Founded in 1816, the American Bible Society (ABS) exists to disseminate free copies of the Bible in local languages throughout the world, based on the belief that healthy republics require a moral citizenry and that the best way of promoting virtue throughout the nations is through the publication and dissemination of the Bible. Today, the ABS is a Christian ministry based in Philadelphia with a $300 million endowment and a mission to engage 100 million Americans with the Bible by 2025. Released just in time for the ABS's Bicentennial year, this book will demonstrate how the ABS's primary mission-to place the Bible in the hands of as many people as possible-has led the history of the ABS to intersect at nearly every point with the history of the United States. However and wherever the United States developed, the ABS was there, fusing American imperialism with the biblical mandate to preach the gospel throughout the entire world. Over the years ABS Bibles could be found in hotel rooms, bookstores, and airports, on steam boats, college and university campuses, and the Internet, and even behind the Iron Curtain. Its agents, Bibles in hand, could be found on the front lines of every American military conflict from the Mexican-American War to the Iraq War. Over the last two hundred years, the ABS has steadily increased its influence both at home and abroad, working with all Christian denominations in the US and internationally, aligning itself whenever possible with the gatekeepers of American religious culture, and has been on the cutting edge of technological innovation. However, despite the changes that the organization has undergone, The Bible Cause demonstrates that the ABS's primary mission and its commitment to positioning itself as the guardian of a Christian civilization have remained constant throughout the last two centuries.

Significant advances in science bring new understandings of the human as a unity of mind, body and world and calls into question the deep-seated dualistic presuppositions of modern theology. Oliver Davies argues that the changing framework allows a return to the defining question of the Easter Church: 'Where is Jesus Christ?'. This is a question which can bring about a fundamental re-orientation of theology, since it gives space for the theological reception of the disruptive presence of the living Christ as the present material as well as formal object of theology in the world. At the centre of this study therefore is a new theology of the doctrine of the exaltation of Christ, based upon St Paul's encounter with the exalted or commissioning Christ on the road to Damascus. This places calling and commissioning at the centre of systematic theology. It provides the ground for a new understanding of theology as transcending the Academy-Church division as well as the divide between systematic and practical theology. It points also to a new critical theological method of engagement and collaboration. This book begins to explore new forms of world-centred theological rationality in the contexts not only of scripture, doctrine, anthropology, ecclesiology and faith, but also of Christian politics and philosophy. It is a work of contemporary and global Christological promise in Fundamental Theology, and is addressed to all those who are concerned, from whichever denomination, with the continuing vitality of Christianity in a changing world.

A fascinating exposition of Christian online communication networks and the Internet's power to build a movement In the 1990s, Marilyn Agee developed one of the most well-known amateur evangelical websites focused on the "End Times", The Bible Prophecy Corner. Around the same time, Lambert Dolphin, a retired Stanford physicist, started the website Lambert's Library to discuss with others online how to experience the divine. While Marilyn and Lambert did not initially correspond directly, they have shared several correspondents in common. Even as early as 1999 it was clear that they were members of the same online network of Christians, a virtual church built around those who embraced a common ideology. Digital Jesus documents how such like-minded individuals created a large web of religious communication on the Internet, in essence developing a new type of new religious movement-one without a central leader or institution. Based on over a decade of interaction with figures both large and small within this community, Robert Glenn Howard offers the first sustained ethnographic account of the movement as well as a realistic and pragmatic view of how new communication technologies can both empower and disempower the individuals who use them. By tracing the group's origins back to the email lists and "Usenet" groups of the 1980s up to the online forums of today, Digital Jesus also serves as a succinct history of the development of online group communications.

An engaging, richly illustrated account of parish churches and churchgoers in England, from the Anglo-Saxons to the mid-sixteenth century Parish churches were at the heart of English religious and social life in the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. In this comprehensive study, Nicholas Orme shows how they came into existence, who staffed them, and how their buildings were used. He explains who went to church, who did not attend, how people behaved there, and how they-not merely the clergy-affected how worship was staged. The book provides an accessible account of what happened in the daily and weekly services, and how churches marked the seasons of Christmas, Lent, Easter, and summer. It describes how they celebrated the great events of life: birth, coming of age, and marriage, and gave comfort in sickness and death. A final chapter covers the English Reformation in the sixteenth century and shows how, alongside its changes, much that went on in parish churches remained as before.

Immigration and race are contentious issues in North America. As a result, immigrants from Ghana and other countries of West Africa confront major challenges in the social context of the United States, even as their experiences and accomplishments confound stereotypes. Religious congregations have often helped immigrants navigate the tricky waters of integration in the past; yet how do these particular black immigrants approach organized religion in light of their identities and aspirations? What are they looking for in religious membership, and how do they find it? In Joining the Choir, Nicolette D. Manglos-Weber takes a deeply personal look at the lives of a few central characters in Accra, Ghana and Chicago, Illinois, examining what religious membership means for them as Christians, transnational Ghanaians, and aspirational migrants. She sheds light on their search for people they can trust and their desires to transcend divisions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in the context of Evangelical Christianity. Her characters are complex, motivated, and adaptable people for whom religious membership answers some questions of integration and raises others. The stories of these migrants show how racial divides are subtly perpetuated within congregations in spite of hopes for religious-based assimilation. Yet they also reveal the potential of religious-based personal trust to bridge those divides, as an imaginative and symbolic leap of faith with the unknown stranger. Finally, their stories highlight the continuing role of religion as a portable basis of trust in the modern world, where more and more people live between nations.

Answers to the most common questions and misconceptions about the Bible Seven Things I Wish Christians Knew about the Bible is a short and readable introduction to the Bible-its origins, interpretation, truthfulness, and authority. Bible scholar, prolific author, and Anglican minister Michael Bird helps Christians understand seven important "things" about this unique book: how the Bible was put together; what "inspiration" means; how the Bible is true; why the Bible needs to be rooted in history; why literal interpretation is not always the best interpretation; how the Bible gives us knowledge, faith, love, and hope; and how Jesus Christ is the center of the Bible. Seven Things presents a clear and understandable evangelical account of the Bible's inspiration, canonization, significance, and relevance in a way that is irenic and compelling. It is a must read for any serious Bible reader who desires an informed and mature view of the Bible that will enrich their faith.

We Shall Rise, a look at Washington Advent Christian Campmeeting after 125 years, portrays an old-fashioned Maine campmeeting through the eyes of one who has lived through nearly half of that time, and through the eyes of her family nearly the whole period. Dr. Deb Cooper Harding comes across as one who has a love affair with a sacred spot where God has met His people year after year. One cannot escape the fact as to how special this spot is to a great many people, that God has used this place to His glory, and will continue to do so "until He comes."

One deep problem facing the Catholic church is the question of how its teaching authority is understood today. It is fairly clear that, while Rome continues to teach as if its authority were unchanged from the days before Vatican II (1962-65), the majority of Catholics - within the first-world church, at least - take a far more independent line, and increasingly understand themselves (rather than the church) as the final arbiters of decision-making, especially on ethical questions. This collection of essays explores the historical background and present ecclesial situation, explaining the dramatic shift in attitude on the part of contemporary Catholics in the U.S. and Europe. The overall purpose is neither to justify nor to repudiate the authority of the church's hierarchy, but to cast some light on: the context within which it operates, the complexities and ambiguities of the historical tradition of belief and behavior it speaks for, and the kinds of limits it confronts - consciously or otherwise. The authors do not hope to fix problems, although some of the essays make suggestions, but to contribute to a badly needed intra-Catholic dialogue without which, they believe, problems will continue to fester and solutions will remain elusive.

Exploring the enormous upheaval caused by the English Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, this vivid new history draws on long-forgotten material from the recesses of one of the world's greatest cathedrals--the great Benedictine Durham Priory, now the Anglican Durham Cathedral. Once a bastion of the Benedictine monks in the north of England, the Priory was dissolved after nearly 500 years on the orders of King Henry VIII in 1539, in his quest to separate the church in England from its headquarters in Rome. This illuminating guide to religious history and its social and political contexts, seen through the arches of one of England's most celebrated cathedrals, examines the devastating economic and spiritual consequences of the Dissolution, revealing how one of history's most effective and chilling apparatus of plunder and ruin erased the orders of monks and nuns that had served some 650 monastic religious houses in England and Wales.

This book is about the life and thought of Origen (c.185-254 A.D.), the most important Greek-speaking Christian theologian and Biblical scholar in antiquity. His writings included works on the text of the Bible, commentaries and sermons on most of the books of the Bible, a major defense of the Christian faith against a philosophical skeptic, and the first attempt at writing systematic theology ever made. Ronald E. Heine presents Origen's work in the context of the two urban centers where he lived-Alexandria in Egypt, and Caesarea in Palestine. Heine argues that these urban contexts and their communities of faith had a discernable impact on Origen's intellectual work.
The study begins with a description of Roman Alexandria where Origen spent the first forty-six years of his life. The thought of the Alexandrian Christian community in which Origen was born and in whose service he produced his first written works is examined from the limited resources that have survived. The remains of Origen's writings produced in Alexandria provide information about his early theological views as well as the circumstances of his life in Alexandria. Heine discusses the issues of the canon and text of the Bible used by Origen and the Alexandrian Christian community and the special work called the Hexapla which he produced on the text of the Septuagint.
Origen's later life in Caesarea was shaped by pastoral as well as teaching duties. These responsibilities put him in contact with the city's large Jewish population. Heine argues that the focus of Origen's thought shifts in this period from his earlier Alexandrian occupation with Gnostic issues to the complex questions concerning the relationship between church and synagogue and the ultimate fate of the Jews. In his final years it appears that Origen was rethinking some of the views he had espoused in his earlier work.

This book examines the complex relationship between religion and business in twentieth-century America. It is the story of how Christianity's most basic institution, the local church, wrestled with the challenges and compromises of competing in the modern marketplace through adopting the advertising, public relations, and marketing methods of business. It follows these sacred promoters, and their critics, as they navigated between divinely inspired and consumer demanded. Amid an animated and contentious battleground for principles, practices and parishioners, John C. Hardin explores the landscape of selling religion in America and its evolution over the twentieth century.

The book of Titus is an easy book to overlook in the New Testament. It is only three chapters long and yet it contains some of the most practical instruction for establishing a local church. Martin Luther said, "This is a short epistle, but it contains such a quintessence of Christian doctrine, and is composed in such a masterly manner, that it contains all that is needful for Christian knowledge and life." That is a bold statement for such a short book I hope that as you study Titus you will be able to discover for yourself what a treasure this book is to the church.

The development of new forms of ministry, lay and ordained, has included worker-priests, now found in the Anglican Communion in a related form variously called Self-Supporting Ministry (SSM) or Non-Stipendiary Ministry (NSM). This book focuses on one of the most recent developments, the creation of Ordained Local Ministry. After chapters that consider preliminary questions of the nature of ministry, such as authority in the church and Holy Orders, Noel Cox argues that the crucial distinction between these and other forms of ministry is that the Ordained Local Minister (OLM) is overtly ordained specifically for a given locality (variously defined); they are a deacon or priest for a specific church, parish, benefice, or deanery, rather than of the universal church. Their introduction inevitably raises difficult ecclesiological questions, which Cox examines.

John Milbank's theology has shaped much modern political thinking both within and without the Church. In Before and Beyond the 'Big Society', Joseph Forde presents the first study devoted exclusively to John Milbank's theology of welfare, and how it has influenced policy in the Church of England since 2008. By examining the favourable response the Church gave to the 'Big Society' project in 2010-12, Forde shows that Milbank's Blue Socialist fingerprint increasingly dominates Church policy. This theology has not evolved in a vacuum, however, and Forde expertly places it in its historical and theoretical context. He offers a detailed critical discussion of Milbank's own critique of what has been the mainstream (Temple) Anglican theology of welfare in the Church of England since the 1940s, and a fresh contribution to the assessment of Anglican social theology. Finally, he demonstrates how Milbank's ideas have been furthered by other influential Anglicans. It is this influence that will carry the greatest implications for the Church of England's policy on welfare in future, making this study relevant to all who care about its contribution to the provision of welfare.