth" character of Luther's theology. In using this theme, Forde points out that we have failed to understand the basic thrust or direction of Luther's theology and that this failure has caused and is still causing us grief. Modern scholarship has demonstrated that Luther simply did not share the views on the nature of faith and salvation that subsequent generations have foisted upon him and used to interpret his thinking. This book attempts to bring the results of some of that scholarship to light and make it more accessible to those who are searching for answers today. The central questions of Christianity are examined in this fresh restatement of Luther's thought--the God-man relationship, the cross, the sacraments, this world and the next, and the role of the church. The author presents the "down-to-earth" character of Luther's theology in the hope that it will help individual Christians today to be both faithful to God and true to their human and social responsibilities.

"A good time to be the church is right now," declares Bishop H. George Anderson. Rather than lamenting the lost influence of the church or dreaming of some golden age, Christians can see the spiritual hunger of our time as a special opportunity to speak and act boldly. Solidly grounded in the Bible and Christian history, and keenly aware of contemporary issues, the Lutheran bishop identifies Christian truths that are especially needed in our time. He recalls his own spiritual journey and encourages readers to tell their faith stories. In an engaging question-and- answer format, Anderson helps readers clarify their own beliefs and discover ways to share the Christian faith with others. With questions for reflection and discussion, along with suggested prayers and hymns, this book is a stimulating study guide for congregations, church councils, evangelism committees, and other Christian groups.

The religion of Orange politics offers an in-depth anthropological account of the Orange Order in Scotland. Based on ethnographic research collected before, during, and after the Scottish independence referendum, Joseph Webster details how Scotland's largest Protestant-only fraternity shapes the lives of its members and the communities in which they live. Within this Masonic-inspired 'society with secrets', Scottish Orangemen learn how transform themselves and their fellow brethren into what they regard to be ideal British citizens. It is from this ethnographic context - framed by ritual initiations, loyalist marches, fraternal drinking, and constitutional campaigning - that the key questions of the book emerge: What is the relationship between fraternal love and sectarian hate? Can religiously motivated bigotry and exclusion be part of human experiences of 'The Good?' What does it mean to claim that one's religious community is utterly exceptional - a literal 'race apart'? -- .

Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds. Shakespeare's achievement, accomplished for the English stage by a translation of the Italian grotesque, was to display for audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible: you didn't have to read it.

This Volume explores the enormous impact the ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades: secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos - the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life - came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. This text demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

This book brings together Methodist scholars and reflective practitioners from around the world to consider how emerging practices of mission and evangelism shape contemporary theologies of mission. Engaging contemporary issues including migration, nationalism, climate change, postcolonial contexts, and the growth of the Methodist church in the Global South, this book examines multiple forms of mission, including evangelism, education, health, and ministries of compassion. A global group of contributors discusses mission as no longer primarily a Western activity but an enterprise of the entire church throughout the world. This volume will be of interest to researchers studying missiology, evangelism, global Christianity, and Methodism and to students of Methodism and mission.

Puppet, Protestant partisan, or Erasmian humanist: which, if any, was Thomas Cranmer? Although he was a key participant in the changes to English life brought about by the Reformation, his reticent nature and lack of extensive personal writings have left a vacuum. For the first time this book examines little-used manuscript sources to reconstruct Cranmer's personal and theological development.

Challenging recent rejections of Hans Urs von Balthasar's groundbreaking study of Karl Barth's theology, Stephen Long argues that these interpreters are myopically impatient with the nuances of Balthasar's reading of Barth and fail to appreciate the longstanding theological friendship that perdured. Even more, current readings threaten to repristinate the embattled divide hallmarking Protestant-Catholic relations prior to Vatican II. Long contends against these contemporary trajectories in a substantial defense of Balthasar's theological preoccupation with Barth's thought. This book offers one of the first full contextualizations of the friendship that developed between Balthasar and Barth, which lasted from the 1930s until Balthasar's death in the 1980s. Re-evaluating Balthasar's theological work on Barth, the present volume provides a critical new reading of not only Balthasar's original volume but a wider account of the systematic engagement Balthasar carried on throughout his career. Within this, a paradigm for fruitful, generous ecumenical dialogue emerges.

Part of a 14-volume work covering writings in American religious history with specific attention to trends in American Protestantism; church and state; theological issues; social Christianity; women in religion; native American religion; regional and black religion; fundamentalism and creationism.

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athis book of offers a degree of courageous moral engagement that builds at least a tenuous bridge across the cultural divide.a
--Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

a Nelson has given us a wonderfully intimate glimpse into how rituals and belief animate the religious experiences of black-southerners. This is an important work that will challenge scholars of religion and race to rethink the nature of religious experience.a
--American Journal of Sociology

"Nelson reveals the spiritual lives of black Southerners like few authors before him. In beautifully written and theoretically engaging prose, the ritual experience of low country worshippers emerges in rich and compelling detail. This book will surely deepen our understanding of power and authority in African American religious life."
--Marla Frederick, author of "Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith"

"A very welcome book, not just for what we learn about one African American congregation, but for its reminder of what it means to see the world with religious eyes. Nelson's guided tour of a Charleston, South Carolina, pentecostal AME church is both enlightening and elegantly written. This book will shift the terms of debate about the role of ritual and experience in American religious life."
--Jim Spickard, University of Redlands

Dreams and visions, prophetic words from God about "dusty souls," speaking in tongues while "in the spirit"--narratives of these and similar events comprise the heart of Every Time I Feel the Spirit. This in-depth study of a Black congregation in Charleston, South Carolina provides a window intothe tremendously important yet still largely overlooked world of African American religion as the faith is lived by ordinary believers.

For decades, scholars have been preoccupied with the relation between Black Christianity, civil rights, and social activism. Every Time I Feel the Spirit is about black religion as religion. It focuses on the everyday experience of religion in the church, congregants' relationships with God, and the role that God and Satan play in congregants' lives--not only as objects of belief but as actual agents. It explores the concepts of religious experience and religious ritual, while emphasizing the attributions that people make to the operation of spiritual forces and beings in their lives.

Through interviews and field work, Nelson uncovers what religious people themselves see as important about their faith while extending and refining sociological understandings of religious ritual and religious experience.

Enemies of the Cross examines how suffering and truth were aligned in the divisive debates of the early Reformation. Vincent Evener explores how Martin Luther, along with his first intra-Reformation critics, offered "true" suffering as a crucible that would allow believers to distinguish the truth or falsehood of doctrine, teachers, and their own experiences. To use suffering in this way, however, reformers also needed to teach Christians to recognize false suffering and the false teachers who hid under its mantle. This book contends that these arguments, which became an enduring part of the Lutheran and radical traditions, were nourished by the reception of a daring late-medieval mystical tradition - the post-Eckhartian - which depicted annihilation of the self as the way to union with God. The first intra-Reformation dissenters, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Thomas Muntzer, have frequently been depicted as champions of medieval mystical views over and against the non-mystical Luther. Evener counters this depiction by showing how Luther, Karlstadt, and Muntzer developed their shared mystical tradition in diverse directions, while remaining united in the conviction that sinful self-assertion prevented human beings from receiving truth and living in union with God. He argues that Luther, Karlstadt, and Muntzer each represented a different form of ecclesial-political dissent shaped by a mystical understanding of how Christians were united to God through the destruction of self-assertion. Enemies of the Cross draws on seldom-used sources and proposes new concepts of "revaluation" and "relocation" to describe how Protestants and radicals brought medieval mystical teachings into new frameworks that rejected spiritual hierarchy.

Patrick Collinson is the leading historian of English religion in the years after the Reformation. The topics covered by this collection of essays ranges from Thomas Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake after repeated recantations in 1556, to William Sancroft, the only other post-Reformation archbishop of Canterbury to have been deprived of office. Patrick Collinson's work explores the complex interactions between the inclusive and exclusive tendencies in English Protestantism, focusing both on famous figures, such as John Foxe and Richard Hooker, and on the individual reactions of lesser figures to the religious challenges of the time. Two themes throughout are the importance of the Bible and the emergence of Puritanism inside the Church of England.