Ashlee Quosigk explores the diversity of opinions within the largest religious group in the US - Evangelical Christians - on the topic of Islam. Evangelicals are often characterized as monolithically antagonistic toward Muslims. This book challenges that stereotype, exposing the sharp divides that exist among Evangelicals on Islam and examines why there is division. Drawing on qualitative research on two congregations in the US, as well as on popular Evangelical leaders, this book details the surprisingly diverse views Evangelicals hold on Muhammad, the Qur'an, interfaith dialogue, syncretism, and politics. This research is invaluable for providing a better understanding of what Evangelicals think, and why. This book also offers insight into why conflict exists and why Evangelicals differ, while advancing culture war theory and qualitative methods. Specifically, it explores differences in moral authority (assumptions that guide one's perceptions of the world) among Evangelicals and explains how these differences influence their views on Islam. The findings are relevant to religious relations worldwide as everyone appeals to moral authority, irrespective of their geographic location.

They always manage to knock on your door at the worst possible times. It's difficult to talk to Jehovah's Witnesses because they test your Bible knowledge and spiritual endurance. But the effort is worth it, because they need to hear the gospel from you. Reed, a former JW elder, closely examines the Jehovah's Witnesses' favorite Bible verses and discusses other important verses they ignore.

This book investigates a puzzling and neglected phenomenon - the rise of English Arminianism during the decade of puritan rule. Throughout the 1650s, numerous publications, from scholarly folios to popular pamphlets, attacked the doctrinal commitments of Reformed Orthodoxy. This anti-Calvinist onslaught came from different directions: episcopalian royalists (Henry Hammond, Herbert Thorndike, Peter Heylyn), radical puritan defenders of the regicide (John Goodwin and John Milton), and sectarian Quakers and General Baptists. Unprecedented rejection of Calvinist soteriology was often coupled with increased engagement with Catholic, Lutheran and Remonstrant alternatives. As a result, sophisticated Arminian publications emerged on a scale that far exceeded the Laudian era. Cromwellian England therefore witnessed an episode of religious debate that significantly altered the doctrinal consensus of the Church of England for the remainder of the seventeenth century. The book will appeal to historians interested in the contested nature of 'Anglicanism' and theologians interested in Protestant debates regarding sovereignty and free will. Part One is a work of religious history, which charts the rise of English Arminianism across different ecclesial camps - episcopal, puritan and sectarian. These chapters not only introduce the main protagonists but also highlight a surprising range of distinctly English Arminian formulations. Part Two is a work of historical theology, which traces the detailed doctrinal formulations of two prominent divines - the puritan John Goodwin and the episcopalian Henry Hammond. Their Arminian theologies are set in the context of the Western theological tradition and the soteriological debates, that followed the Synod of Dort. The book therefore integrates historical and theological enquiry to offer a new perspective on the crisis of 'Calvinism' in post-Reformation England.

God, as depicted in popular evangelical literature, is loving and friendly, described in heartfelt, often saccharine prose evocative of nostalgia, comfortable domesticity, and familial love. This emotional appeal is a widely-adopted strategy of the writers most popular among American evangelicals, including such high-profile pastors as Max Lucado, Rick Warren, and Joel Osteen. Todd M. Brenneman offers an in-depth examination of this previously unexplored aspect of American evangelical identity: sentimentality, which aims to produce an emotional response by appealing to readers' notions of familial relationships, superimposed on their relationship with God. Brenneman argues that evangelicals use sentimentality to establish authority in the public sphere-authority that is, by its emotional nature, unassailable by rational investigation. Evangelicals also deploy sentimentality to try to bring about change in society, though, as Brenneman shows, the sentimental focus on individual emotion and experience can undermine the evangelical agenda. Sentimentality not only allows evangelicals to sidestep intellectual questioning, but sets the stage for doctrinal change as well as weakening the evangelical vision of transforming society into the kingdom of God.

Exploring one of the most controversial figures in recent evangelical theology, this book thoroughly examines core features of Stanley J. Grenz's Trinitarian vision.

When Art Disrupts Religion opens at London's Tate Modern Museum, with a young Evangelical man contemplating a painting by Mark Rothko, an aesthetic experience that proves disruptive to his religious life. Without those moments with Rothko, he says, "there never would have been an undoing of my conservative Evangelical worldview." The memoirs, interviews, and ethnographic field notes gathered by Philip Francis for this book lay bare the power of the arts to unsettle and overturn deeply ingrained religious beliefs and practices. Francis explores the aesthetic disturbances of more than 80 Evangelical respondants. From the paintings of Rothko to the films of Ingmar Bergman, from The Brothers Karamozov to The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Francis finds that the arts function as sites of "defamiliarization," "comfort in uncertainty," "a stand-in for faith" and a "surrogate transcendence." Bridging the gap between aesthetic theory and lived religion, this book sheds light on the complex interrelationship of religion and art in the modern West, and the role of the arts in education and social life.

In the late nineteenth century, a small community of Native Hawaiian Mormons established a settlement in heart of The Great Basin, in Utah. The community was named Iosepa, after the prophet and sixth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Joseph F. Smith. The inhabitants of Iosepa struggled against racism, the ravages of leprosy, and economic depression, by the early years of the twentieth century emerging as a modern, model community based on ranching, farming, and an unwavering commitment to religious ideals. Yet barely thirty years after its founding the town was abandoned, nearly all of its inhabitants returning to Hawaii. Years later, Native Hawaiian students at nearby Brigham Young University, descendants of the original settlers, worked to clean the graves of Iosepa and erect a monument to memorialize the settlers. Remembering Iosepa connects the story of this unique community with the earliest Native Hawaiian migrants to western North America and the vibrant and growing community of Pacific Islanders in the Great Basin today. It traces the origins and growth of the community in the tumultuous years of colonial expansion into the Hawaiian islands, as well as its relationship to white Mormons, the church leadership, and the Hawaiian government. In the broadest sense, Mathew Kester seeks to explain the meeting of Mormons and Hawaiians in the American West and to examine the creative adaptations and misunderstandings that grew out of that encounter.