Before Taize, there was Grandchamp. The lesser-known Protestant women's community,initiated in 1936, grew out of generations of women's groups in French-speaking Switzerland. It was heavily influenced by Wilfred Monod, the Student Christian Movement, Swiss Reformed efforts at liturgical renewal, and Bonhoeffer's Life Together. It was so deeply affected by the angst generated by World War II and the search by European Christians for new ways to be Christian. The Fruits of Grace, authored by the third prioress of the Community of Grandchamp in Switzerland, reflects on the origins of the community, the sources and development of its spirituality, and on its ministries. Foci include the involvement of the community in the ecumenical movement and in mission around the world. There is also important new information about its interaction with Taize, Roman Catholic religious communities, and the women themselves, as individuals and as a community. Sister Minke de Vries provides an intimate view into the inner workings of a women's community and the structures of the spiritual practices of the Community of Grandchamp. It is a powerful analysis of a European Protestant women's monastic community.

So you have a problem with evangelical Christians? Which ones? These are the provocative questions Tom Krattenmaker poses to his fellow progressives in The Evangelicals You Don't Know. He challenges stereotypes about evangelical Christians and introduces readers to a movement of "new evangelicals" who are bringing forth a non-partisan expression of evangelicalism and creating opportunities for alliances and partnerships to advance the common good. Krattenmaker argues that cultural fault lines no longer divide the religious from the secular, or the evangelicals from "everyone else." Rather, the lines that matter now run between the fundamentalist culture warriors of both the left and right on one side, and, on the other, the good-doers of any faith, or none, who want to work together to solve our society's problems and introduce a new civility and decency to our shared national life. Krattenmaker is one of the best-informed non-evangelicals writing about evangelicalism in American public life. He offers interesting stories, intriguing character sketches, and incisive writing in his readable and engaging book. Recounting the findings and insights gleaned from his many years of engagement with evangelical America, he draws conclusions sure to surprise, challenge, and even inspire non-evangelicals who had written off this controversial and influential faith movement. The Evangelicals You Don't Know offers a refreshing alternative to narratives that pay attention only to aspects of evangelicalism that are most distasteful and threatening to secular-progressives and liberal religionists - providing instead a hopeful introduction to promising new currents rising among theologically conservative Christians.

Nietzsche was famously an atheist, despite coming from a strongly Protestant family. This heritage influenced much of his thought, but was it in fact the very thing that led him to his atheism? This work provides a radical re-assessment of Protestantism by documenting and extrapolating Nietzsche's view that Christianity dies from the head down. That is, through Protestantism's inherent anarchy. In this book, Nietzsche is put into conversation with the initiatives of several powerful thinking writers; Luther, Boehme, Leibniz, and Lessing. Using Nietzsche as a critical guide to the evolution of Protestant thinking, each is shown to violate, warp, or ignore gospel injunctions, and otherwise pose hazards to the primacy of Christian ethics. Demonstrating that a responsible understanding of Protestantism as a historical movement needs to engage with its inherent flaws, this is a text that will engage scholars of philosophy, theology, and religious studies alike.

Despite the fact that women are often mentioned as having played instrumental roles in the establishment of Methodism on the Continent of Europe, very little detail concerning the women has ever been provided to add texture to this historical tapestry. This book of essays redresses this by launching a new and wider investigation into the story of pioneering Methodist women in Europe. By bringing to light an alternative set of historical narratives, this edited volume gives voice to a broad range of religious issues and concerns during the critical period in European history between 1869 and 1939. Covering a range of nations in Continental Europe, some important interpretive themes are suggested, such as the capacity of women to network, their ability to engage in God's work, and their skill at navigating difficult cultural boundaries. This ground breaking study will be of significant interest to scholars of Methodism, but also to students and academics working in history, religious studies, and gender.

In August of 1520, Martin Luther published the first of three incendiary works, Address to the German Nobility, in which he urged secular authorities to take a strong hand in "reforming" the Roman church. In October, he published The Church Held Captive, and by December the deepest theological rationale appeared in The Freedom of a Christian. With these three books, the relatively unknown Friar Martin exploded onto the Western European literary and religious scene. These three works have been universally acknowledged as classics of the Reformation, and of the Western religious tradition in general. Though Reformation scholars have been reluctant to single out one as the most important of the three, Denis Janz proposes a bold case for The Church Held Captive. In the first entirely new translation in more than a century, Janz presents Luther's text as it hasn't been read in English before. Previous translations stifle the original text by dulling the sharpest edges of its argumentation and tame Luther by substituting euphemisms for his vulgarities. In Janz's dual language edition we see the provocative, offensive, and extreme restored. In his wide-ranging introduction, Janz offers much-needed context to clarify the role of The Church Held Captive in Luther's life and the life of the Reformation. This edition is the most reader-friendly scholarly version of Luther's classic in the English language.

The Reformation of the 16th century was a complex and multifaceted political, social, cultural, and religious process. Most historians agree, however, that in the framework of this process it was the religious and theological efforts to reform and renew the late medieval church decadent and irrelevant in many ways that were the initiating forces that set a broad historical movement in motion. Among these reforming religious and theological forces, the Lutheran reform movement was the most important and influential one. It was the historical impact of the theological genius of the Wittenberg professor Martin Luther (1483-1546) that profoundly changed and shaped the face of Europe and beyond. Today, Lutheranism has become a worldwide communion of churches that stretches from Germany to Siberia, Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, and Surinam. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of Lutheranism presents information on major theological issues, historical developments of Lutheranism worldwide, Lutheran ecumenical and missionary involvement and activities, worship and liturgy, spirituality, social ethics, inter-religious and Jewish relations, Lutheranism and the arts, theology, and important representatives of Lutheranism. This is done through a detailed chronology, an introductory essay, an appendix of Lutheran Churches, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Lutheranism."

The theology of Karl Barth has often been a productive dialogue partner for evangelical theology, but for too long the dialogue has been dominated by questions of orthodoxy. Karl Barth and the Future of Evangelical Theology contributes to the conversation through a creative reconfiguration of both partners in the conversation, neither of whom can be rightly understood as preservers of Protestant orthodoxy. Rather, American evangelicalism is identified with the revivalist forms of Protestantism that arose in the post-Reformation era, while Barth is revisited as a theologian attuned both to divine and human agency. In the ensuing conversation, questions of orthodoxy are not eliminated but subordinated to a concern for the life of God and God's people. By offering an alternative to the dominant constraints, this book opens up new avenues for fruitful conversation on Barth and the future of evangelical theology.

Much of the emerging protestantism of the sixteenth century produced a Reformation in conscious opposition to formal philosophy. Nevertheless, sectors of the Reformation produced a spiritualizing form of Platonism in the drive for correct devotion. Out of an understandable fear of idolatry or displacement of the uniquely redemptive place of Christ, Christian piety moved away from the senses and the material world - freshly uncovered in the Reformation. This volume argues, however, that in the quest for restoring "true religion", sectors of the Protestant tradition impugned too severely the material components of prior Christian devotion. Larry Harwood argues that a similar spiritualizing tendency can be found in other Christian traditions, but that its applicability to the particulars of the Christian religion is nevertheless questionable. Moreover, in that quest of a spiritualizing Protestant "true religion", the Christian God could shade toward the conceptual god of the philosophers, with devotees construed as rationalist philosophers. Part of the paradoxical result was to propel the Protestant devotee toward a denuded worship for material worshipers of the Christian God who became esh.

The Salvation Army is an integral part of the Christian Church, although distinctive in government and practice. The Army's doctrine follows the mainstream of Christian belief and its articles of faith emphasize God's saving purposes. Its objects are 'the advancement of the Christian religion... of education, the relief of poverty, and other charitable objects beneficial to society or the community of mankind as a whole.' The Salvation Army was founded in London in 1865 by William Booth its first 'General' and has continued growing ever since. In 2015 it celebrated it 150th anniversary and today it has a presence in 127 countries. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of The Salvation Army contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on i leaders, personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of The Salvation Army. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about The Salvation Army..

This is the first interpretation of the reaction of the Southern Churches to the Civil War and Reconstruction. During the Civil War and afterwards, Southern evangelicals remained convinced that their cause was both Christian and just. This position became more entrenched as northern evangelicals entered the South after the war, aiming to save freedmen. Stowell shows the religious reconstruction that followed deeply effected the logic of the Lost Cause and the subsequent history of Reconstruction.

In Like Leaven in the Dough: Protestant Social Thought in Latin America, 1920-1950, Carlos Mondragon offers an introduction to the ideas of notable Protestant writers in Latin America during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite their national and denominational differences, Mondragon argues that Protestant intellectuals developed a coherent set of ideas about freedom of religion and thought, economic justice, militarism, and national identity. This was a period when Protestants comprised a very small proportion of Latin America's total population; their very marginality compelled them to think creatively about their identity and place in Latin American society. Accused of embracing a foreign faith, these Protestants struggled to define national identities that had room for religious diversity and liberty of conscience. Marginalized and persecuted themselves, Latin America's Protestants articulated a liberating message decades before the appearance of Catholic Liberation Theology.

This book provides a critical analysis of a revival often overshadowed by earlier "great awakenings". The Revival of 1857-58 was a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centres across the United States. The author places this revival within the context of Protestant revival traditions and suggests that it may have been the closest thing to a truly national awakening in American history.

Through focusing on the unintended by-products of New England Puritanism as a cultural transplant in the Levant, this book explores the socio-historical forces which account for the failure of early envoys' attempts to convert the 'native,' population. Early failure in conversion led to later success in reinventing themselves as agents of secular and liberal education, welfare, and popular culture. Through making special efforts not to debase local culture, the missionaries' work resulted in large sections of society becoming protestantized without being evangelized. An invaluable resource for postgraduates and those undertaking postdoctoral research, this book explores a seminal but overlooked interlude in the encounters between American Protestantism and the Levant. Using data from previously unexplored personal narrative accounts, Khalaf dates the emergence of the puritanical imagination, sparked by sentiments of American exceptionalism, voluntarism and "soft power" to at least a century before commonly assumed.

This work details traces the origins, development and impact of the proselytizing organization, the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, from its Protestant foundation during the famine of 1845-47 to the early decades of Irish Free State. It argues that the foundation of this ostensibly religious society was also underpinned by social, political, and economic factors and demonstrates that by the mid 1850s the mission operated on a very substantial scale. Moffitt examines the mission's role in the shifting political realities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The impact of this inter-faith power struggle and its legacy to the present day are explored by examining contemporary sources, folklore evidence, and the depiction of proselytizing missions in both Catholic and Protestant denomination literature and fictional writings. -- .

This timely new study examines the place and nature of religion in industrial societies through a comparative analysis of conservative Protestant politics in a variety of 'first world' societies. Rejecting the popular, but misleading, grouping of diverse movements under the heading of 'fundamentalism', Bruce presents a series of detailed case studies of the Christian Right in the United States, Protestant unionism in Northen Ireland, anti-Catholicism in Scotland, Afrikaner politics in South Africa, and Empire Loyalism in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. He proceeds to examine the constraints that culturally diverse societies place on those who wish to promote political agendas based on religious ideas or on religiously informed ethnic identities.

Luther's theology has inspired many since 1517 when he nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church. It was the trigger for the Reformation, a change in the very fabric of Christianity that is still studied extensively to this day. Much of this work however has been conducted from either a European or North American perspective. With Lutheranism becoming more and more common in the southern hemisphere, new interpretations of Luther's theology are needed for these emergent and different contexts. In Transfiguring Luther, Vitor Westhelle offers a reading of Luther and his legacy that goes beyond the traditional geopolitics of Luther research, exploring realities where the Reformer's reception and the latent promise of his theology receive unsuspected appraisal. Westhelle provides both a revisitation of the past and an invitation to a new orientation. By establishing a texture rather than a rigid actuality, Westhelle allows the reader to reach their own conclusions about these seldom examined aspects of Luther's theology.

Can evangelicals and Roman Catholics be allies in the culture wars now being waged against Christian beliefs and values?

This courageous book seeks a way to allow sectarian strife between the two groups to give way to a decision to work together to mend the fabric of values that has been relentlessly rent in the last thirty-five years. Here, both evangelicals and Roman Catholic authors ask whether the time has come to present a united front against the onslaught of publicly sanctioned unbelief in the land.

Growing out of a historic seminar in the spring of 1994, this bold statement with its probing questions admits the deep differences in Roman Catholic and evangelical attitudes toward the Church, Papal authority, and the sacraments. But it also holds that with more openness, and more clarity about continuing doctrinal differences, enough common ground can be found to engage the larger enemy of skepticism that threatens the country's foundations.

Several of the contributors to this book have been criticized for daring to suggest cooperation between evangelicals and Roman Catholics. They respond with careful concern for their detractors but affirm courageously with Martin Luther: "Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise."

All thinking Christians owe it to themselves to see whether this conviction is based on God's Word - and to consider the shared spiritual commitment proposed by these authors.

Many students and members of the public who follow news reports on science and religion may think that Protestantism and science are in conflict. But while evangelical attacks on evolution may make the headlines, many mainstream Protestant groups have long embraced science and the scientific worldview. This volume in the Greenwood Guides to Science and Religion covers those Protestant thinkers who seek to use the insights of science to further their understanding of religion and faith. In addition, the volume will also discuss such trends at the liberal protestant acceptance of evolution, the advent of ecotheology, and the Social Gospel. Liberal Protestantism and Science covers the most important trends in the interrelationship of the belief and scientific activity: BLThe Liberal Protestant acceptance of evolution, and the teaching of the science in the schools. lBLThe advent of "ecotheology," and other means by which theologians address the changes in the environment. BLThe Social Gospel, the early 20th century attempts by Protestants to extend scientific principles to improving society as a whole. The volume includes a selection of primary source documents, a glossary and a timeline, and an annotated bibliography of the most useful resources for further research.

In this study, Irene Backus examines the fate of the Apocalypse at the hands of early Protestants in three centres of the Reformation: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. To do so, Backus systematically investigates sources and methods on the most important reformed and Lutheran commentaries of the Apocalypse from 1528-1584.

Winner of the 2013 Christianity Today Book Award for Theology / Ethics
Scholars and laypersons alike regard Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) as North America's greatest theologian. The Theology of Jonathan Edwards is the most comprehensive survey of his theology yet produced and the first study to make full use of the recently-completed seventy-three-volume online edition of the Works of Jonathan Edwards. The book's forty-five chapters examine all major aspects of Edwards's thought and include in-depth discussions of the extensive secondary literature on Edwards as well as Edwards's own writings. Its opening chapters set out Edwards's historical and personal theological contexts. The next thirty chapters connect Edwards's theological loci in the temporally-ordered way in which he conceptualized the theological enterprise-beginning with the triune God in eternity with his angels to the history of redemption as an expression of God's inner reality ad extra, and then back to God in eschatological glory.
The authors analyze such themes as aesthetics, metaphysics, typology, history of redemption, revival, and true virtue. They also take up such rarely-explored topics as Edwards's missiology, treatment of heaven and angels, sacramental thought, public theology, and views of non-Christian religions. Running throughout the volume are what the authors identify as five basic theological constituents: trinitarian communication, creaturely participation, necessitarian dispositionalism, divine priority, and harmonious constitutionalism. Later chapters trace his influence on and connections with later theologies and philosophies in America and Europe. The result is a multi-layered analysis that treats Edwards as a theologian for the twenty-first-century global Christian community, and a bridge between the Christian West and East, Protestantism and Catholicism, conservatism and liberalism, and charismatic and non-charismatic churches.

Luther provides a clear exposition of the state of German politics on the eve of the Reformation. Dr Mullett concentrates particularly on the evolution of Luther's thought and its central preoccupation with re-aligning the church's theology with that of the New Testament.

The Alpha Enterprise explores the development, growth and impact of the most widely used evangelising programme of recent decades. The Alpha course is run in over seven thousand churches in the UK and over five thousand in the USA. Across the world some four million people have graduated through the course in over 80 countries. Alpha is truly the fastest growing evangelising initiative, creating widespread support as well as stirring strong criticism. Stephen Hunt critically examines the content and working philosophy of the Alpha course through the experiences of the churches that have run it, as well as the individuals who have experienced it first hand. Hunt charts the history of the programme, its use of group dynamics and media, how it links with the charismatic movement, how it deals with issues such as homosexuality, how it is run not only in churches but in prisons and universities too, and concludes by measuring Alpha's impact and success. Engaging with debates regarding postmodernity, globalisation, McDonaldisation, consumerism, and secularisation, and based on real-life surveys, The Alpha Enterprise sheds new light not only on evangelism but on contemporary Christianity in general and how it engages with a post-Christian culture.

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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.

Natural law theory has been enjoying a significant revival in recent times. Led by Germain Grisez in the USA and John Finnis in the UK, one school of thinkers has been articulating a highly developed system of natural law built upon a sophisticated account of practical reasoning and a rich and flexible understanding of the human good. However, long-standing prejudices against old-style natural law among moral philosophers and Protestant ethicists, together with the new theory's appropriation by conservatives in the impassioned debate between the Vatican and dissenting theologians in the United States, have prevented the Finnis-Grisez version from being adequately appreciated. Providing a clear and substantive introduction to the theory for those who are new to it, this book then broadens, assesses, and advances the debate about it, examining crucial philosophical, theological and ethical issues and opening up discussion beyond the confines of the Roman Catholic Church. Part 1, on philosophical issues, starts with two broad chapters that locate the Grisez school in relation to modern moral philosophy and the Roman Catholic philosophical tradition of Thomism, and then follows these with further chapters on two crucial issues: the possibility of consensus on the human good, and the nature of moral absolutes. Part 2, on theological dimensions, begins with a Lutheran critique of Grisez, locates him in relation to the ethics of two very prominent 20th century Protestants, Karl Barth and Stanley Hauerwas, and then explores the major area of theological controversy within the Roman Catholic community - how to conceive of the "Church's" authority with regard to moral matters. Part 3 subjects the school's thought to critical examination in a broad range of ethical fields: bioethics, gender, sex and the environment. A concluding chapter then develops eight topics that recur in the course of the book: the status of ethical realism in the contemporary intellectual climate; whether realism is best conceived in rationalist or naturalist terms; whether marriage should be counted as a basic good; whether physical pleasure should not be counted a basic good; whether it is always wrong to act deliberately against a basic good; the problems of moral certainty and authority; the rapproachement between Protestant and Roman Catholic ethics; and, finally, whether ethical understanding is really independent of one's anthropological point of view. Drawing together North American, European and Australian contributors from across moral philosophy and Protestant ethics as well as from Roman Catholic moral theology, this book opens up the debate about the Finnis-Grisez theory, highlighting its strengths and weaknesses in order to advance current discussion about natural law in moral theology and in moral and legal philosophy.