Brian Beck has had a long and distinguished career in Methodist studies, having additionally served as President of the UK Methodist Conference and helped lead the international Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. This book is the first time that Beck's seminal work on Methodism has been gathered together. It includes eighteen essays from the last twenty-five years, covering many different aspects of Methodist thought and practice. This collection is divided into two main sections. Part I covers Methodism's heritage and its implications, while Part II discusses wider issues of Methodism's identity. The chapters themselves examine the work of key figures, such as John Wesley and J. E. Rattenbury, as well as past and present forms of Methodist thought and practice. As such, this book is important reading for any scholar of Methodism as well as students and academics of religious studies and theology more generally.

Demonstrates the vital role Sunday schools played in forming and sustaining faith before, during, and after the First World War for British populations both at home and abroad. Sunday schools were an important part of the religious landscape of twentieth-century Britain and they were widely attended by much of the British population. The Sunday School Movement in Britain argues that the schools played a vital role in forming and sustaining the faith of those who lived and served during the First World War. Moreover, the volume contends that the conflict did not cause the schools to decline and proposes that decline instead set in much earlier in the twentieth century. The book also questions the perception that the schools were ineffective tools of religious socialisation and examines the continued attempts of the Sunday school movement to professionalise and improve their efforts. Thus, the involvement of the movement with the World's Sunday School Association is revealed to be part of the wider developing international ecumenical community during the twentieth century. Drawing together under-utilised material from archives and newspapers in national and local collections, The Sunday School Movement in Britain presents a history of the schools demonstrating their lasting significance in the religious life of the nation and, by extension, the enduring importance of Christianity in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century.

Protestant nonconformity was one of the most significant influences in nineteenth-century Britain, and has rightly received considerable attention from historians. At both local and national level much of its influence was channelled through, and inspired by, the activities and utterances of the professional minister. The names of the most successful were often household words in the Victorian period, and most have attracted a biographer. Yet neither the experiences nor the careers of these pulpit princes were necessarily those of the typical minister - almost nine thousand of them in 1900 - who served in the chapels of the main dissenting denominations. Using simple sampling and statistical techniques, Kenneth D. Brown sets out to recreate the lives, both private and professional, of this less celebrated but faithful and more representative body of men, rescuing them from the anonymity of the past.

First published by the author in 1895, The German Pietists of Provincial Pennsylvania narrates the history of the early Germans of various sects and congregations who settled in Pennsylvania starting at the end of the seventeenth century, with a particular focus on a group of German Pietist mystics who emigrated to America in 1694 to pursue the freedom to practice their religion. The book details Pietism's origins in Europe, Pietists' beliefs and practices, and the Pietists' relationships with other religious groups, like the Quakers, Lutherans, and Jansenites. The book is a product of meticulous archival work and research, and it includes numerous references to and facsimile pages from rare source material. Sachse also provides a comprehensive look at the activities of well-known figures including Johannes Kelpius, Daniel Falkner, Johann Jacob Zimmerman, and Benjamin Furly.

History has long viewed French Protestants as Calvinists. Refusing to Kiss the Slipper re-examines the Reformation in francophone Europe, presenting for the first time the perspective of John Calvin's evangelical enemies and revealing that the French Reformation was more complex and colorful than previously recognized. Michael Bruening brings together a cast of Calvin's opponents from various French-speaking territories to show that opposition to Calvinism was stronger and better organized than has been recognized. He examines individual opponents, such as Pierre Caroli, Jerome Bolsec, Sebastian Castellio, Charles Du Moulin, and Jean Morely, but more importantly, he explores the anti-Calvinist networks that developed around such individuals. Each group had its own origins and agenda, but all agreed that Calvin's claim to absolute religious authority too closely echoed the religious sovereignty of the pope. These oft-neglected opponents refused to offer such obeisance-to kiss the papal slipper-arguing instead for open discussion of controversial doctrines. They believed Calvin's self-appointed leadership undermined the bedrock principle of the Reformation that the faithful be allowed to challenge religious authorities. This book shows that the challenge posed by these groups shaped the way the Calvinists themselves developed their reform strategies. Bruening's work demonstrates that the breadth and strength of the anti-Calvinist networks requires us to abandon the traditional assumption that Huguenots and other francophone Protestants were universally Calvinist.

Thomas Green examines the Scottish Reformation from a new perspective - the legal system and lawyers. For the leading lawyers of the day, the Scottish Reformation presented a constitutional and jurisdictional crisis of the first order. In the face of such a challenge moderate judges, lawyers and officers of state sought to restore order in a time of revolution by retaining much of the medieval legacy of Catholic law and order in Scotland. Green covers the Wars of the Congregation, the Reformation Parliament, the legitimacy of the Scottish government from 1558 to 1561, the courts of the early Church of Scotland and the legal significance of Mary Stewart's personal reign. He also considers neglected aspects of the Reformation, including the roles of the Court of Session and of the Court of the Commissaries of Edinburgh.

Faith and Revolution in the Life of Eduardo Mondlane. This work is a significant contribution to the narrative of Christianity in southern Africa within the framework of the struggle for liberation from colonial rule. By focusing on the story of a Protestant political and ecumenical leader, Eduardo Mondlane, of note within a dominantly Roman Catholic country, Faris explores the role of the churches and missions, especially the Swiss Mission, in the struggle for African Independence.

This volume explores the place of the Bible in Protestantism; the laity and the clergy; worship; the relationship between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism; and social and individual ethics.

They sought to transform the world, and ended up transforming twentieth-century America Between the 1890s and the Vietnam era, tens of thousands of American Protestant missionaries were stationed throughout the non-European world. They expected to change the peoples they encountered abroad, but those foreign peoples ended up changing the missionaries. Missionary experience made many of these Americans critical of racism, imperialism, and religious orthodoxy. When they returned home, the missionaries and their children liberalized their own society. Protestants Abroad reveals the untold story of how these missionary-connected individuals left their enduring mark on American public life as writers, diplomats, academics, church officials, publishers, foundation executives, and social activists. David Hollinger provides riveting portraits of such figures as Pearl Buck, John Hersey, and Life and Time publisher Henry Luce, former "mish kids" who strove through literature and journalism to convince white Americans of the humanity of other peoples. Hollinger describes how the U.S. government's need for people with language skills and direct experience in Asian societies catapulted dozens of missionary-connected individuals into prominent roles in intelligence and diplomacy. He also shows how Edwin Reischauer and other scholars with missionary backgrounds led the growth of Foreign Area Studies in universities during the Cold War. Hollinger shows how the missionary contingent advocated multiculturalism at home and anticolonialism abroad, pushed their churches in ecumenical and social-activist directions, and joined with cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals to challenge traditional Protestant cultural hegemony and promote a pluralist vision of American life. Missionary cosmopolitans were the Anglo-Protestant counterparts of the New York Jewish intelligentsia of the same era. Protestants Abroad sheds new light on how missionary-connected American Protestants played a crucial role in the development of modern American liberalism, and helped Americans reimagine their nation as a global citizen.

August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was "overwhelmed as with a stream of joy." His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom's new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke's narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members' relationship to the pious stories of the "last hours," the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world's leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.

Sustainability Science is an interdisciplinary, problem-driven field that seeks to address fundamental questions on human-environment interactions. Reconstructing Sustainability Science repositions sustainability science as a "science of design" that is, a normative science of what ought to be in order to achieve certain goals rather than a science of what is. It provides an essential understanding of the complex relationship between science, social change and the normative dimensions of sustainability.

Drawing upon interviews of 30 prominent sustainability scientists, the book first gives an in-depth, empirical discussion and analysis of the three main questions regarding the development of sustainability science: how researchers in the emerging field of sustainability science are attempting to define sustainability, establish research agendas, and link the knowledge they produce to societal action. This study is paired with a thorough content analysis of the sustainability science literature in which the boundaries and tensions between emerging research pathways and decision-making for sustainability are explored. The second part aims to reformulate the sustainability science research agenda and its relationship to decision-making and social action. The book includes case studies of innovative sustainability research centres that act as examples of how a science of design can be constructed. The book concludes with a grounded discussion of the implications for building sustainability research and education programs, and training the next generation of sustainability scientists and practitioners.

This timely book gives students, researchers and practitioners an invaluable analysis of the emergence of sustainability science, and both the opportunities and barriers faced by scientific efforts to contribute to social action.
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What does the practice of religion look like in Latin American today? In this book, which examines religious practice in three Latin American cities- Lima, Peru; Cordoba, Argentina; and Montevideo, Uruguay- Gustavo Morello reveals the influence of modernity on average citizens' cultural practices. Technological development, the dynamics of capitalism, the specialization of spheres of knowledge- all these aspects of modernity were thought to diminish the importance of religion. Yet, Morello argues, if we look at religion as ordinary Latin Americans practice it, we discover that modernity has not diminished religion, but transformed it, creating what Morello calls "enchanted modernity." In Latin America, there is more religion than secularists expect, but of a different kind than religious leaders would wish. Morello explores how urban, contemporary Latin Americans, both believers and non-believers, from different social classes and religious affiliations, experience transcendence in everyday life. Using semi-structured interviews with 254 individuals in three cities with shifting religious landscapes and different cultural histories, Morello highlights the diversity within Latin America, exploring societies that are understudied and examining a broad array of religious traditions: "nones" (agnostics, non-affiliated, atheist), Catholics, Evangelicals (including mainstream Protestants, Pentecostals, neo-Evangelicals), and other traditions (including Jews, Muslims, Mormons, African-derived traditions, and Buddhists). Morello emphasizes elements, nuances, and dynamics that have previously been overlooked and that can enrich the study of religion other non-western societies. The book seeks to contribute to a critical theory of contemporary religion- one that is not centered in the North Atlantic world and that takes seriously the voices of the Latin American people.

The Oxford History of Protestant Dissenting Traditions, Volume I traces the emergence of Anglophone Protestant Dissent in the post-Reformation era between the Act of Uniformity (1559) and the Act of Toleration (1689). It reassesses the relationship between establishment and Dissent, emphasising that Presbyterians and Congregationalists were serious contenders in the struggle for religious hegemony. Under Elizabeth I and the early Stuarts, separatists were few in number, and Dissent was largely contained within the Church of England, as nonconformists sought to reform the national Church from within. During the English Revolution (1640-60), Puritan reformers seized control of the state but splintered into rival factions with competing programmes of ecclesiastical reform. Only after the Restoration, following the ejection of two thousand Puritan clergy from the Church, did most Puritans become Dissenters, often with great reluctance. Dissent was not the inevitable terminus of Puritanism, but the contingent and unintended consequence of the Puritan drive for further reformation. The story of Dissent is thus bound up with the contest for the established Church, not simply a heroic tale of persecuted minorities contending for religious toleration. Nevertheless, in the half century after 1640, religious pluralism became a fact of English life, as denominations formed and toleration was widely advocated. The volume explores how Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers began to forge distinct identities as the four major denominational traditions of English Dissent. It tracks the proliferation of Anglophone Protestant Dissent beyond England-in Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, New England, Pennsylvania, and the Caribbean. And it presents the latest research on the culture of Dissenting congregations, including their relations with the parish, their worship, preaching, gender relations, and lay experience.

Benjamin Franklin grew up in a devout Protestant family with limited prospects for wealth and fame. By hard work, limitless curiosity, native intelligence, and luck (what he called "providence"), Franklin became one of Philadelphia's most prominent leaders, a world recognized scientist, and the United States' leading diplomat during the War for Independence. Along the way, Franklin embodied the Protestant ethics and cultural habits he learned and observed as a youth in Puritan Boston. Benjamin Franklin: Cultural Protestant follows Franklin's remarkable career through the lens of the trends and innovations that the Protestant Reformation started (both directly and indirectly) almost two centuries earlier. His work as a printer, civic reformer, institution builder, scientist, inventer, writer, self-help dispenser, politician, and statesmen was deeply rooted in the culture and outlook that Protestantism nurtured. Through its alternatives to medieval church and society, Protestants built societies and instilled habits of character and mind that allowed figures such as Franklin to build the life that he did. Through it all, Franklin could not assent to all of Protestantism's doctrines or observe its worship, but for most of his life he acknowledged his debt to his creator, revelled in the natural world guided by providence, and conducted himself in a way (imperfectly) to merit divine approval. In this biography, D. G. Hart recognizes Franklin as a cultural or non-observant Protestant, someone who thought of himself as a Presbyterian, ordered his life as other Protestants did, sometimes went to worship services, read his Bible, and prayed, but could not go all the way and join a church.

Use this proven strategy for outreach in conjunction with The Faith-Sharing Congregation by Swanson and Clement and Faith-Sharing New Testament with Psalms (Cokesbury).

Volume 4 of The Annotated Luther series presents an array of Luther's writings related to pastoral work. Luther's famous lnvocavit Sermons and other selected sermons show a forthright and lively preacher. Hymn texts reveal Luther's grasp of hymnody as a tool for conveying and expressing faith. His Small Catechism as well as several pieces on prayer, including his Personal Prayer Book and A Simple Way to Pray, show his engagement in the basic task of teaching the faith. Luther's prefaces to his own writings contain personal reflections on his reforming work. Also in this volume are his commentary on The Magnificat, selected letters, and shorter pieces that display his pastoral responses to particular situations: Sermon on Preparing to Die, Whether One May Flee from a Deadly Plague, and Comfort for Women Who Have Had a Miscarriage. Each volume in The Annotated Luther series contains new introductions, annotations, illustrations, and notes to help shed light on Luther's context and interpret his writings for today. The translations of Luther's writings include updates of Luther's Works, American Edition or entirely new translations of Luther's German or Latin writings.

In this fascinating book Kathleen M. McIntyre traces intra-village conflicts stemming from Protestant conversion in southern Mexico and successfully demonstrates that both Protestants and Catholics deployed cultural identity as self-defense in clashes over local power and authority. McIntyre's study approaches religious competition through an examination of disputes over tequio (collective work projects) and cargo (civil-religious hierarchy) participation. By framing her study between the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Zapatista uprising of 1994, she demonstrates the ways Protestant conversion fueled regional and national discussions over the state's conceptualization of indigenous citizenship and the parameters of local autonomy. The book's timely scholarship is an important addition to the growing literature on transnational religious movements, gender, and indigenous identity in Latin America.