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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
Apocalyptic millennialism is one of the most powerful strands in
evangelical Christianity. It is not a single belief, but across
many powerful evangelical groups there is general adhesion to faith
in the physical return of Jesus in the Second Coming, the
affirmation of a Rapture heavenward of "saved" believers, a
millennium of peace under the rule of Jesus and his saints and,
eventually, a final judgement and entry into deep eternity. In
Discovering the End of Time (2016) Donald Harman Akenson traced the
emergence of the primary packaging of modern apocalyptic
millennialism back to southern Ireland in the 1820s and '30s. In
Exporting the Rapture, he documents for the first time how the
complex theological construction that has come to dominate modern
evangelical thought was enhulled in an organizational system that
made it exportable from the British Isles to North America- and
subsequently around the world. A key figure in this process was
John Nelson Darby who was at first a formative influence on
evangelical apocalypticism in Ireland; then the volatile central
figure in Brethren apocalypticism throughout the British Isles; and
also a crusty but ultimately very successful missionary to the
United States and Canada. Akenson emphasizes that, as strong a
personality as John Nelson Darby was, the real story is that he
became a vector for the transmission of a terrifically complex and
highly seductive ideological system from the old world to the new.
So beguiling, adaptable, and compelling was the new Dispensational
system that Darby injected into North-American evangelicalism that
it continued to spread logarithmically after his death. By the
1920s, the system had become the doctrinal template of the
fundamentalist branch of North-American evangelicalism and the
distinguishing characteristic of the bestselling Scofield Bible.
Over the last four decades, evangelical scholars have shown growing
interest in Christian debates over other religions, seeking answers
to essential questions: How are we to think about and relate to
other religions, be open to the Spirit, and at the same time remain
evangelical and orthodox? Gerald R. McDermott and Harold A. Netland
offer critiques of a variety of theologians and religious studies
scholars, including evangelicals, but also challenge evangelicals
to move beyond parochial positions. This volume is both a manifesto
and a research program, critically evaluating the last forty years
of Christian treatments of religious others and proposing a
comprehensive direction for the future. It addresses issues
relating to the religions in both systematic theology and
missiology, taking up long-debated questions such as
contextualization, salvation, revelation, the relationship between
culture and religion, conversion, social action, and ecumenism. It
concludes with responses from four leading thinkers of African,
Asian, and European backgrounds: Veli-Matti Karkkainen, Vinoth
Ramachandra, Lamin Sanneh, and Christine Schirrmacher.
Latter-day Saints have a paradoxical relationship to the past; even
as they invest their own history with sacred meaning, celebrating
the restoration of ancient truths and the fulfillment of biblical
prophecies, they repudiate the eighteen centuries of Christianity
that preceded the founding of their church as apostate distortions
of the truth. Since the early days of Mormonism, Latter-day Saints
have used the paradigm of apostasy and restoration in their
narratives about the origin of their church. This has generated a
powerful and enduring binary of categorization that has profoundly
impacted Mormon self-perception and relations with others. Standing
Apart explores how the idea of apostasy has functioned as a
category to mark, define, and set apart "the other" in Mormon
historical consciousness and in the construction of Mormon
narrative identity. The volume's fifteen contributors trace the
development of LDS narratives of apostasy within the context of
both Mormon history and American Protestant historiography. They
suggest ways in which these narratives might be reformulated to
engage with the past, as well as offering new models for interfaith
relations. This volume provides a novel approach for understanding
and resolving some of the challenges faced by the LDS church in the
twenty-first century.
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.
In recent years evangelical Christians have been increasingly
turning their attention toward issues such as the environment,
international human rights, economic development, racial
reconciliation, and urban renewal. Such engagement marks both a
return to historic evangelical social action and a pronounced
expansion of the social agenda advanced by the Religious Right in
the past few decades. For outsiders to evangelical culture, this
trend complicates simplistic stereotypes. For insiders, it brings
contention over what "true" evangelicalism means today. Beginning
with an introduction that broadly outlines this 'new
evangelicalism', the editors identify its key elements, trace its
historical lineage, account for the recent changes taking place
within evangelicalism, and highlight the implications of these
changes for politics, civic engagement, and American religion. The
essays that follow bring together an impressive interdisciplinary
team of scholars to map this new religious terrain and spell out
its significance in what is sure to become an essential text for
understanding trends in contemporary evangelicalism.
A Geography of the Hutterites in North America explores the
geographical diffusion of the Hutterite colonies from the
"bridgehead" of Dakota Territory in 1874 to the present
distribution across North America. Looking further than just maps
of location, this book analyzes the relationship between parent and
daughter colonies as the Hutterite population continues to grow and
examines the role of cultural and demographic forces in determining
the diffusion process. Throughout this geographical analysis, Simon
M. Evans pays due attention to the Hutterites' contribution to the
cultural landscape of the Canadian Prairies and the American Great
Plains, as well as the interactions that the Hutterites have with
the land, including their agricultural success. With over forty
years of research and personal interactions with more than a
hundred Hutterite colonies, Evans offers a unique insight into the
significant role that the Hutterites have in North America, both
currently and historically. This study goes beyond the history,
life, and culture of this communal brotherhood to present a new
geographical analysis that reports on current and ongoing research
within the field. The first narrative to be published regarding
Hutterites in nearly a decade, A Geography of the Hutterites in
North America is a valuable resource for scholars and students
alike.
Why, when traditionally organized religious groups are seeing
declining membership and participation, are networks of independent
churches growing so explosively? Drawing on in-depth interviews
with leaders and participants, The Rise of Network Christianity
explains the social forces behind the fastest growing form of
Christianity in the U.S., which Brad Christerson and Richard Flory
have labeled "Independent Network Christianity" (INC). This form of
Christianity emphasizes aggressive engagement with the
supernatural, including healing, direct prophecies from God,
engaging in "spiritual warfare" against demonic spirits, and social
transformation. Christerson and Flory argue that large-scale social
changes since the 1970s, including globalization and the digital
revolution have given competitive advantages to religious groups
organized by networks rather than traditionally organized
congregations and denominations. Network forms of church governance
allow for experimentation with controversial supernatural
practices, innovative finances and marketing, and a highly
participatory, unorthodox, and experiential faith, which is
attractive in today's unstable religious marketplace. Christerson
and Flory argue that as more religious groups imitate this type of
governance, religious belief and practice will become more
experimental, more oriented around practice than belief, more
shaped by the individual religious "consumer" and that authority
will become more highly concentrated in the hands of individuals
rather than institutions.
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