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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > General
The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled "lost
tribes of Israel"-Israelites driven from their homeland around 740
BCE-took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the
United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found,
Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about
religious nationalism in early America. Some white Protestants,
Mormons, American Jews, and Indigenous people constructed
nationalist narratives around the then-popular idea of "Israelite
Indians." Although these were minority viewpoints, they reveal that
the story of religion and nationalism in the early United States
was more complicated and wide-ranging than studies of American
"chosen-ness" or "manifest destiny" suggest. Telling stories about
Israelite Indians, Dougherty argues, allowed members of specific
communities to understand the expanding United States, to envision
its transformation, and to propose competing forms of sovereignty.
In these stories both settler and Indigenous intellectuals found
biblical explanations for the American empire and its stark racial
hierarchy. Lost Tribes Found goes beyond the legal and political
structure of the nineteenth-century U.S. empire. In showing how the
trope of the Israelite Indian appealed to the emotions that bound
together both nations and religious groups, the book adds a new
dimension and complexity to our understanding of the history and
underlying narratives of early America.
"The Repealer Repulsed" is an account of Daniel O'Connell's visit
to Belfast in January 1840. Henry Cooke, the celebrated
Presbyterian leader, publicly challenged O'Connell to debate Repeal
during the visit. O'Connell refused to debate Cooke, partly because
of his unwillingness to elevate his rival's stature but also for
fear of violence. In contrast to O'Connell's usual triumphant
rallies, the Belfast visit produced extensive rioting and the
planned ceremonial welcomes for O'Connell in border towns were
cancelled for fear of disorder. O'Connell himself travelled in
disguise. Written and published in haste to discredit O'Connell,
this book has been described as a foundation text of Ulster
unionism. It contains one of the earliest statements of the
economic case for Ulster unionism and provides valuable insight
into the construction of political Protestantism.
In the mid-1980s, a radio program with a compelling spiritual
message was accidentally received by listeners in Vietnam's remote
northern highlands. The Protestant evangelical communication had
been created in the Hmong language by the Far East Broadcasting
Company specifically for war refugees in Laos. The Vietnamese Hmong
related the content to their traditional expectation of salvation
by a Hmong messiah-king who would lead them out of subjugation, and
they appropriated the evangelical message for themselves. Today,
the New Way (Kev Cai Tshiab) has some three hundred thousand
followers in Vietnam. Tam T. T. Ngo reveals the complex politics of
religion and ethnic relations in contemporary Vietnam and
illuminates the dynamic interplay between local and global forces,
socialist and postsocialist state building, cold war and post-cold
war antagonisms, Hmong transnationalism, and U.S.-led evangelical
expansionism.
Among his many accomplishments, Jonathan Edwards was an effective
mentor who trained many leaders for the church in colonial America,
but his pastoral work is often overlooked. Rhys S. Bezzant
investigates the background, method, theological rationale, and
legacy of his mentoring ministry. Edwards did what mentors normally
do-he met with individuals to discuss ideas and grow in skills. But
Bezzant shows that Edwards undertook these activities in a
distinctly modern or affective key. His correspondence is written
in an informal style; his understanding of friendship and
conversation takes up the conventions of the great metropolitan
cities of Europe. His pedagogical commitments are surprisingly
progressive and his aspirations for those he mentored are bold and
subversive. When he explains his mentoring practice theologically,
he expounds the theme of seeing God face to face, summarized in the
concept of the beatific vision, which recognizes that human beings
learn through the example of friends as well as through the
exposition of propositions. In this book the practice of mentoring
is presented as an exchange between authority and agency, in which
the more experienced person empowers the other, whose own character
and competencies are thus nurtured. More broadly, the book is a
case study in cultural engagement, for Edwards deliberately takes
up certain features of the modern world in his mentoring and yet
resists other pressures that the Enlightenment generated. If his
world witnessed the philosophical evacuation of God from the
created order, then Edwards's mentoring is designed to draw God
back into an intimate connection with human experience.
A richly documented study of the interrelation between religious
reformation and territorial state-building in the German region of
upper Franconia from the later Middle Ages through the Confessional
era. Religious reform and the rise of the territorial state were
the central features of early modern German history. Reformation
and state-building, however, had a much longer history, beginning
in the later Middle Ages and continuingthrough the early modern
period. In this insightful new study, Smith explores the key
relationship between the rise of the territorial state and
religious upheavals of the age, centering his investigation on the
diocese of Bamberg in upper Franconia. During the Reformation, the
diocese was split in half: the parishes in the domains of the
Franconian Hohenzollerns became Lutheran; those under the secular
jurisdiction of the bishops of Bamberg remainedCatholic. Drawing
from a broad range of archival sources, Smith offers a compelling
look at the origins and course of Catholic and Protestant reform.
He examines the major religious crises of the period -- the Great
Schism, the Conciliar Movement, the Hussite War, the Peasant's War,
the Thirty Years' War, and the Witch Craze -- comparing their
impact on the two states and showing how events played out on the
local, territorial, and imperial stages. Careful analysis of the
sources reveals how religious beliefs shaped politics in the
emerging territorial principalities, explaining both the
similarities as well as the profound differences between Lutheran
and Catholic conceptions ofthe state. William Bradford Smith is
Professor of History at Oglethorpe University.
Hindu Christian Faqir compares two colonial Indian saints from
Punjab, the neo-Vedantin Hindu Rama Tirtha (1873-1906) and the
Christian convert Sundar Singh (1889-1929). Timothy S. Dobe shows
that varied asceticisms, personal exemplary models, and material
religion exuded their ambivalent and powerful public presence in
Protestant metropolitan centers as much as in colonial peripheries.
Challenging ideas of the invention of modern Hinduism, the
transparent translation of Christianity, and the construction of
saints by devotees, this book focuses on the long-standing, shared
religious idioms on which these two men creatively drew to appeal
to transnational audiences and to pursue religious perfection.
Following both men's usage of Urdu, the book adopts the word
"faqir" to examine the vernacular and performative dimensions of
Indian holy man traditions, thereby calling special attention to
missionary and Orientalist anti-ascetic accounts of the "fukeer"
indigenous Islamic traditions and this-worldly religion. Exploring
Rama Tirtha and Sundar Singh's global tours in Europe and America,
self-conscious sartorial styles, and intimate autobiographical
writings, Dobe demonstrates that the vernacular holy man traditions
of Punjab provided resources that both men drew on to construct
their forms of modern monkhood. The rise of heroic, anti-colonial
sannyasis or sadhus of modern Hinduism like Swami Vivekananda is
thus repositioned in relation to global Christianity, Sufi, bhakti,
and Sikh regional practices, religious boundary-crossing,
contestation and conversion. A comparative and contextualized story
of two Punjabi holy men's particular performance of sainthood,
Hindu Christian Faqir reveals much about the broad, interactional
history of religious modernities.
The volume addresses the question of the effect the Reformation had
on everyday culture, how the people of the 16th century reacted to
this revolutionary event and how it shaped their environment a " in
both the profane and the sacred spheres a " to meet the new demands
placed on them. This is the first time that German researchers on
the Reformation have exploited objects from material culture as a
source in their own right for work on the history and after-effects
of the Reformation.
A gripping story of how an entire family, deeply enmeshed in
Mormonism for thirty years, found their way out and found faith in
Jesus Christ. For thirty years, Lynn Wilder, once a tenured faculty
member at Brigham Young University, and her family lived in, loved,
and promoted the Mormon Church. Then their son Micah, serving his
Mormon mission in Florida, had a revelation: God knew him
personally. God loved him. And the Mormon Church did not offer the
true gospel. Micah's conversion to Christ put the family in a
tailspin. They wondered, Have we believed the wrong thing for
decades? If we leave Mormonism, what does this mean for our safety,
jobs, and relationships? Is Christianity all that different from
Mormonism anyway? As Lynn tells her story of abandoning the
deception of Mormonism to receive God's grace, she gives a rare
look into Mormon culture, what it means to grow up Mormon, and why
the contrasts between Mormonism and Christianity make all the
difference in the world. Whether you are in the Mormon Church, are
curious about Mormonism, or simply are looking for a gripping
story, Unveiling Grace will strengthen your faith in the true God
who loves you no matter what.
AQUINAS AMONG THE PROTESTANTS This major new book provides an
introduction to Thomas Aquinas's influence on Protestantism. The
editors, both noted commentators on Aquinas, bring together a group
of influential scholars to demonstrate the ways that Anglican,
Lutheran, and Reformed thinkers have analyzed and used Thomas
through the centuries. Later chapters also explore how today's
Protestants might appropriate the work of Aquinas to address a
number of contemporary theological and philosophical issues. The
authors set the record straight and disavow the widespread
impression that Aquinas is an irrelevant figure for the history of
Protestant thought. This assumption has dominated not only
Protestant historiography but also Roman Catholic accounts of the
Reformation and Protestant intellectual life. The book opens the
possibility for contemporary reception, engagement, and critique
and even intra-Protestant relations and includes: Information on
the fruitful appropriation of Aquinas in Anglican, Lutheran, and
Reformed theologians over the centuries Important essays from
leading scholars on the teachings of Aquinas New perspectives on
Thomas Aquinas's position as a towering figure in the history of
Christian thought Aquinas Among the Protestants is a
ground-breaking and interdenominational work for students and
scholars of Thomas Aquinas and theology more generally.
The German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's life and
theology played a significant role in the church and theological
struggles against apartheid in South Africa. The essays in this
book align itself with this historical trajectory, but especially
address the question of Bonhoeffer's possible message and
continuing legacy after the transition to democracy in South
Africa. The essays argue that Bonhoeffer's work and witness still
provides rich resources for a theological engagement with more
contemporary challenges. In the process, it rethinks Bonhoeffer's
understanding of time, the body, life together, responsibility, and
being human.
Although their statues grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, few
tourists are aware that the founding ministers of Hartford's First
Church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (after whose English
birthplace the city is named), carried a distinctive version of
Puritanism to the Connecticut wilderness. Shaped by Protestant
interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine, and largely
developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, and as "godly" lecturers in English parish churches,
Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its
counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Focusing especially on Hooker, Baird Tipson explores the
contributions of William Perkins, Alexander Richardson, and John
Rogers to his thought and practice, the art and content of his
preaching, and his determination to define and impose a distinctive
notion of conversion on his hearers. Hooker's colleague Samuel
Stone composed The Whole Body of Divinity, a comprehensive
treatment of his thought (and the first systematic theology written
in the American colonies). Stone's Whole Body, virtually unknown to
scholars, not only provides the indispensable intellectual context
for the religious development of early Connecticut but also offers
a more comprehensive description of the Puritanism of early New
England than anything previously available. Hartford Puritanism
argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism, one where
Hartford's founding ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, both
fully embraced and even harshened Calvin's double predestination.
In The Lost Soul of American Protestantism, D. G. Hart examines the
historical origins of the idea that faith must be socially useful
in order to be valuable. Through specific episodes in Presbyterian,
Lutheran, and Reformed history, Hart presents a neglected form of
Protestantism confessionalism as an alternative to prevailing
religious theory. He explains that, unlike evangelical and mainline
Protestants who emphasize faith's role in solving social and
personal problems, confessional Protestants locate Christianity's
significance in the creeds, ministry, and rituals of the church.
Although critics have accused confessionalism of encouraging social
apathy, Hart deftly argues that this form of Protestantism has much
to contribute to current discussions on the role of religion in
American public life, since confessionalism refuses to confuse the
well-being of the nation with that of the church. The history of
confessional Protestantism suggests that contrary to the legacy of
revivalism, faith may be most vital and influential when less
directly relevant to everyday problems, whether personal or social.
Clear and engaging, D. G. Hart's groundbreaking study is essential
reading for everyone exploring the intersection of religion and
daily life."
When Martin Luther mounted his challenge to the Catholic Church,
reform stimulated a range of responses, including radical solutions
such as those proposed by theologians of the Anabaptist movement.
But how did ordinary Anabaptists, men and women, grapple with the
theological and emotional challenges of the Lutheran Reformation?
Anabaptism developed along unique lines in the Lutheran heartlands
in central Germany, where the movement was made up of scattered
groups and did not centre on charismatic leaders as it did
elsewhere. Ideas were spread more often by word of mouth than by
print, and many Anabaptists had uneven attachment to the movement,
recanting and then relapsing. Historiography has neglected
Anabaptism in this area, since it had no famous leaders and does
not seem to have been numerically strong. Baptism, Brotherhood, and
Belief challenges these assumptions, revealing how Anabaptism's
development in central Germany was fundamentally influenced by its
interaction with Lutheran theology. In doing so, it sets a new
agenda for understandings of Anabaptism in central Germany, as
ordinary individuals created new forms of piety which mingled ideas
about brotherhood, baptism, the Eucharist, and gender and sex.
Anabaptism in this region was not an isolated sect but an important
part of the confessional landscape of the Saxon lands, and
continued to shape Lutheran pastoral affairs long after scholarship
assumed it had declined. The choices these Anabaptist men and women
made sat on a spectrum of solutions to religious concerns raised by
the Reformation. Understanding their decisions, therefore, provides
new insights into how religious identities were formed in the
Reformation era.
As historians have gradually come to recognize, the involvement of
women was central to the anti-slavery cause in both Britain and the
United States. Like their male counterparts, women abolitionists
did not all speak with one voice. Among the major differences
between women were their religious affiliations, an aspect of their
commitment that has not been studied in detail. Yet it is clear
that the desire to live out and practice their religious beliefs
inspired many of the women who participated in anti-slavery
activities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This book examines the part that the traditions, practices, and
beliefs of English Protestant dissent and the American Puritan and
evangelical traditions played in women's anti-slavery activism.
Focusing particularly on Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and
Unitarian women, the essays in this volume move from accounts of
individual women's participation in the movement as printers and
writers, to assessments of the negotiations and the occasional
conflicts between different denominational groups and their
anti-slavery impulses. Together the essays in this volume explore
how the tradition of English Protestant Dissent shaped the American
abolitionist movement, and the various ways in which women
belonging to the different denominations on both sides of the
Atlantic drew on their religious beliefs to influence the direction
of their anti-slavery movements. The collection provides a nuanced
understanding of why these women felt compelled to fight for the
end of slavery in their respective countries.
A "contemplative" ethnographic study of a Benedictine monastery in
Vermont known for its folk-inspired music. Far from being a
long-silent echo of medieval religion, modern monastery music is
instead a resounding, living illustration of the role of music in
religious life. Benedictine monks gather for communal prayer
upwards of five timesper day, every day. Their prayers, called the
Divine Office, are almost entirely sung. Benedictines are famous
for Gregorian Chant, but the original folk-inspired music of the
monks of Weston Priory in Vermont is amongthe most familiar in
post-Vatican II American Catholicism. Using the ethnomusicological
methods of fieldwork and taking inspiration from the monks' own way
of encountering the world, this book offers a contemplative
engagement with music, prayer, and everyday life. The rich
narrative evokes the rhythms of learning among Benedictines to show
how monastic ways of being, knowing, and musicking resonate with
humanistic inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge andunderstanding.
Maria S. Guarino received her PhD in critical and comparative
studies in music from the University of Virginia. She specializes
in ethnography, religious life, Benedictine monasticism, and
contemplativepractices. Support for this publication was provided
by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music of the Eastman
School of Music at the University of Rochester.
In January of 1956, five young evangelical missionaries were
speared to death by a band of the Waorani people in the Ecuadorian
Amazon. Two years later, two missionary women-the widow of one of
the slain men and the sister of another-with the help of a Wao
woman were able to establish peaceful relations with the same
people who had killed their loved ones. The highly publicized
deaths of the five men and the subsequent efforts to Christianize
the Waorani quickly became the defining missionary narrative for
American evangelicals during the second half of the twentieth
century. God in the Rainforest traces the formation of this story
and shows how Protestant missionary work among the Waorani came to
be one of the missions most celebrated by Evangelicals and most
severely criticized by anthropologists and others who accused
missionaries of destroying the indigenous culture. Kathryn T. Long
offers a study of the complexities of world Christianity at the
ground level for indigenous peoples and for missionaries,
anthropologists, environmentalists, and other outsiders. For the
first time, Long brings together these competing actors and agendas
to reveal one example of an indigenous people caught in the
cross-hairs of globalization.
On a motorcycle trip from Manitoba to southern Chile, Cameron Dueck
seeks out isolated enclaves of Mennonites-and himself. "An
engrossing account of an unusual adventure, beautifully written and
full of much insight about the nature of identity in our
ever-changing world, but also the constants that hold us
together."-Adam Shoalts, national best-seller author of Beyond the
Trees: A Journey Alone Across Canada's Arctic and A History of
Canada in 10 Maps Across Latin America, from the plains of Mexico
to the jungles of Paraguay, live a cloistered Germanic people. For
nearly a century, they have kept their doors and their minds
closed, separating their communities from a secular world they view
as sinful. The story of their search for religious and social
independence began generations ago in Europe and led them, in the
late 1800s, to Canada, where they enjoyed the freedoms they sought
under the protection of a nascent government. Yet in the 1920s,
when the country many still consider their motherland began to take
shape as a nation and their separatism came under scrutiny, groups
of Mennonites left for the promises of Latin America: unbroken land
and new guarantees of freedom to create autonomous, ethnically pure
colonies. There they live as if time stands still-an isolation with
dark consequences. In this memoir of an eight-month, 45,000
kilometre motorcycle journey across the Americas, Mennonite writer
Cameron Dueck searches for common ground within his cultural
diaspora. From skirmishes with secular neighbours over water rights
in Mexico, to a mass-rape scandal in Bolivia, to the Green Hell of
Paraguay and the wheat fields of Argentina, Dueck follows his
ancestors south, finding reasons to both love and loathe his
culture-and, in the process, finding himself.
The Language of Disenchantment explores how Protestant ideas about
language influenced British colonial attitudes toward Hinduism and
proposals for the reform of that tradition. Protestant literalism,
mediated by a new textual economy of the printed book, inspired
colonial critiques of Indian mythological, ritual, linguistic, and
legal traditions. Central to these developments was the
transposition of the Christian opposition between monotheism and
polytheism or idolatry into the domain of language. Polemics
against verbal idolatry - including the elevation of a scriptural
canon over heathenish custom, the attack on the personifications of
mythological language, and the critique of "vain repetitions" in
prayers and magic spells - previously applied to Catholic and
sectarian practices in Britain were now applied by colonialists to
Indian linguistic practices. As a remedy for these diseases of
language, the British attempted to standardize and codify Hindu
traditions as a step toward both Anglicization and
Christianization. The colonial understanding of a perfect language
as the fulfillment of the monotheistic ideal echoed earlier
Christian myths according to which the Gospel had replaced the
obscure discourses of pagan oracles and Jewish ritual. By
recovering the historical roots of the British re-ordering of South
Asian discourses in Protestantism, Yelle challenges representations
of colonialism, and of the modernity that it ushered in, as simply
rational or secular.
Autobiographical narrative is seldom viewed as a catalyst for the
social and political upheavals of mid-seventeenth-century England
and its colonies. Protestant Autobiography in the
Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World argues that it should be.
Focusing on the inward search for signs of election as a powerful
stimulus for new, written forms of self-identification, this study
directs critical attention toward the collective processes through
which 'truthful' texts of spiritual experience were constructed,
validated, and endorsed. This new analysis of the rhetoric of
authentic selfhood emphasizes the ways in which personal accounts
of religious awakening became another opportunity to conceptualize
experience as an authorizing principle. A broad spectrum of
Protestant life-writing is explored, from Augustine's Confessions,
first translated into English in 1620, through John Bunyan's Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and Richard Baxter's
Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696). The forms in which these landmark
texts were circulated and the interests that those circulations
served are examined in such a way as to put canonical texts back
into conversation with the outpouring of individual life writings
that dates from the middle of the 17th century on. As the first new
historicized account of the seventeenth-century Protestant
conversion narrative in a generation, Protestant Autobiography in
the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World contributes to the
reintegration of the scholarly fields of literature, religion, and
politics. It revitalizes the study of proto-literary forms which,
while devotional in nature, were deeply political in their
consequences, contributing as they did to the emerging discourse of
personal liberties.
The Preacher King investigates Martin Luther King Jr.'s religious
development from a precocious "preacher's kid" in segregated
Atlanta to the most influential America preacher and orator of the
twentieth century. To give the most accurate and intimate portrait
possible, Richard Lischer draws almost exclusively on King's
unpublished sermons and speeches, as well as tape recordings,
personal interviews, and even police surveillance reports. By
returning to the raw sources, Lischer recaptures King's truest
preaching voice and, consequently, something of the real King
himself. He shows how as the son, grandson, and great-grandson of
preachers, King early on absorbed the poetic cadences, traditions,
and power of the pulpit, more profoundly influenced by his fellow
African-American preachers than by Gandhi and the classical
philosophers. Lischer also reveals a later phase of King's
development that few of his biographers or critics have addressed:
the prophetic rage with which he condemned American religious and
political hypocrisy. During the last three years of his life,
Lischer shows, King accused his country of genocide, warned of long
hot summers in the ghettos, and called for a radical redistribution
of wealth. 25 years after its initial publication, The Preacher
King remains a critical study that captures the crucial aspect of
Martin Luther King Jr.'s identity. Human, complex, and passionate,
King was the consummate American preacher who never quit trying to
reshape the moral and political character of the nation.
Madam Britannia: Women, Church, and Nation, 1712-1812 explores the
complex and fascinating relationship between women, Protestantism,
and nationhood. Opening with a history of Britannia, this book
argues that Britannia becomes increasingly popular as a national
emblem from 1688 onwards. Over the eighteenth century, depictions
of Britannia become exemplary as well as emblematic, her behaviour
to be imitated as well as admired. Britannia takes life during the
eighteenth century, stepping out of iconic representation on coins,
out of the pages of James Thomson's poetry, down from the stage of
David Mallett's plays, the frames of Francis Hayman and William
Hogarth's paintings, and John Flaxman's monuments to enter people's
lives as an identity to be experienced.
One of the key strands explored in this book is Britannia's
relationship to female personifications of the Church of England,
which themselves often drew on key Protestant Queens such as
Elizabeth I and Anne. But during the eighteenth century, Britannia
also gained cultural status by being a female figure of nationhood
at a time when Enlightenment historians developed conjectural
histories which placed women at the centre of civilization. Women's
religion, conversation, and social practice thus had a new
resonance in this new, self-consciously civilized age. In this
book, Emma Major looks at how narratives of faith, national
identity, and civilisation allowed women such as Elizabeth Burnet,
Elizabeth Montagu, Catherine Talbot, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Hester
Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Hannah More to see themselves as active
agents in the shaping of the nation.
The figure of D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899-1981) dominates the
history of British evangelicalism in the twentieth century. As
perhaps the greatest non-conformist statesman of his generation,
'the Doctor' is best known as a preacher and mentor of young
preachers. From the pulpit of Westminster Chapel in London and
other platforms, he called the evangelical movement back to a
robust reformed Christianity, with a passion for biblical
conviction and Spirit-empowered revival. His impact upon
evangelicalism was immense, and his legacy remains deeply
influential. By building on, and engaging with, the work of earlier
biographers and theologians, this valuable collection of new
studies seeks to advance our understanding of Lloyd-Jones' life and
legacy in a number of fresh directions. The topics covered are: the
interwar Calvinist resurgence, Wales, revival, the charismatic
controversy, ministerial education, fundamentalism, Barth, Rome,
the Anglican secession crisis, and the Protestant past. The volume
concludes with a chronological bibliography of Lloyd-Jones'
writings. The contributors are Andrew Atherstone, Ben Bailie, David
W. Bebbington, John Coffey, Philip H. Eveson, David Ceri Jones,
William K. Kay, John Maiden, Robert Pope, Ian M. Randall and Robert
Strivens.
The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in
the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England
has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made
to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which
depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases,
have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious
thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their
influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors
provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their
impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when
the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary
form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional
hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of
hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the
change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the
course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to
the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian
cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style,
language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by
families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication
and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and
stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical
Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the
practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.
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