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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
Among the Old Order Mennonite and Amish communities of Lancaster
County, Pennsylvania, the coming of the telephone posed a serious
challenge to the longstanding traditions of work, worship, silence,
and visiting. In 1907, Mennonites crafted a compromise in order to
avoid a church split and grudgingly allowed telephones for lay
people while prohibiting telephone ownership among the clergy. By
1909, the Amish had banned the telephone completely from their
homes. Since then, the vigorous and sometimes painful debates about
the meaning of the telephone reveal intense concerns about the
maintenance of boundaries between the community and the outside
world and the processes Old Order communities use to confront and
mediate change.
In "Holding the Line," Diane Zimmerman Umble offers a historical
and ethnographic study of how the Old Order Mennonites and Amish
responded to and accommodated the telephone from the turn of the
twentieth century to the present. For Old Order communities, Umble
writes, appropriate use of the telephone marks the edges of
appropriate association--who can be connected to whom, in what
context, and under what circumstances. Umble's analysis of the
social meaning of the telephone explores the effect of technology
on community identity and the maintenance of cultural values
through the regulation of the means of communication.
The Sound of Gravel is Ruth Wariner's unforgettable and deeply
moving story of growing up in a polygamist Mormon doomsday
community. The thirty-ninth of her father's forty-one children,
Ruth is raised on a farm in the hills of Mexico, where polygamy is
practiced without fear of legal persecution. There, Ruth's family
lives in a home without indoor plumbing or electricity and attends
a church where preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by
destroying the world. In need of government assistance and
supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and
forth between Mexico and the United States, where her mother
collects welfare and her father works a variety of odd jobs. Ruth
comes to love the time she spends in the States, realising that
perhaps the belief system into which she was born is not the one
for her. As she enters her teen years, she becomes a victim of
abuse in a community in which opposition toward men is tantamount
to arguing with God. Finally, and only after devastating tragedy,
Ruth finds an opportunity to escape. Recounted from the innocent
and hopeful perspective of a child, The Sound of Gravel is the
remarkable true story of a girl forced to define a place for
herself within a community of misguided believers. This is a
gripping tale of triumph, courage, resilience, and love.
The emergence of the Mormon church is arguably the most radical
event in American religious history. How and why did so many
Americans flock to this new religion, and why did so many other
Americans seek to silence or even destroy that movement? Winner of
the MHA Best Book Award by the Mormon History Association Mormonism
exploded across America in 1830, and America exploded right back.
By 1834, the new religion had been mocked, harassed, and finally
expelled from its new settlements in Missouri. Why did this
religion generate such anger? And what do these early conflicts say
about our struggles with religious liberty today? In No Place for
Saints, the first stand-alone history of the Mormon expulsion from
Jackson County and the genesis of Mormonism, Adam Jortner
chronicles how Latter-day Saints emerged and spread their faith-and
how anti-Mormons tried to stop them. Early on, Jortner explains,
anti-Mormonism thrived on gossip, conspiracies, and outright fables
about what Mormons were up to. Anti-Mormons came to believe Mormons
were a threat to democracy, and anyone who claimed revelation from
God was an enemy of the people with no rights to citizenship. By
1833, Jackson County's anti-Mormons demanded all Saints leave the
county. When Mormons refused-citing the First Amendment-the
anti-Mormons attacked their homes, held their leaders at gunpoint,
and performed one of America's most egregious acts of religious
cleansing. From the beginnings of Mormonism in the 1820s to their
expansion and expulsion in 1834, Jortner discusses many of the most
prominent issues and events in Mormon history. He touches on the
process of revelation, the relationship between magic and LDS
practice, the rise of the priesthood, the questions surrounding
Mormonism and African Americans, the internal struggles for
leadership of the young church, and how American law shaped this
American religion. Throughout, No Place for Saints shows how
Mormonism-and the violent backlash against it-fundamentally
reshaped the American religious and legal landscape. Ultimately,
the book is a story of Jacksonian America, of how democracy can
fail religious freedom, and a case study in popular politics as
America entered a great age of religion and violence.
Historically, the church's ministry of grounding new believers in
the essentials of the faith has been known as
"catechesis"--systematic instruction in faith foundations,
including what we believe, how we pray and worship, and how we
conduct our lives. For most evangelicals today, however, this very
idea is an alien concept. Packer and Parrett, concerned for the
state of the church, seek to inspire a much needed evangelical
course correction. This new book makes the case for a recovery of
significant catechesis as a nonnegotiable practice of churches,
showing the practice to be complementary to, and of no less value
than, Bible study, expository preaching, and other formational
ministries, and urging evangelical churches to find room for this
biblical ministry for the sake of their spiritual health and
vitality.
In The Future of Evangelicalism in America, thematic chapters on
culture, spirituality, theology, politics, and ethnicity reveal the
sources of the movement's dynamism, as well as significant
challenges confronting the rising generations. A collaboration
among scholars of history, religious studies, theology, political
science, and ethnic studies, the volume offers unique insight into
a vibrant and sometimes controversial movement, the future of which
is closely tied to the future of America.
How is it that some conservative groups are viscerally
antigovernment even while enjoying the benefits of government
funding? In "Piety and Public Funding" historian Axel R. Schafer
offers a compelling answer to this question by chronicling how, in
the first half century since World War II, conservative evangelical
groups became increasingly adept at accommodating their hostility
to the state with federal support.Though holding to the ideals of
church-state separation, evangelicals gradually took advantage of
expanded public funding opportunities for religious foreign aid,
health care, education, and social welfare. This was especially the
case during the Cold War, when groups such as the National
Association of Evangelicals were at the forefront of battling
communism at home and abroad. It was evident, too, in the Sunbelt,
where the military-industrial complex grew exponentially after
World War II and where the postwar right would achieve its earliest
success. Contrary to evangelicals' own claims, liberal public
policies were a boon for, not a threat to, their own institutions
and values. The welfare state, forged during the New Deal and
renewed by the Great Society, hastened--not hindered--the
ascendancy of a conservative political movement that would, in
turn, use its resurgence as leverage against the very system that
helped create it.By showing that the liberal state's dependence on
private and nonprofit social services made it vulnerable to
assaults from the right, "Piety and Public Funding" brings a much
needed historical perspective to a hotly debated contemporary
issue: the efforts of both Republican and Democratic
administrations to channel federal money to "faith-based"
organizations. It suggests a major reevaluation of the religious
right, which grew to dominate evangelicalism by exploiting
institutional ties to the state while simultaneously brandishing a
message of free enterprise and moral awakening.
Stories of contemporary exorcisms are largely met with ridicule, or
even hostility. Sean McCloud argues, however, that there are
important themes to consider within these narratives of seemingly
well-adjusted people-who attend school, go shopping, and watch
movies-who also happen to fight demons. American Possessions
examines Third Wave evangelical spiritual warfare, a late
twentieth-, early twenty-first century movement of evangelicals
focused on banishing demons from human bodies, material objects,
land, regions, political parties, and nation states. While Third
Wave beliefs may seem far removed from what many scholars view as
mainstream religious practice in America, McCloud argues that the
movement provides an ideal case study for identifying some of the
most prescient tropes within the contemporary American religious
landscape; namely "the consumerist," "the haunted," and "the
therapeutic." Drawing on interviews, television shows,
documentaries, websites, and dozens of spiritual warfare handbooks,
McCloud examines Third Wave practices such deliverance rituals (a
uniquely Protestant form of exorcism), spiritual housekeeping (the
removal of demons from everyday objects), and spiritual mapping
(searching for the demonic in the physical landscape). Demons, he
shows, are the central fact of life in the Third Wave imagination.
McCloud provides the first book-length study of this influential
movement, highlighting the important ways that it reflects and
diverts from the larger, neo-liberal culture from which it
originates.
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