What is the true nature and mission of the church? Is its proper Christian purpose to save souls, or to transform the social order? This question is especially fraught when the church is one built by an enslaved people and formed, from its beginning, at the center of an oppressed community's fight for personhood and freedom. Such is the central tension in the identity and mission of the black church in the United States. For decades the black church and black theology have held each other at arm's length. Black theology has emphasized the role of Christian faith in addressing racism and other forms of oppression, arguing that Jesus urged his disciples to seek the freedom of all peoples. Meanwhile, the black church, even when focused on social concerns, has often emphasized personal piety rather than social protest. With the rising influence of white evangelicalism, biblical fundamentalism, and the prosperity gospel, the divide has become even more pronounced. In Piety or Protest, Raphael G. Warnock, Senior Pastor of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the spiritual home of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., traces the historical significance of the rise and development of black theology as an important conversation partner for the black church. Calling for honest dialogue between black and womanist theologians and black pastors, this fresh theological treatment demands a new look at the church's essential mission. The Reverend Dr. Raphael G. Warnock serves as Senior Pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church (Atlanta, Georgia). In the Religion, Race, and Ethnicity series

Raised in a broken family and emotionally overlooked, Sherry Gore grew up without a solid foundation, a prisoner of her own poor choices, and at times without hope. A series of terrible mistakes left her feeling wrecked and alone and a sudden tragedy threw Sherry into an emotional tailspin too powerful to escape. Sherry hangs by a thread, unable to see how she can go on living, until it happens: on a morning of no particular significance, she walks into a church and BAM the truth of Jesus' forgiving love shatters her world and cleaves her life in two: She goes to bed stunned; she wakes up a Christian. Unwilling to return to the darkness of her former life, Sherry attacks her faith head on. Soon the life Sherry Gore remakes for herself and her children as she seeks to follow the teachings of the Bible features head coverings, simple dress, and a focus on Jesus Christ. Only then does she realize, in a fit of excitement, that there are others like her. They are called Amish and Mennonite, and she realizes she has found her people. The plain choice that Sherry makes is not easy - and life still brings unexpected pain and heartache - but it changes everything for her, as she becomes one of the few people on earth to have successfully joined the Amish from the outside. She has found her place. And her story proves that one can return from the darkest depths to the purest light with the power of God.

Sara Moslener sheds light on the contemporary purity movement by examining how earlier movements established the rhetorical and moral frameworks utilized by two of today's leading purity organizations, True Loves Waits and Silver Ring Thing. Her investigation reveals that purity work over the last two centuries has developed in concert with widespread fears of changing traditional gender roles and sexual norms, national decline, and global apocalypse. In Virgin Nation Moslener highlights various points in U.S. history when evangelical beliefs and values have seemed to provide viable explanations for and solutions to widespread cultural crises, resulting in the growth of their cultural and political influence. By asserting a causal relationship between sexual immorality, national decline, and apocalyptic anticipation, leaders have shaped a purity rhetoric that positions Protestant evangelicalism as the salvation of American civilization. Nineteenth-century purity reformers, Moslener shows, utilized a nationalist discourse that drew upon racialized and sexualized fears of national decline and pointed to sexual immorality as the cause of Anglo-Saxon decline, and national decay. In the early to mid-twentieth century, fundamentalist leaders such as Billy Graham and Carl F.H. Henry sought to establish an intellectually sound millennialist theology that linked sexual immorality, national vulnerability, and the expectation of imminent nuclear apocalypse. Then with the resurgence of Christian fundamentalism in the 1970s, formerly apolitical social conservatives found themselves swayed by the nationalist and prophetic ideologies of the Moral Majority, which also linked sexual immorality to national decline and pending apocalypse. However, millennialist theologies, relevant at the height of the cold war, had mostly disappeared from political discourse by the 1970s when the Red Scare began to fade from popular consciousness. For contemporary purity advocates, says Moslener, the main obstacle to moral and national restoration is sexual immorality, a cultural blight traceable to the excesses of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Today the movement positions the adolescents who embody sexual purity as an embattled sexual minority poised to save America from the repercussions of its own moral turpitude, with or without government assistance.

In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? It is now known that religious works formed the greater part of the publishing market for most of the century. What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people's hands? Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is the first book to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by evangelical dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. Isabel Rivers also looks back to earlier sources and forward to the continued republication of many of these works well into the nineteenth century. The first part is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and not-for-profit religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. The second part shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. The third part explores the main literary kinds, including annotated bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. Building on many years' research into the religious literature of the period, Rivers discusses over two hundred writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother-daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease twenty years later. In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter's most faithful correspondent. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer's disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image - of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience - sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive. Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they're ours to hold.

This fascinating book brings more than one hundred previously unpublished Shaker songs to the attention of scholars, performers, and aficionados of folk music. A Shaker Musical Legacy introduces Shaker songs and dances that Brother Ricardo Belden, the last male member of the Hancock Shakers, gave in original manuscript form to Jerry and Sybil Count, the first directors of the Shaker Village Camp. The Opdahls have selected from and transcribed this music and included dance directions to honor Brother Ricardo's hope that doing so would keep alive a part of the Shaker heritage.
The songs are transcribed as modern musical scores for use by contemporary musicians and singers. Many examples are also shown in their original Shaker musical notation. Step-by-step instructions show how to perform the dances as the Shakers themselves danced them. Explanatory notes introduce each of nine musical sections.

This book offers an authoritative overview of the history of evangelicalism as a global movement, from its origins in Europe and North America in the first half of the eighteenth century to its present-day dynamic growth in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. Starting with a definition of the movement within the context of the history of Protestantism, it follows the history of evangelicalism from its early North Atlantic revivals to the great expansion in the Victorian era, through to its fracturing and reorientation in response to the stresses of modernity and total war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the movement's indigenization and expansion toward becoming a multicentered and diverse movement at home in the non-Western world that nevertheless retains continuity with its historic roots. The book concludes with an analysis of contemporary worldwide evangelicalism's current trajectory and the movement's adaptability to changing historical and geographical circumstances.

This book shows that new centers of Christianity have taken root in the global south. Although these communities were previously poor and marginalized, Stephen Offutt illustrates that they are now socioeconomically diverse, internationally well connected, and socially engaged. Offutt argues that local and global religious social forces, as opposed to other social, economic, or political forces, are primarily responsible for these changes.