While concentrated on the famous Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis, this book focuses on an area that has so far been somewhat marginalized or even overlooked by modern interpreters: the recontextualizing of the Passio Perpetuae in the subsequent reception of this text in the literature of the early Church. Since its composition in the early decades of the 3rd century, the Passio Perpetuae was enjoying an extraordinary authority and popularity. However, it contained a number of revolutionary and innovative features that were in conflict with existing social and theological conventions. This book analyses all relevant texts from the 3rd to 5th centuries in which Perpetua and her comrades are mentioned, and demonstrates the ways in which these texts strive to normalize the innovative aspects of the Passio Perpetuae. These efforts, visible as they are already on careful examination of the passages of the editor of the passio, continue from Tertullian to Augustine and his followers. The normalization of the narrative reaches its peak in the so-called Acta Perpetuae which represent a radical rewriting of the original and an attempt to replace it by a purified text, more compliant with the changed socio-theological hierarchies.

"The Sleeping Giant" is the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S.--the Hispanic community. Hispanics, especially Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Mexicans, are changing society and the church. As a second-generation Puerto Rican, born and reared in El Barrio of New York City, Manuel Ortiz knows first-hand what it is like to be a Hispanic in the U.S. As a sociologist, he recognizes the exciting potential for the future of the church--if leadership development is undertaken. Oritz first explores the unique needs and concerns of Hispanics in the U.S. Then he turns to key missiological issues, including Protestant-Catholic relationships, justice, racial reconcilliation and ecclesiastical structures. Ortiz has interviewed numerous Hispanic leaders working in a variety of contexts and describes their models for ministry. Finally, the book focuses on leadership training and education, with a particular emphasis on developing second-generation leadership. The sleeping giant must not be ignored. This is a book that will awaken awareness of the possibilities of the Hispanic church.

Baptists in America began the eighteenth century a small, scattered, often harassed sect in a vast sea of religious options. By the early nineteenth century, they were a unified, powerful, and rapidly-growing denomination, poised to send missionaries to the other side of the world. One of the most influential yet neglected leaders in that transformation was Oliver Hart, longtime pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Hart, arguably the most important evangelical leader in the pre-Revolutionary South. During his thirty years in Charleston, Hart emerged as the region's most important Baptist denominational architect. His outspoken patriotism forced him to flee Charleston when the British army invaded Charleston in 1780, but he left behind a southern Baptist people forever changed by his energetic ministry. Hart's accommodating stance toward slavery enabled him and the white Baptists who followed him to reach the center of southern society, but also eventually doomed the national Baptist denomination of Hart's dreams. More than a biography, Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America seamlessly intertwines Hart's story with that of eighteenth-century American Baptists, providing one of the most thorough accounts to date of this important and understudied religious group's development. This book makes a significant contribution to the study of Baptist life and evangelicalism in the pre-Revolutionary South and beyond.

The America we know and love is in danger as never before in its history. The Land of George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the uniquely great American Constitution is under deadly attack. It has already been distorted and heavily damaged. America is being assaulted from within and without by forces of atheism, legalized immorality, socialism, communism, and Islam. Some of these forces go by the deceptive names of "progressives," "social democrats," "leftists," as well as socialism, communism, and atheism, but they have their basis in vile hatred of America, and they work assiduously to malign and defame our country, and overthrow it. Their method is constant lying and deception in every form imaginable. We witness preposterous lies every day from these individuals and groups in their quest to defame America, conservatism, Republicans, and any individual or group that opposes them. They have as their goal the revolutionary overthrow of America, and its replacement by socialism, communism, or Islam and Sharia law. All of these forces have a long historical record of inhuman cruelty, genocide, and democide. The destructive revolutionary activities of the 1960s opened up these avenues of attack, and they have increasingly evolved and been institutionalized since the 1970s and 80s. They run throughout our educational institutions, the courts, the media, entertainment, and have even infiltrated our government. Our universities have been corrupted and politicized by them. Many professors who teach our young people today are avowed Marxists, socialists, and communists. Many of these professors are also radical feminists who are atheists, Marxists, communists, and lesbians. They also express great hatred for America, and seek to radically change it to some form of Marxism, socialism, or communism. The ACLU, an atheist and communist organization from its start in 1920, is now a highly financed organization that actually seeks to legally overthrow Constitutional American liberties, and promote a totally different world of anarchic, atheistic freedom, divorced from God and moral law, and which will be intolerant of anything else. America began as a Christian democratic nation, with Presidents who stood staunchly for liberty under God, Christianity, the Bible, and freedom of worship. They warned us against the results of immorality-tyranny, despotism, corruption, and decline. Constitutional liberties have already been largely swept away by a Supreme Court that now places atheistic autonomy above everything else-above God, the Bible, morality, our country, our flag, marriage, and the family. The current President has even declared that we are no longer a Christian nation. This book not only seeks to describe these corrupting developments, but to suggest how and why they have risen to dominance.