An edition of four previously unpublished heretical dialogues in Middle English, translated or adapted from Wycliffite sources composed circa 1380-1420. These previously unpublished prose treatises, cast as fictional dialogues, all survive in the form of single manuscripts, probably by different authors, but they cohere in their ideological outlook, subject matter, and debate form. The Dialogue between Jon and Richard concerns the four orders of friars; the Dialogue between a Friar and a Secular claims to be the written record of an oral debate that took place before a Lord Duke of Gloucester, and invites the lord to judge the two disputants: the friar offers a series of tendentious propositions on salvation, sin, and mendicancy, rebutted by the secular priest. The Dialogue between Reson and Gabbyng is a free translation and adaptation of the first twelve chapters of Wyclif's Dialogus (Speculum ecclesie militantis). The Dialogue between a Clerk and a Knight stages a conflict between papal and imperial, or regal, power, insisting on the rights of the king and his lords to remove the goods of corrupt clergy from England. These dialogues provide a comprehensive introduction to Wycliffite belief, and arguments on a range of controversial topics. The edition includes an introduction, detailed explanatory notes, and a glossary.

Evangelical Bible study groups are the most prolific type of small group in American society, with more than 30 million Protestants gathering every week for this distinct purpose, meeting in homes, churches, coffee shops, restaurants, and other public and private venues across the country. What happens in these groups? How do they help shape the contours of American Evangelical life? While more public forms of political activism have captured popular and scholarly imaginations, it is in group Bible study that Evangelicals reflect on the details of their faith. Here they become self-conscious religious subjects, sharing the intimate details of life, interrogating beliefs and practices, and articulating their version of Christian identity and culture.

In Words upon the Word, James S. Bielo draws on over nineteen months of ethnographic work with five congregations to better understand why group Bible study matters so much to Evangelicals and for Evangelical culture. Through a close analysis of participants' discourse, Bielo examines the defining themes of group life--from textual interpretation to spiritual intimacy and the rehearsal of witnessing. Bielo's approach allows these Evangelical groups to speak for themselves, illustrating Bible study's uniqueness in Evangelical life as a site of open and critical dialogue. Ultimately, Bielo's ethnography sheds much needed light on the power of group Bible study for the ever-evolving shape of American Evangelicalism.

Joel Osteen, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and Brian McLaren pastor some the largest churches in the nation, lead vast spiritual networks, write best-selling books, and are among the most influential preachers in American Protestantism today. Spurred by the phenomenal appeal of these religious innovators, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere investigate how they operate and how their style of religious expression fits into America's cultural landscape. Drawing from the theory of religious economy, the authors offer new perspectives on evangelical leadership and key insights into why some religious movements thrive while others decline.

Holy Mavericks provides a useful overview of contemporary evangelicalism while emphasizing the importance of "supply-side thinking" in understanding shifts in American religion. It reveals how the Christian world hosts a culture of celebrity very similar to the secular realm, particularly in terms of marketing, branding, and publicity. Holy Mavericks reaffirms that religion is always in conversation with the larger society in which it is embedded, and that it is imperative to understand how those religious suppliers who are able to change with the times will outlast those who are not.

At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together?
In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not lie solely in the protection of religious freedom. Instead, he reveals how American culture was transformed to accommodate the religious differences within it. The expansion of individual rights, the mixing of believers and churches in the same institutions, and the introduction of more civility into public life all played an instrumental role in creating the religious pluralism for which the United States has become renowned. These changes also established important precedents for future civil rights movements in which dignity, as much as equality, would be at stake.
Beyond Toleration is the first book to offer a systematic explanation of how early Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them --and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly. Today when religious conflicts once again pose a grave danger to democratic experiments across the globe, Beneke's book serves as a timely reminder of how one country moved past toleration and towards religious pluralism.

Studies of religion among our nation's newest immigrants largely focus on how religion serves the immigrant community -- for example by creating job networks and helping retain ethnic identity in the second generation. In this book Ecklund widens the inquiry to look at how Korean Americans use religion to negotiate civic responsibility, as well as to create racial and ethnic identity. She compares the views and activities of second generation Korean Americans in two different congregational settings, one ethnically Korean and the other multi-ethnic. She also conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with Korean American members of these and seven other churches around the country, and draws extensively on the secondary literature on immigrant religion, American civic life, and Korean American religion. Her book is a unique contribution to the literature on religion, race, and ethnicity and on immigration and civic life.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. The Road to Clarity is one of the first ethnographic in-depth studies of this phenomenon. It is a vivid account based on almost two years of participation in ordinary church members' daily religious and non-religious lives. The book offers a fascinating inquiry into the nature of long-term commitment to Adventism among rural people in Madagascar. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument, and intellectual exploration. This is a novel approach which challenges utilitarian and cultural particularist explanations of the success of this kind of Christianity.

Tabona Shoko contends that religion and healing are intricately intertwined in African religions. This book on the religion of the Karanga people of Zimbabwe sheds light on important methodological issues relevant to research in the study of African religions. Analysing the traditional Karanga views of the causes of illness and disease, mechanisms of diagnosis at their disposal and the methods they use to restore health, Shoko discusses the views of a specific African Independent Church of the Apostolic tradition. The conclusion Shoko reaches about the central religious concerns of the Karanga people is derived from detailed field research consisting of interviews and participant observation. This book testifies that the centrality of health and well-being is not only confined to traditional religion but reflects its adaptive potential in new religious systems manifest in the phenomenon of Independent Churches. Rather than succumbing to the folly of static generalizations, Tabona Shoko offers important insights into a particular society upon which theories can be reassessed, adding new dimensions to modern features of the religious scene in Africa.

"New York Times" eBook bestseller One fateful starless night, 17-year-old Ira Wagler got up at 2 AM, left a scribbled note under his pillow, packed all of his earthly belongings into in a little black duffel bag, and walked away from his home in the Amish settlement of Bloomfield, Iowa. Now, in this heartwarming memoir, Ira paints a vivid portrait of Amish life--from his childhood days on the family farm, his Rumspringa rite of passage at age 16, to his ultimate decision to leave the Amish Church for good at age 26. "Growing Up Amish" is the true story of one man's quest to discover who he is and where he belongs. Readers will laugh, cry, and be inspired by this charming yet poignant coming of age story set amidst the backdrop of one of the most enigmatic cultures in America today--the Old Order Amish.

What does it mean to grow up as an evangelical Christian today? What meanings does 'childhood' have for evangelical adults? How does this shape their engagements with children and with schools? And what does this mean for the everyday realities of children's lives? Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three contrasting evangelical churches in the UK, Anna Strhan reveals how attending to the significance of children within evangelicalism deepens understanding of evangelicals' hopes, fears and concerns, not only for children, but for wider British society. Developing a new, relational approach to the study of children and religion, Strhan invites the reader to consider both the complexities of children's agency and how the figure of the child shapes the hopes, fears, and imaginations of adults, within and beyond evangelicalism. The Figure of the Child in Contemporary Evangelicalism explores the lived realities of how evangelical Christians engage with children across the spaces of church, school, home, and other informal educational spaces in a de-christianizing cultural context, how children experience these forms of engagement, and the meanings and significance of childhood. Providing insight into different churches' contemporary cultural and moral orientations, the book reveals how conservative evangelicals experience their understanding of childhood as increasingly countercultural, while charismatic and open evangelicals locate their work with children as a significant means of engaging with wider secular society. Setting out an approach that explores the relations between the figure of the child, children's experiences, and how adult religious subjectivities are formed in both imagined and practical relationships with children, this study situates childhood as an important area of study within the sociology of religion and examines how we should approach childhood within this field, both theoretically and methodologically.

The twin concepts of kinship and pilgrimage have deep roots in Protestant culture. This cultural anthropological study, based in part on the author's own fieldwork, argues that in Reformed Protestantism, the Catholic custom of making pilgrimages to sacred spots has been replaced by the custom of "reunion," in which scattered members of a family or group return each year to their place of origin to take part in a quasi-sacred ritual meal and other ritual activities. Neville discusses open air services and kin-based gatherings in the Southern United States and Scotland as examples of symbolic forms that express certain themes in Northern European Protestant culture, contrasting these forms with the symbolic social statements in the Roman Catholic liturgical world of medieval Europe and traditional Mediterranean Catholicism. According to Neville, Protestant rituals of reunion such as family reunion, church homecoming, cemetery association day, camp meeting, and denomination conference center are part of an institutionalized pilgrimage complex that comments on Protestant culture and belief while presenting a symbolic inversion of the pilgrimage and the culture of Roman Catholic tradition.

Evangelicalism, an inter-denominational religious movement that has grown to become one of the most pervasive expressions of world Christianity in the early twenty-first century, had its origins in the religious revivals led by George Whitefield, John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. With its stress on the Bible, the cross of Christ, conversion and the urgency of mission, it quickly spread throughout the Atlantic world and then became a global phenomenon. Over the past three decades evangelicalism has become the focus of considerable historical research. This research companion brings together a team of leading scholars writing broad-ranging chapters on key themes in the history of evangelicalism. It provides an authoritative and state-of-the-art review of current scholarship, and maps the territory for future research. Primary attention is paid to English-speaking evangelicalism, but the volume is transnational in its scope. Arranged thematically, chapters assess evangelicalism and the Bible, the atonement, spirituality, revivals and revivalism, worldwide mission in the Atlantic North and the Global South, eschatology, race, gender, culture and the arts, money and business, interactions with Roman Catholicism, Eastern Christianity, and Islam, and globalization. It demonstrates evangelicalism's multiple and contested identities in different ages and contexts. The historical and thematic approach of this research companion makes it an invaluable resource for scholars and students alike worldwide.

Written by an expert in the history of Protestant Christianity

"" In "Evangelical Christian Executives, ] "Dr. Solomon has captured the essence of an effective and refreshingly different approach to business. In telling the compelling stories of six Christian CEOs, he shows us an alternative to an ethic of greed that has so tarnished corporate America."" --John D. Beckett, CEO and Chairman of R.W. Beckett Corp. Events of recent years have encouraged a high degree of skepticism and doubt about business institutions and markets. In the face of widespread cynicism about corporate credibility, business leaders are seeking to restore the trust and confidence not only of investors, but of employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, potential investors, and the public-at-large. In this volume, Lewis D. Solomon focuses on evangelical Christians who have founded or come to lead six firms. He explores whether religion offers a constructive way to think about corporate governance and the tensions between profitability and social responsibility. Solomon finds that many Christian executives have a private faith, leading quietly by example. Others want their faith to shine forth. Solomon focuses on this latter group, dividing them into two categories. The first group he identifies as preachers, who weave visible demonstrations of their faith into the fabric of their businesses. The second are those who take a more sophisticated approach, based on two biblical principles: stewardship and/or servant-leadership. In addition to examining how these leaders of faith have successfully brought their religious values into their businesses, he assesses the consequences of incorporating their faith and values into their business organizations, considering profitability, employee and customer satisfaction, legal and environmental compliance, and charitable giving. Together with these leadership styles and results, Solomon presents three business models--constant, transformational, and evolving--that enable readers to gain a further understanding of the six companies. While Solomon shows that it is possible to integrate financial profitability and broader religious goals, he finds that it is difficult, though not impossible, to maintain a biblically based leadership style after a firm goes public or expands. With the growth of evangelical Christianity in many sectors of American public life, this volume will be of broad interest to business executives, sociologists, students of religion, and economists. Lewis D. Solomon is Theodore Rinehart Professor of Business Law at the George Washington University Law School, where he has taught corporate and tax law for over twenty-five years. A prolific author on legal, business, public policy, and religious topics, he has written over fifty books and numerous articles. He is an ordained rabbi and interfaith minister.

In the contemporary United States, there are hundreds of thousands of Protestant churches whose members habitually carry their Bibles with them. These churches - often referred to as evangelical or fundamentalist - play a crucial role in shaping American society. In this book, David Watt draws on years of fieldwork to present an elegant reinterpretation of the way that conservative Protestants influence American politics and culture. At the heart of the book is a sympathetic, but far from uncritical, analysis of those forms of social power that are assumed to be natural among Bible-carrying Christians. While outsiders often presuppose that evangelical Christians take for granted the authority of certain institutions (among them the American state, corporations, ministers, men, and heterosexuals), Watt argues that the reality is far more complex. This is a concise and lively book that sheds new light on the way that Bible-carrying Christians influence the way that people in America think - and avoid thinking - about social power.

A radical new interpretation of the political and intellectual history of Puritan Massachusetts, The Making of an American Thinking Class envisions the Bay colony as a seventeenth century one-party state, where congregations served as ideological 'cells' and authority was restricted to an educated elite of ministers and magistrates. From there Staloff offers a broadened conception of the interstices of political, social, and intellectual authority in Puritan Massachusetts and beyond, arguing that ideologies, as well as ideological politics, are produced by self-conscious, and often class-conscious, thinkers.

Americans love to eat. They are also deeply religious. So it’s no surprise that food has an important place in the religious lives of Americans.. They eat in worship services. They drink coffeein church basements. They feed neighbors and strangers in the name of their god. For countless American Protestants, food and church are inseparable. From dry cookies and punch at coffee hour to potlucks and spaghetti dinners, Whitebread Protestants looks at the role food plays in the daily life of white mainline Protestant congregations.

Philip Jenkins looks at how the image of the cult evolved and why panics about such groups occur at certain times. He examines the deep roots of cult scares in American history, offering the first-ever history and analysis of cults and their critics fromthe 19th century to the present day. Contrary to popular belief, Jenkins shows, cults and anti-cult movements were not an invention of the 1960's, but in fact are traceable to the mid-19th century, when Catholics, Mormons and Freemasons were equally denounced for violence, fraud and licentiousness. He finds that, although there are genuine instances of aberrant behavior, a foundation of truth about fringe religious movements is all but obscured by a vast edifice of myth, distortion and hype.

"This colection brings together two generations of scholarship on many important topics in African-American religious history. . . . A useful and judiciously chosen compilation that should serve well in the classroom."
-- "Religious Studies Review"

"It serves as a smorgasbord of the study of black spirituality."
-- "Black Issues Book Review"

Down by the Riverside provides an expansive introduction to the development of African American religion and theology. Spanning the time of slavery up to the present, the volume moves beyond Protestant Christianity to address a broad diversity of African American religion from Conjure, Orisa, and Black Judaism to Islam, African American Catholicism, and humanism.

This accessible historical overview begins with African religious heritages and traces the transition to various forms of Christianity, as well as the maintenance of African and Islamic traditions in antebellum America. Preeminent contributors include Charles Long, Gayraud Wilmore, Albert Raboteau, Manning Marable, M. Shawn Copeland, Vincent Harding, Mary Sawyer, Toinette Eugene, Anthony Pinn, and C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya. They consider the varieties of religious expression emerging from migration from the rural South to urban areas, African American women's participation in Christian missions, Black religious nationalism, and the development of Black Theology from its nineteenth-century precursors to its formulation by James Cone and later articulations by black feminist and womanist theologians. They also draw on case studies to provide a profile of the Black Christian church today.

This thematic history of the unfolding of religious life in AfricanAmerica provides a window onto a rich array of African American people, practices, and theological positions.

This book offers the first comprehensive examination of the role of religion in the proceedings, theories, ideas and goals of the Continental Congress. Those who argue that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian Nation" have made much of the religiosity of the founders, particularly as it was manifested in ritual invocations of a clearly Christian God. Congress's religious activities, Davis shows, expressed an unreflective popular piety, and by no means a determination of the revolutionaries to entrench religion in the federal state.

This book presents writings produced by the Muggletonians---an unusual seventeenth-century English sect founded in 1652 by John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton. The volume draws on documents from a recently discovered Muggleton archive and rare seventeenth-century tracts. Among those included are Muggleton's autobiography, excerpts from works co-written by Muggleton and Reeve, letters, songs (including ones composed to celebrate Muggleton's release from prison), and miscellany.

The South has been the standard focus of Reconstruction, but reconstruction following the Civil War was not a distinctly Southern experience. In the post-Civil War West, American Indians also experienced reconstruction through removal to reservations and assimilation to Christianity, and Latter-day Saints - Mormons - saw government actions to force the end of polygamy under threat of disestablishing the church. These efforts to bring nonconformist Mormons into the American mainstream figure in the more familiar scheme of the federal government's reconstruction - aimed at rebellious white Southerners and uncontrolled American Indians. In this volume, more than a dozen contributors look anew at the scope of the reconstruction narrative and offer a unique perspective on the history of the Latter-day Saints. Marshaled by editors Clyde A. Milner II and Brian Q. Cannon, these writers explore why the federal government wanted to reconstruct Latter-day Saints, when such efforts began, and how the initiatives compare with what happened with white Southerners and American Indians. Other contributions examine the effect of the government's policies on Mormon identity and sense of history. Why, for example, do Latter-day Saints not have a Lost Cause? Do they share a resentment with American Indians over the loss of sovereignty? And were nineteenth-century Mormons considered to be on the ""wrong"" side of a religious line, but not a ""race line""? The authors consider these and other vital questions and topics here. Together, and in dialogue with one another, their work suggests a new way of understanding the regional, racial, and religious dynamics of reconstruction - and, within this framework, a new way of thinking about the creation of a Mormon historical identity.

Women of Principle deals with the struggles of contemporary Mormon polygynous women in their efforts to sustain their families in the prolonged absence of their husbands. Janet Bennion shows how women, through their networks with other women, are able to gain economic security and social autonomy. The book includes narratives from the lives of these women - narratives that clearly reveal why many mainstream Mormon women are viewing polygyny as a viable alternative to the difficulties of single-motherhood, "spinsterhood", poverty, and emotional deprivation.