When Cecil B. DeMille's epic, The Ten Commandments, came out in 1956, lines of people crowded into theaters across America to admire the movie's spectacular special effects. Thanks to DeMille, the commandments now had fans as well as adherents. But the country's fascination with the Ten Commandments goes well beyond the colossal scenes of this Hollywood classic. In this vividly rendered narrative, Jenna Weissman Joselit situates the Ten Commandments within the fabric of American history. Her subjects range from the 1860 tale of the amateur who claimed to have discovered ancient holy stones inside a burial mound in Ohio to the San Francisco congregation of Sherith Israel, which commissioned a luminous piece of stained glass depicting Moses in Yosemite for its sanctuary; from the Kansas politician Charles Walter, who in the late nineteenth century proposed codifying each commandment into state law, to the radio commentator Laura Schlessinger, who popularized the Ten Commandments as a psychotherapeutic tool in the 1990s. At once text and object, celestial and earthbound, Judaic and Christian, the Ten Commandments were not just a theological imperative in the New World; they also provoked heated discussions around key issues such as national identity, inclusion, and pluralism. In a country as diverse and heterogeneous as the United States, the Ten Commandments offered common ground and held out the promise of order and stability, becoming the lodestar of American identity. While archaeologists, theologians, and devotees across the world still wonder what became of the tablets that Moses received on Mount Sinai, Weissman Joselit offers a surprising answer: they landed in the United States.

This book is a history of an astounding transatlantic phenomenon, a popular evangelical revival known in America as the first Great Awakening (1735-1745). Beginning in the mid-1730s, supporters and opponents of the revival commented on the extraordinary nature of what one observer called the "great ado," with its extemporaneous outdoor preaching, newspaper publicity, and rallies of up to 20,000 participants. Frank Lambert, biographer of Great Awakening leader George Whitefield, offers an overview of this important episode and proposes a new explanation of its origins.

The Great Awakening, however dramatic, was nevertheless unnamed until after its occurrence, and its leaders created no doctrine nor organizational structure that would result in a historical record. That lack of documentation has allowed recent scholars to suggest that the movement was "invented" by nineteenth-century historians. Some specialists even think that it was wholly constructed by succeeding generations, who retroactively linked sporadic happenings to fabricate an alleged historic development. Challenging these interpretations, Lambert nevertheless demonstrates that the Great Awakening was invented--not by historians but by eighteenth-century evangelicals who were skillful and enthusiastic religious promoters. Reporting a dramatic meeting in one location in order to encourage gatherings in other places, these men used commercial strategies and newly popular print media to build a revival--one that they also believed to be an "extraordinary work of God." They saw a special meaning in contemporary events, looking for a transatlantic pattern of revival and finding a motive for spiritual rebirth in what they viewed as a moral decline in colonial America and abroad.

By examining the texts that these preachers skillfully put together, Lambert shows how they told and retold their revival account to themselves, their followers, and their opponents. His inquiries depict revivals as cultural productions and yield fresh understandings of how believers "spread the word" with whatever technical and social methods seem the most effective.

The claim that the Bible was 'the Christian's only rule of faith and practice' has been fundamental to Protestant dissent. Dissenters first braved persecution and then justified their adversarial status in British society with the claim that they alone remained true to the biblical model of Christ's Church. They produced much of the literature that guided millions of people in their everyday reading of Scripture, while the voluntary societies that distributed millions of Bibles to the British and across the world were heavily indebted to Dissent. Yet no single book has explored either what the Bible did for dissenters or what dissenters did to establish the hegemony of the Bible in British culture. The protracted conflicts over biblical interpretation that resulted from the bewildering proliferation of dissenting denominations have made it difficult to grasp their contribution as a whole. This volume evokes the great variety in the dissenting study and use of the Bible while insisting on the factors that gave it importance and underlying unity. Its ten essays range across the period from the later seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century and make reference to all the major dissenting denominations of the United Kingdom. The essays are woven together by a thematic introduction which places the Bible at the centre of dissenting ecclesiology, eschatology, public worship and 'family religion', while charting the political and theological divisions that made the cry of 'the Bible only' so divisive for dissenters in practice.

The inspiration of Ernest Holmes has reached hundreds of thousands of readers through his classic works, many of which are just now becoming available in paperback.
Originally published in the first half of the twentieth century, these meditative, concise volumes have never previously appeared in paperback. Whether a newcomer to the philosophy Holmes founded or a veteran reader, you will find great power and practicality in the words that render Holmes one of the most celebrated and beloved mystical teachers of the past hundred years.

Evangelical theology is a burgeoning field. Evangelicals have been growing in numbers and prominence worldwide, and the rise to academic prominence of evangelical historians, scripture scholars, ethicists, and theologians--many of whom have changed the face of their disciplines--has demonstrated the growing maturity of this movement's intellectual leaders. This volume surveys the state of the discipline on topics of greatest importance to evangelical theology. Each chapter has been written by a theologian or scholar who is widely recognized for his or her published work and is considered a leading thinker on that particular topic. The authors critically assess the state of the question, from both classical and evangelical traditions, and propose a future direction for evangelical thinking on the subject.

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.

David Brainerd is simultaneously one of the most enigmatic and recognizable figures in American religious history. Born in 1718 and known for his missionary work among the Indians (as well as for being expelled from Yale), Brainerd and the story of his life entered the realm of legend almost immediately upon his death at the age of twenty-nine.
Much of his reputation is based on the picture of Brainerd constructed by Jonathan Edwards in his best-selling Life of David Brainerd. This new biography seeks to restore Brainerd to the context of the culture in which he lived. Combining archival research with the most recent scholarship on the Great Awakening and Indian missions, John A. Grigg argues that Brainerd was shaped by two formative experiences. On the one hand, he was the child of a prosperous, well-respected Connecticut family that was part of the political and social establishment. On the other, he was a participant in one of the more fundamental challenges to that establishment-the religious revivals of the 1740s. Brainerd's work among the Indians, Grigg argues, was a way to combine the sense of order and tradition inherited from his family with his radical experiences in the revival movement. Moving beyond biography, Grigg also examines how the myth of Brainerd came to be. He argues that both Edwards and John Wesley crafted their versions of Brainerd's life in order to address specific problems in their own churches, and he examines how subsequent generations of evangelicals utilized Brainerd for their own purposes.
The Lives of David Brainerd is the first truly scholarly biography of Brainerd, drawing on everything from town records and published sermons to hand-written fragments to tell the story not only of his life, but of his legend. The David Brainerd who emerges from this work is a man who is both familiar and remarkably new.

John Owen was a leading theologian in seventeenth-century England. Closely associated with the regicide and revolution, he befriended Oliver Cromwell, was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford, and became the premier religious statesman of the Interregnum. The restoration of the monarchy pushed Owen into dissent, criminalizing his religious practice and inspiring his writings in defense of high Calvinism and religious toleration. Owen transcended his many experiences of defeat, and his claims to quietism were frequently undermined by rumors of his involvement in anti-government conspiracies. Crawford Gribben's biography documents Owen's importance as a controversial and adaptable theologian deeply involved with his social, political, and religious environments. Fiercely intellectual and extraordinarily learned, Owen wrote millions of words in works of theology and exegesis. Far from personifying the Reformed tradition, however, Owen helped to undermine it, offering an individualist account of Christian faith that downplayed the significance of the church and means of grace. In doing so, Owen's work contributed to the formation of the new religious movement known as evangelicalism, where his influence can still be seen today.