This book highlights the life and writings of an itinerant preacher in John Wesley's Methodist Connexion, Thomas Wride (1733-1807). Detailed studies of such rank and file preachers are rare, as Methodist history has largely been written by and about its leadership. However, Wride's ministry shows us that the development of this worldwide movement was more complicated and uncertain than many accounts suggest. Wride's attitude was distinctive. He was no respecter of persons, freely criticising almost everyone he came across, and in doing so exposing debates and tensions within both Methodism and wider society. However, being so combative also led him into conflict with the very movement he sought to promote. Wride is an authentic, self-educated, and non-elite voice that illuminates important features of Eighteenth-Century life well beyond his religious activities. He sheds light on his contemporaries' attitudes to issues such as the role of women, attitudes towards and the practice of medicine, and the experience and interpretation of dreams and supernatural occurrences. This is a detailed insight into the everyday reality of being an Eighteenth-Century Methodist minister. As such, this text will be of interest to academics working in Methodist Studies and Religious History, as well as Eighteenth-Century History more generally.

The world stands before a landmark date: October 31, 2017, the quincentennial of the Protestant Reformation. Countries, social movements, churches, universities, seminaries, and other institutions shaped by Protestantism face a daunting question: how should the Reformation be commemorated 500 years after the fact? Protestantism has been credited for restoring essential Christian truth, blamed for disastrous church divisions, and invoked as the cause of modern liberalism, capitalism, democracy, individualism, modern science, secularism, and so much else. In this volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines come together to answer the question of commemoration and put some of the Reformation's larger themes and trajectories of influence into historical and theological perspective. Protestantism after 500 Years? examines the historical significance of the Reformation and considers how we might expand and enrich the ongoing conversation about Protestantism's impact. The contributors to this volume conclude that we must remember the Reformation not only because of the enduring, sometimes painful religious divisions that emerged from this era, but also because a historical understanding of the Reformation has been a key factor towards promoting ecumenical progress through communication and mutual understanding.

Offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally, by studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. In the Haitian diaspora, as in Haiti itself, the majority of Haitians have long practiced Catholicism or Vodou. However, Protestant forms of Christianity now flourish both in Haiti and beyond. In the Bahamas, where approximately one in five people are now Haitian-born or Haitian-descended, Protestantism has become the majority religion for immigrant Haitians. In My Soul Is in Haiti, Bertin M. Louis, Jr. has combined multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, Haiti, and the Bahamas with a transnational framework to analyze why Protestantism has appealed to the Haitian diaspora community in the Bahamas. The volume illustrates how devout Haitian Protestant migrants use their religious identities to ground themselves in a place that is hostile to them as migrants, and it also uncovers how their religious faith ties in to their belief in the need to "save" their homeland, as they re-imagine Haiti politically and morally as a Protestant Christian nation. This important look at transnational migration between second and third world countries shows how notions of nationalism among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas are filtered through their religious beliefs. By studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas, Louis offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally.

Missionary Families Find a Sense of Place and Identity is a community history of members of nineteen Lutheran missionary families who served in Tanzania. Based on over ninety interviews and John Benson's extensive knowledge of cultural geography, he compares the lives of the missionary generation who grew up in the United States and went to Tanzania as missionaries to those of their children who grew up in Africa but settled in the United States as adults. Benson blends his personal experiences as a child of missionaries in Tanzania to tell the story of both generations. Missionary Families is centered on the themes of connection to place and religious development and will appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies and religion.

W.R. Ward was one of the most influential historians of modern religion to be found at work in Britain during the twentieth century. Across fifty years his writings provoked a major reconsideration by historians of the significance of religion in society and its importance in the contexts of political, cultural and intellectual life. Ward was, above all, an international scholar who did much to repudiate any settled understanding that religious history existed in merely national categories. In particular, he showed how much British and American religion owed to the insights of Continental European thought and experience. This book presents many of Ward's most important articles and gives a picture of the character, and extraordinary breadth, of his work. Embracing studies of John Wesley and the development of Methodism at large, the ambitions of Evangelicals in an age of international mission, the place of mysticism in evolution of Protestantism and the relations of churches and secular powers in the twentieth century, Andrew Chandler concludes that it was in such scholarship that Ward 'quietly recast the picture that we have of the past and drew our attention towards a far greater, more difficult and more interesting, landscape.'

Theologians and scholars of religion draw on rich resources to address the complex issues raised by political reconciliation in the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia, South Africa, Northern Ireland and elsewhere. The questions addressed include: Can truth set a person, or a society, free? How is political forgiveness possible? Are political, personal, and spiritual reconciliation essentially related? Explorations in Reconciliation brings Catholic, Protestant, Mennonite, Jewish and Islamic perspectives together within a single volume to present some of the most relevant theological work today. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/ISBN, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. The support of the Irish School of Ecumenics Trust in making this OA version possible is gratefully acknowledged.

The dominant narrative of Mississippi during the Civil Rights Era focuses on white citizens, the white church, and their intense resistance to change. Signed by twenty-eight white pastors of the Methodist Mississippi Annual conference and published in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate on January 2, 1963, the "Born of Conviction" statement offered an alternative witness to the segregationist party line by calling for freedom of the pulpit and reminding readers of the Methodist Discipline's claim that the teachings of Jesus "[permit] no discrimination because of race, color, or creed". The twenty-eight pastors sought to speak to and for a mostly silent yet significant minority of Mississippians, and to lead white Methodists to join the conversation on the need for racial justice. The document additionally expressed support for public schools and opposition to any attempt to close them, and affirmed the signers' opposition to Communism. Though a few lay and clergy persons voiced public affirmation of "Born of Conviction," the overwhelming reaction was negative-by mid-1964, twenty of the original signers had left Mississippi, revealing the challenges faced by whites who offered even mild dissent to massive resistance in the Deep South. Dominant narratives, however, rarely tell the whole story. The statement caused a significant crack in the public unanimity of Mississippi white resistance. Signers and their public supporters had also received private messages of gratitude for their stand, and eight of the signers remained in the Methodist ministry in Mississippi until retirement. Born of Conviction tells the story of "the Twenty-eight," illuminating the impact on the larger culture of this attempt by white clergy to support race relations change. The book explores the theological and ethical understandings of the signers through an account of their experiences before, during, and after the statement's publication. It also offers a detailed portrait of both public and private expressions of the theology and ethics of white Mississippi Methodists as a whole - including laity and other clergy - as revealed by their responses to the "Born of Conviction" controversy, which came at the crisis point of the Civil Rights Era in Mississippi.

By the middle of the nineteenth century much clearly gendered, anti-Catholic literature was produced for the Protestant middle classes. "Nineteenth Century Anti-Catholic Discourses "explores how this writing generated a series of popular Catholic images and looks toward the cultural, social and historical foundation of these representations. Diana Peschier places the novels of Charlotte Bronte within the framework of Victorian social ideologies, in particular the climate created by rise of anti-Catholicism, providing an alternative reading of her work.

Many scholars and church leaders believe that music and worship style are essential in stimulating diversity in congregations. Gerardo Marti draws on interviews with more than 170 congregational leaders and parishioners, as well as his experiences participating in worship services in a wide variety of Protestant, multiracial Southern Californian churches, to present this insightful study of the role of music in creating congregational diversity.
Worship across the Racial Divide offers a surprising conclusion: that there is no single style of worship or music that determines the likelihood of achieving a multiracial church. Far more important are the complex of practices of the worshipping community in the production and absorption of music. Multiracial churches successfully diversify by stimulating unobtrusive means of interracial and interethnic relations; in fact, preparation for music apart from worship gatherings proves to be just as important as its performance during services. Marti shows that aside from and even in spite of the varying beliefs of attendees and church leaders, diversity happens because music and worship create practical spaces where cross-racial bonds are formed.
This groundbreaking book sheds light on how race affects worship in multiracial churches. It will allow a new understanding of the dynamics of such churches, and provide crucial aid to church leaders for avoiding the pitfalls that inadvertently widen the racial divide.

Published in 1989, this bibliography considers religious seminaries that are affiliated with the various denominations of the theological institutions established in the United States by the Protestants in the early 1800s, it also considers non-denominational and independent settings. Divided into two sections, the first short section considers the relationship between the civil governments and the seminaries, the second, organized by denomination into 15 chapters provides an extensive bibliography with annotations. The work pulls together a wealth of reference material and identifies salient works, whether book, article, dissertation or essay, to provide a much-needed resource for those interested in seminary education in the United States, whether scholar, student, policy maker, or interested citizen.

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.

When Mary Marshall Dyer (1780-1867) joined the Shakers in 1813 with her husband and five children, she thought she had found salvation. But two years later, she fled the sect, calling them subversive of Christian morality and a danger to American society. When her husband and the Shaker authorities denied her request for the return of her children, Dyer joined forces with an aggressive anti-Shaker movement – an informal yet effective group linked together by their despisal of Shakerism and their determination to thwart the new faith. Distraught, angry, and alone, Dyer turned her anguish into action and embarked on a fifty-year campaign against the Shakers -- and was the centerpiece of the Shakers’ counterattack. The American public followed the debate with great interest, not least because it offered titillating details into the mysterious sect, but also because Dyer’s experiences reflected profound changes in the family, religion, and gender in antebellum America. In this compelling study of Dyer and her world, Elizabeth A. De Wolfe suggests that while neither the Shakers nor Dyer would agree, the latter, a mother without children and a wife without a husband, and the former, a celibate communal sect that disavowed the marriage bond, shared similar positions on the margins of antebellum society.

Originally published in 1867, this is a comprehensively detailed history of both the persecution and flight of the Huguenots and their re-settlement in England and Ireland and consequent lives. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. Contents Include: The Reformation, Invention of Printing - Episode in the Life of Palissy - Persecutions of the Reformed - The Duke of Alva in Flanders, Massacre of St. Bartholomew - Relations of England with France and Spain - Settlements and Industries of the Protestant Refugees in England - Early Walloon and French Churches in England - The Edict of Nantes, Colbert and Louis xiv - The Huguenot Persecutions Under Louis xiv - Renewed Flight of the Huguenots - The Huguenots and the English Revolution of 1688 - Adventures of Dumont De Bostaquet, Irish Campaigns of 1689-90 - Huguenot Officers in the British Service - Huguenot Men of Science and Learning - Huguenot Settlements in England, Men of Industry - The Huguenot Churches in England - Huguenot Settlements in Ireland - Descendants of the Refugees - Conclusion, The French Revolution - List of Distinguished Refugee Protestants and Their Descendants

The Reformation has traditionally been explained in terms of theology, the corruption of the church and the role of princes. R.W. Scribner, while not denying the importance of these, shifts the context of study of the German Reformation to an examination of popular beliefs and behaviour, and of the reactions of local authorities to the problems and opportunities for social as well as religious reform. This book brings together a coherent body of work that has appeared since 1975, including two entirely new essays and two previously published only in German.

This is a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479-1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen". Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, "may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen". However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next 25 years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation - and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation - no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549. This volume brings the two documents head-to-head in a confrontation postponed for more than four hundred and fifty years. In addition, this book supplies a life of Cochlaeus, plus a full scholarly apparatus for readers who wish to make a broader study of the period.

The book investigates facets of global Protestantism through Anglican, Quaker, Episcopalian, Moravian, Lutheran Pietist, and Pentecostal missions to enslaved and indigenous peoples and political reform endeavours in a global purview that spans the 1730s to the 1930s. The book uses key examples to trace both the local and the global impacts of this multi-denominational Christian movement. The essays in this volume explore three of the critical ways in which Protestant communities were established and became part of a worldwide network: the founding of far-flung missions in which Western missionaries worked alongside enslaved and indigenous converts; the interface between Protestant outreach and political reform endeavours such as abolitionism; and the establishment of a global epistolary through print communication networks. Demonstrating how Protestantism came to be both global and ecumenical, this book will be a key resource for scholars of religious history, religion and politics, and missiology as well as those interested in issues of postcolonialism and imperialism.

Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as this new book shows, the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed—and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the “civilizing mission,” a wide-ranging project that sought to protect “child races” from harmful influences while remodeling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress. This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins.

Freedom of religious belief is guaranteed under the constitution of the People's Republic of China, but the degree to which this freedom is able to be exercised remains a highly controversial issue. Much scholarly attention has been given to persecuted underground groups such as Falungong, but one area that remains largely unexplored is the relationship between officially registered churches and the communist government. This study investigates the history of one such official church, Moore Memorial Church in Shanghai. This church was founded by American Methodist missionaries. By the time of the 1949 revolution, it was the largest Protestant church in East Asia, running seven day a week programs. As a case study of one individual church, operating from an historical (rather than theological) perspective, this study examines the experience of people at this church against the backdrop of the turbulent politics of the Mao and Deng eras. It asks and seeks to answer questions such as: were the people at the church pleased to see the foreign missionaries leave? Were people forced to sign the so-called Christian manifesto?Once the church doors were closed in 1966, did worshippers go underground? Why was this particular church especially chosen to be the first re-opened in Shanghai in 1979? What explanations are there for its phenomenal growth since then? A considerable proportion of the data for this study is drawn from Chinese language sources, including interviews, personal correspondence, statistics, internal church documents and archives, many of which have never previously been published or accessed by foreign researchers. The main focus of this study is on the period from 1949 to 1989, a period in which the church experienced many ups and downs, restrictions and limitations. The Mao era, in particular, remains one of the least understood and seldom written about periods in the history of Christianity in China. This study therefore makes a significant contribution to our evolving understanding of the delicate balancing act between compromise, co-operation and compliance that categorises church-state relations in modern China.

The main concern of this study, first published in 1990, is the part played by Protestantism in the complex of social processes of 'secularization'. The book deals with the way in which Protestant schism and dissent paved the way for the rise of religious pluralism and toleration; and it also looks at the fragility of the two major responses to religious pluralism - the accommodation of liberal Protestantism and the sectarian rejection of the conservative alternative. It examines the part played by social, economic and political changes in undermining the plausibility of religion in western Europe, and puts forward the argument that core Reformation ideas must not be overlooked, particularly the repercussions of different beliefs about authority in competing Christian traditions.

This book treads new ground by bringing the Evangelical and Dissenting movements within Christianity into close engagement with one another. While Evangelicalism and Dissent both have well established historiographies, there are few books that specifically explore the relationship between the two. Thus, this complex relationship is often overlooked and underemphasised. The volume is organised chronologically, covering the period from the late seventeenth century to the closing decades of the twentieth century. Some chapters deal with specific centuries but others chart developments across the whole period covered by the book. Chapters are balanced between those that concentrate on an individual, such as George Whitefield or John Stott, and those that focus on particular denominational groups like Wesleyan Methodism, Congregationalism or the 'Black Majority Churches'. The result is a new insight into the cross pollination of these movements that will help the reader to understand modern Christianity in England and Wales more fully. Offering a fresh look at the development of Evangelicalism and Dissent, this volume will be of keen interest to any scholar of Religious Studies, Church History, Theology or modern Britain.

This study examines the role of the Six-Day War in American Protestant politics and culture. The author argues that American foreign policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, culminating in the Trump Administration's 2017 recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital, and the domestic Evangelical communities who supported it, has a direct correlation with the long-term consequences of the 1967 Six-Day War. For most of America's history, biblical literalists, or Evangelicals, dominated the religious culture of the country. But, in 1925, the Scopes trial on science, evolution, and religion embarrassed Evangelicals and caused them to retreat from American culture and politics. Modern and liberal Protestants won dominance and established control in nearly all of the Mainline seminaries, publishing houses, and denominations, leading to the creation of the National Council of Churches by 1950. This book argues that the Six-Day War reversed that power structure in American religion, with Evangelicals returning to a place of prominence in American culture and politics. Whereas the Scopes trial showed much of American Protestantism that the Modernists had the right understanding of the Bible; the Six-Day War demonstrated that, ironically, Evangelicals may have had it right all along. They used this historic leverage to vaunt themselves into the highest planes of American life, with Billy Graham becoming "America's Pastor." In this historic process, the 1967 war between Israel and the surrounding Arab states clarified the way those different branches of American Protestantism thought about the Arab-Israeli conflict, particularly the issue of Jerusalem. Indeed, the nature of the Six-Day War was deep and appeared to be of Biblical proportions. Because Israel gained territories in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and the ancient Biblical heartlands formerly held by Jordan; historical, messianic, and even apocalyptic intrusions entered the various branches of American Protestantism. In some branches, supersessionism, a belief that the Church had replaced the Jewish people as God's chosen, was stoked. In other branches, supersessionism was rejected and the nature of Judaism and its connection to the Holy Land was re-evaluated. The important point is that the territories that Israel captured had thick theological meaning, and this would force all branches of American Protestantism to reconsider their assumptions about Judaism and Zionism, as well as Islam and Palestinian nationalism. Evangelicalism.

In 1989 a woman fishing in Texas on a quiet stretch of the Colorado River snagged a body. Her ""catch"" was the corpse of Johnny Jenkins, shot in the head. His death was as dramatic as the rare book dealer's life, which read, as the Austin American-Statesman declared, ""like a bestseller."" In 1975 Jenkins had staged the largest rare book coup of the twentieth century - the purchase, for more than two million dollars, of the legendary Eberstadt inventory of rare Americana, a feat noted in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. His undercover work for the FBI, recovering rare books stolen by mafia figures, had also earned him headlines coast to coast, as had his exploits as ""Austin Squatty,"" playing high stakes poker in Las Vegas. But beneath such public triumphs lay darker secrets. At the time of his death, Jenkins was about to be indicted by the ATF for the arson of his rare books, warehouse, and offices. Another investigation implicated Jenkins in forgeries of historical documents, including the Texas Declaration of Independence. Rumors of million-dollar gambling debts at mob-connected casinos circulated, along with the rumblings of irate mafia figures he'd fingered and eccentric Texas collectors he'd cheated. Had he been murdered? Or was his death a suicide, staged to look like a murder? How Jenkins, a onetime president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, came to such an unseemly end is one of the mysteries Michael Vinson pursues in this spirited account of a tragic American life. Entrepreneur, con man, connoisseur, forger, and self-made hero, Jenkins was a Texan who knew how to bluff but not when to fold.

This book explores the ways in which modern Hindu identities were constructed in the early nineteenth century. It draws parallels between sixteenth and eventeenth Cecntury Protestantism and the rise of modernity in the West, and the Hindu reformation in the nineteenth century which contributed to the rise of Vedantic Hindu modernity discourse in India. The nineteenth century Hindu modernity, it is argued, sought both individual flourishing and collective emancipation from Western domination. For the first time Hinduism began to be constructed as a religion of sacred texts. In particular, texts belonging to what could be loosely called Vedanta: Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. In this way, the main protagonists of this Vedantist modernity were imitating Western Protestantism, but at the same time also inventing totally novel interpretations of what it meant to be Hindu. The book traces the major ideological paths taken in this cultural-religious reformation from its originator Rammohun Roy up to its last major influence, Rabindranath Tagore. Bringing these two versions of modernity into conversation brings a unique view on the formation of modern Hindu identities. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of religious, Hindu and South Asian studies, as well as religious istory and interreligious dialogue.

This stimulating volume explores how the memory of the Reformation has been remembered, forgotten, contested, and reinvented between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Remembering the Reformation traces how a complex, protracted, and unpredictable process came to be perceived, recorded, and commemorated as a transformative event. Exploring both local and global patterns of memory, the contributors examine the ways in which the Reformation embedded itself in the historical imagination and analyse the enduring, unstable, and divided legacies that it engendered. The book also underlines how modern scholarship is indebted to processes of memory-making initiated in the early modern period and challenges the conventional models of periodisation that the Reformation itself helped to create. This collection of essays offers an expansive examination and theoretically engaged discussion of concepts and practices of memory and Reformation. This volume is ideal for upper level undergraduates and postgraduates studying the Reformation, Early Modern Religious History, Early Modern European History, and Early Modern Literature.