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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Christianity > Protestantism & Protestant Churches > Other Protestant & Nonconformist Churches > General
Formed in 1972, Jesus People USA is an evangelical Christian
community that fundamentally transformed the American Christian
music industry and the practice of American evangelicalism, which
continues to evolve under its influence. In this fascinating
ethnographic study, Shawn David Young replays not only the growth
and influence of the group over the past three decades but also the
left-leaning politics it developed that continue to serve as a
catalyst for change. Jesus People USA established a still-thriving
Christian commune in downtown Chicago and a ground-breaking music
festival that redefined the American Christian rock industry.
Rather than join "establishment" evangelicalism and participate in
what would become the megachurch movement, this community adopted a
modified socialism and embraced forms of activism commonly
associated with the New Left. Today the ideological tolerance of
Jesus People USA aligns them closer to liberalism than to the
religious right, and Young studies the embodiment of this
liminality and its challenge to mainstream evangelical belief. He
suggests the survival of this group is linked to a growing
disenchantment with the separation of public and private,
individual and community, and finds echoes of this postmodern faith
deep within the evangelical subculture.
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.
Since her groundbreaking memoir In My Father's House, which
recounts an agonizing break from fundamentalist polygamy, Dorothy
Allred Solomon has continued to publish on the lives of Mormon
women and the dissonance many experience in connection to
fundamentalist pasts. The more Solomon delved into issues of
agency, the more she felt her own dissonance and began to look for
answers in her ancestral past-those early women she knew only
through family stories. Finding Karen: An Ancestral Mystery springs
from a decade of research into Solomon's paternal great-great
grandmother Karen Sorensen Rasmussen, who converted to Mormonism in
Denmark and emigrated to the United States in 1859. Held up to
Solomon throughout childhood as an icon of feminine heroism, a
stoic handcart immigrant who helped establish Zion in Utah, Karen
became equally emblematic of Solomon's own strong-willed
determination and of everything Solomon found lacking in herself.
Finding Karen is a revelatory journey, twinned with Solomon's own
in surprising ways. As valuable a study in recovering history as it
is in the need to re-examine family stories, Solomon's retelling
takes readers through the twists and turns of discovery/recovery as
she encounters them. In doing so, she illuminates not only the risk
inherent in trusting even what persists as historic record but also
the insights to be gained from assiduous persistence.
In 1878, Elder Joseph Standing traveled into the Appalachian
mountains of North Georgia, seeking converts for the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Sixteen months later, he was
dead, murdered by a group of twelve men. The church refused to bury
the missionary in Georgia soil; instead, he was laid to rest in
Salt Lake City beneath a monument that declared, "There is no law
in Georgia for the Mormons." Most accounts of this event have
linked Standing's murder to the virulent nineteenth-century
anti-Mormonism that also took the life of prophet Joseph Smith and
to an enduring southern tradition of extralegal violence. In these
writings, the stories of the men who took Standing's life are
largely ignored, and they are treated as significant only as
vigilantes who escaped justice. Historian Mary Ella Engel adopts a
different approach, arguing that the mob violence against Standing
was a local event, best understood at the local level. Her
examination of Standing's murder carefully situates it in the
disquiet created by missionaries' successes in the North Georgia
community. As Georgia converts typically abandoned the state for
Mormon colonies in the West, a disquiet situated within a wider
narrative of post-Reconstruction Mormon outmigration to colonies in
the West. In this rich context, the murder reveals the complex
social relationships that linked North Georgians-families, kin,
neighbors, and coreligionists-and illuminates how mob violence
attempted to resolve the psychological dissonance and gender
anxieties created by Mormon missionaries. In laying bare the bonds
linking Georgia converts to the mob, Engel reveals Standing's
murder as more than simply mountain lawlessness or religious
persecution. Rather, the murder responds to the challenges posed by
the separation of converts from their loved ones, especially the
separation of women and their dependents from heads of households.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints adopted the vocal
and theatrical traditions of American musical theater as important
theological tenets. As Church membership grew, leaders saw how the
genre could help define the faith and wove musical theater into
many aspects of Mormon life. Jake Johnson merges the study of
belonging in America with scholarship on voice and popular music to
explore the surprising yet profound link between two
quintessentially American institutions. Throughout the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries, Mormons gravitated toward musicals as a
common platform for transmitting political and theological ideas.
Johnson sees Mormons using musical theater as a medium for theology
of voice--a religious practice that suggests how vicariously
voicing another person can bring one closer to godliness. This
sounding, Johnson suggests, created new opportunities for living.
Voice and the musical theater tradition provided a site for Mormons
to negotiate their way into middle-class respectability. At the
same time, musical theater became a unique expressive tool of
Mormon culture.
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
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