In Pure, Linda Kay Klein uses a potent combination of journalism, cultural commentary, and memoir to take us "inside religious purity culture as only one who grew up in it can" (Gloria Steinem) and reveals the devastating effects evangelical Christianity's views on female sexuality has had on a generation of young women. In the 1990s, a "purity industry" emerged out of the white evangelical Christian culture. Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual "stumbling blocks" for boys and men, and any expression of a girl's sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls-resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to and took pregnancy tests despite being a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question purity-based sexual ethics. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities-a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Pure is "a revelation... Part memoir and part journalism, Pure is a horrendous, granular, relentless, emotionally true account" (The Cut) of society's larger subjugation of women and the role the purity industry played in maintaining it. Offering a prevailing message of resounding hope and encouragement, "Pure emboldens us to escape toxic misogyny and experience a fresh breath of freedom" (Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and founder of Together Rising).

This monograph tracks the development of the socio-economic stance of early Mormonism, an American Millenarian Restorationist movement, through the first fourteen years of the church's existence, from its incorporation in the spring of 1830 in New York, through Ohio and Missouri and Illinois, up to the lynching of its prophet Joseph Smith Jr in the summer of 1844. Mormonism used a new revelation, the Book of Mormon, and a new apostolically inspired church organization to connect American antiquities to covenant-theological salvation history. The innovative religious strategy was coupled with a conservative socio-economic stance that was supportive of technological innovation. This analysis of the early Mormon church uses case studies focused on socio-economic problems, such as wealth distribution, the financing of publication projects, land trade and banking, and caring for the poor. In order to correct for the agentive overtones of standard Mormon historiography, both in its supportive and in its detractive stance, the explanatory models of social time from Fernand Braudel's classic work on the Mediterranean are transferred to and applied in the nineteenth-century American context.

Isaiah Shembe's Prophetic Uhlanga: The Worldview of the Nazareth Baptist Church in Colonial South Africa examines the worldview generated and sustained by the Zulu Zionist prophet Isaiah Shembe and his congregation, the Nazareth Baptist Church, during South Africa's colonial era. The book contends that the worldview embraced by Shembe and his congregants was prophetically defined and reified. This argument challenges nationalist and postcolonialist discourses about colonized populations that have viewed empire and its consequences as the prime determinants of colonized individuals' lives. Through a close reading of the church's records, Joel E. Tishken demonstrates that at the heart of the narrative Shembe and church members told of themselves was a sincere and faithful conviction that Shembe was God's anointed prophet and his followers God's new chosen people. Within their understanding of colonial South Africa, British imperialism and white supremacy were part of God's cosmic vision to provide atonement and salvation for Africans - plans they believed God was prophetically communicating to Shembe. The historical narrative, theology, and identity of Shembe and his parishioners revolved around this prophetically prescribed explanation for the conditions of colonial Africa. Thus, Tishken argues that colonized communities interpreted their worlds in much more creative and complex ways than scholars have recognized. This book is applicable to courses on imperialism, South Africa, African religions, and the history of Christianity.

No living scholar has shaped the study of American religious history more profoundly than George M. Marsden. His work spans U.S. intellectual, cultural, and religious history from the seventeenth through the twenty-first centuries. This collection of essays uses the career of George M. Marsden and the remarkable breadth of his scholarship to measure current trends in the historical study of American evangelical Protestantism and to encourage fresh scholarly investigation of this faith tradition as it has developed between the eighteenth century and the present. Moving through five sections, each centered around one of Marsden's major books and the time period it represents, the volume explores different methodologies and approaches to the history of evangelicalism and American religion.
Besides assessing Marsden's illustrious works on their own terms, this collection's contributors isolate several key themes as deserving of fresh, rigorous, and extensive examination. Through their close investigation of these particular themes, they expand the range of characters and communities, issues and ideas, and contingencies that can and should be accounted for in our historical texts. Marsden's timeless scholarship thus serves as a launchpad for new directions in our rendering of the American religious past.
""American Evangelicalism" is a grandly conceived and skillfully executed "festschrift" in honor of George M. Marsden. The affection and regard for Marsden from his colleagues and former students shine through one essay after another. As a major historian of American evangelicalism whose temporal range spans from the colonial era well into the twenty-first century, Marsden very much deserves this impressive tribute." --Leigh Eric Schmidt, Edward C. Mallinckrodt Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities, Washington University in St. Louis

Nineteenth-century evangelicals have often been dismissed as antiintellectual and philistine. This book draws on periodicals, memoirs and letters to discover how far this was true of British evangelicals between 1790 and 1833. It examines their leisure pursuits along with their enjoyment of art, music, literature, and study, and concludes that they shared the thought and taste of their contemporaries to a far greater extent than is always acknowledged. What is more, their theology encouraged such activities. Evangelicals regarded recreations which engaged the mind, or which could be pursued within the safety of the home, as more concordant with spirituality than 'sensual' or 'worldly' pleasures. Nevertheless, their faith did militate against culture and learning. Some evangelicals dismissed all nonreligious pursuits as 'vanity', since their deep rooted otherworldliness made them suspicious of anything which did not contribute to eternal well-being. A new generation adopted a more rigid attitude to the Bible, which made them unwilling to examine new ideas.In the last resort, even the most cultured evangelicals were unable to reconcile their delight in the arts with their world-denying theology.

At its founding, the United States was one of the most religiously diverse places in the world. Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Quakers, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, Lutherans, Huguenots, Dunkers, Jews, Moravians, and Mennonites populated the nations towns and villages. Dozens of new denominations would emerge over the succeeding years. What allowed people of so many different faiths to forge a nation together?
In this richly told story of ideas, Chris Beneke demonstrates how the United States managed to overcome the religious violence and bigotry that characterized much of early modern Europe and America. The key, Beneke argues, did not lie solely in the protection of religious freedom. Instead, he reveals how American culture was transformed to accommodate the religious differences within it. The expansion of individual rights, the mixing of believers and churches in the same institutions, and the introduction of more civility into public life all played an instrumental role in creating the religious pluralism for which the United States has become renowned. These changes also established important precedents for future civil rights movements in which dignity, as much as equality, would be at stake.
Beyond Toleration is the first book to offer a systematic explanation of how early Americans learned to live with differences in matters of the highest importance to them --and how they found a way to articulate these differences civilly. Today when religious conflicts once again pose a grave danger to democratic experiments across the globe, Beneke's book serves as a timely reminder of how one country moved past toleration andtowards religious pluralism.

A war hereo and successful young minister in Edinburgh during the 1920s, George MacLeod shocked his many admirers by taking a post in Govan, a poor and depressed area of Glasgow, and moving inexorably towards socialism and pacifism during the depression years. It was during this time that he embarked on the rebuilding of the ancient abbey on the Isle of Iona, taking with him unemployed craftsmen from the shipyards of the Clyde and trainee ministers, whom he persuaded to work as labourers. Out of this was the Iona Community.

Christian churches and groups within Anglo-American contexts have increasingly used popular music as a way to connect with young people. This book investigates the relationships between evangelical Christianity and popular music, focusing particularly on electronic dance music in the last twenty years. Author Stella Lau illustrates how electronic dance music is legitimized in evangelical activities by Christians discourses, and how the discourses challenge the divide between the secular and the sacred in the Western culture.

Unlike other existing books on the relationships between music cultures and religion, which predominantly discuss the cultural implications of such phenomenon, Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture examines the notion of spirituality in contemporary popular electronic dance music. Lau s emphasis on the sonic qualities of electronic dance music opens the door for future research about the relationships between aural properties of electronic dance music and religious discourses. With three case studies conducted in the cultural hubs of electronic dance music Bristol, Ibiza and New York the monograph can also be used as a guidebook for ethnographic research in popular music.

Shortlisted for the Herskovits Award, this book throws light on secrecy and violence in Uganda, Rwanda and the Great Lakes area of East Africa. On 17 March 2000 several hundred members of a charismatic Christian sect, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTC), burnt to death in the group's headquarters in the Southwest Ugandan village of Kanungu. Days later the Ugandan police discovered a series of mass graves containing over 400 bodies on various other properties belonging to the sect. Was this mass suicide or mass murder? Based on eight years of historical andethnographic research, Ghosts of Kanungu provides a comprehensive and scholarly account of the MRTC and of the events leading up to the inferno. It argues that none of these events can be understood without reference to abroader social history of Southwestern Uganda during the twentieth century, in which anti-colonial movements, Catholic White Fathers missionaries, colonial relocation schemes, the breakdown of the Ugandan state, post-war reconstruction, the onset of HIV/AIDS, and the transformation of the regional Nyabingi fertility cult into a Marian church with worldwide connections, all played their part. RICHARD VOKES is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Adelaide, Australia Uganda: Fountain Publishers (PB)

This book explores Mormon theology in new ways from a scholarly non-Mormon perspective. Bringing Jesus and Satan into relationship with Joseph Smith the founding prophet, Douglas Davies shows how the Mormon 'Plan of Salvation' can be equated with mainstream Christianity's doctrine of the Trinity as a driving force of the faith. Exploring how Jesus has been understood by Mormons, his many Mormon identities are described in this book: he is the Jehovah of the Bible, our Elder Brother and Father, probably also a husband, he visited the dead and is also the antagonist of Satan-Lucifer. This book offers a way into the Mormon 'problem of evil' understood as apostasy, from pre-mortal times to today. Three images reveal the wider problem of evil in Mormonism: Jesus' pre-mortal encounter with Lucifer in a heavenly council deciding on the Plan of Salvation, Jesus Christ's great suffering - engagement with evil in Gethsemane, and Joseph Smith's First Vision of the divine when he was almost destroyed by an evil force. Douglas Davies, well-known for his previous accounts of Mormon life and thought, shows how renewed Mormon interest in theological questions of belief can be understood against the background of Mormon church-organization and its growing presence on the world-stage of Christianity.

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.

"Shakerism teaches God's immanence through the common life shared in Christ's mystical body." Like many religious seekers throughout the ages, they honor the revelation of God but cannot be bound up in an unchanging set of dogmas or creeds. Freeing themselves from domination by the state religion, Mother Ann Lee and her first followers in mid-18th-century England labored to encounter the godhead directly. They were blessed by spiritual gifts that showed them a way to live the heavenly life on Earth. The result of their efforts was the fashioning of a celibate communal life called the Christlife, wherein a person, after confessing all sin, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, can travel the path of regeneration into ever- increasing holiness. Pacifism, equality of the sexes, and withdrawal from the world are some of the ways the faith was put into practice. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Shakers contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on Shaker communities, industries, individual families, and important people. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Shakers.

With the Christian church in the west in decline, some churches are undergoing difficult transitions as they seek to become relevant, to both themselves and their surrounding cultures. Evangelicalism and the Emerging Church details an ethnographic study of a Vineyard congregation making sense of their Vineyard roots and their growing relationship with the self-proclaimed "emerging church" network. Through a rich account of congregational life and tensions, universal issues are raised such as relating to religious parentage, creating safe places for spirituality, Christian growth and maturity, communication with contemporary culture, and the challenges of identity reconstruction. This book is the first to conduct an academic study of a Vineyard congregation in the United Kingdom.

Now in paperback, and with a new preface, Julia Kasdorf's The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life investigates the often difficult relationships among writing, community, and belief. In the ten essays collected here--presented in relation to poetry as well as photographs and other illustrations--Kasdorf draws on family stories, historical documentation, and her own experiences to examine aspects of Mennonite life and explore a variety of themes, including gender, community, silence, place, identity, and the body.

In each of the four sections of The Body and the Book, Kasdorf tries to reconcile her profession with the practical wisdom and habitual silence of her Mennonite heritage. In the first section, she delves into the old Amish settlement where her parents grew up and its lasting influence on her. The second section focuses on the obstacles she faces as a woman writing from a traditional and ethnic religious background. In each essay in the third section, she uses a historical episode as an occasion to explore the complex interconnections among voice, body, gender, and religious tradition. And in the last section, she demonstrates how writing enables an author to integrate disparate experiences and memories. Even as she strives to create herself as an individual, she cannot fully separate from the Mennonite heritage that has shaped her.

How does university turn students into who they become? Why are student evangelicals such a significant and controversial force at so many universities? In many countries, university has become the main Rite of Passage between the child and adult worlds. University can be enjoyable and fascinating but also life-changing and traumatic. And at the exact time when a student's identity is the most challenged and uncertain, student evangelical groups are highly organised on many university campuses to offer students a powerful identity so that the world makes sense once again. For some, these groups will protect them from the university's assault on their faith. For others, they will challenge and even change who they are. Meeting Jesus at University explores universities in six countries. Drawing upon detailed fieldwork, it examines the largest student evangelical group at each university in order to understand in depth the relationship between the student evangelical group and the university which it aims to convert. Meeting Jesus at University offers an original contribution to the discussion of Rites of Passage, examining what is experienced at university and how university breaks down and remoulds young people. It explores why student evangelicals are so active, particularly at Britain and America's most prestigious and identity-challenging institutions meaning that students at these places are the most likely to find themselves meeting Jesus at university.

Published in 1905: This book discusses Evangelism and Christianity.

When approaching the most public disagreement over predestination in the eighteenth century, the 'Free Grace' controversy between John Wesley and George Whitefield, the tendency can be to simply review the event as a row over the same old issues. This assumption pervades much of the scholarly literature that deals with early Methodism. Moreover, much of that same literature addresses the dispute from John Wesley's vantage point, often harbouring a bias towards his Evangelical Arminianism. Yet the question must be asked: was there more to the 'Free Grace' controversy than a simple rehashing of old arguments? This book answers this complex question by setting out the definitive account of the 'Free Grace' controversy in first decade of the Evangelical Revival (1739-49). Centred around the key players in the fracas, John Wesley and George Whitefield, it is a close analysis of the way in which the doctrine of predestination was instrumental in differentiating the early Methodist societies from one another. It recounts the controversy through the lens of doctrinal analysis and from two distinct perspectives: the propositional content of a given doctrine and how that doctrine exerts formative pressure upon the assenting individual(s). What emerges from this study is a clearer picture of the formative years of early Methodism and the vital role that doctrinal pronouncement played in giving a shape to early Methodist identity. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of Methodism, Evangelicalism, Theology and Church History.

The purpose of this book is to provide valuable anthropological data on the identity construction of a rapidly growing Chinese Christian population in the United States. As more and more Chinese of different generations and varying cultural backgrounds practice evangelical Christianity, the meaning of Chinese American will change accordingly. The book provides significant linguistic data for a nascent but important area of anthropological research. The scope of the book encompasses Asian American homiletics, discourse analysis and prosody, types of sermons and roles of men and women in a diverse, multilingual church. Parallels between Confucianism and Christianity and the role of "gradual evangelism" in identity construction are discussed. These elements are contextualized within current sociocultural and economic spheres and address the implications of the "model minority" and Asian patriarchy. The book provides original linguistic data of sermons in Mandarin, Cantonese and English. The book posits that the Chinese of the Boston church have developed an ethno-Christian identity and this identity demonstrated through ethnically marked prosodic cues, unites the congregation in the ethnic church. This position challenges some current approaches to identity construction and the role of religion in immigrant communities.

In this gripping biography, journalist Markus Baum presents Eberhard Arnold's life (1883-1935) as a challenge to all of us to reconsider our response to Jesus' command to "leave everything and follow me".

Baum's account recreates a colorful slice of history, a time when thousands of young men and women across Weimar Germany rejected bourgeois mores and struck out on a different path. Arnold, an aspiring young writer and speaker, was a driving force behind this "Youth Movement". But he went further, leaving the limelight, a comfortable lifestyle, and a promising career, to live the answers he had found. He started a community based on Christ's teachings and example. Arnold was able to unite a motley assortment of workers, aristocrats, and students from diverse political and religious persuasions under a shared vision of Christ's kingdom as a living reality.

Against the Wind explores the forces that shaped Arnold's life -- the early Church, the Anabaptists, the Salvation Army, Charles Finney's Evangelical revival in America -- and his influence on other spiritual leaders of his day -- Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, and Martin Buber among them. It recounts his lonely stand against the rise of Nazism, and presents his continuing legacy, the Bruderhof community movement, which carries on his commitment to integrate faith and social action so needed today.

Most of all, Against the Wind gives flesh, blood, and personality to a man whose role in history has been obscured. Arnold abhorred private property and institutional religion, hated hypocrisy and embraced absolutes. Even during his lifetime he was dubbed a "modern St. Francis". But he also struggled to find his convictions and put theminto action. He chose to walk resolutely against the prevailing winds, but not without difficulty and disappointment.

A major treatment of the early history of the Evangelical Movement in 18th century England, showing how Anglican evangelicalism was quite distinct from the Methodist revival under Wesley and Whitefield. A great contribution to the study of evangelicalism and the relationship between Anglicanism and Nonconformity.

What does it cost to follow Jesus? For these men and women, the answer was clear. They were ready to give witness to Christ in the face of intense persecution, even if it cost them their lives. From the stoning of Stephen to Nigerian Christians persecuted by Boko Haram today, these stories from around the world and through the ages will inspire greater faithfulness to the way of Jesus, reminding us what costly discipleship looks like in any age. Since the birth of Christianity, the church has commemorated those who suffered for their faith in Christ. In the Anabaptist tradition especially, stories of the boldness and steadfastness of early Christian and Reformation-era martyrs have been handed down from one generation to the next through books such as Thieleman van Braght's Martyrs Mirror (1660). Yet the stories of more recent Christian witnesses are often unknown. Bearing Witness tells the stories of early Christian martyrs Stephen, Polycarp, Justin, Agathonica, Papylus, Carpus, Perpetua, Tharacus, Probus, Andronicus, and Marcellus, followed by radical reformers Jan Hus, Michael and Margaretha Sattler, Weynken Claes, William Tyndale, Jakob and Katharina Hutter, Anna Janz, Dirk Willems. But the bulk of the book focuses on little-known modern witness including Veronika Loehans, Jacob Hochstetler, Gnadenhutten, Joseph and Michael Hofer, Emanuel Swartzendruber, Regina Rosenberg, Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, Johann Kornelius Martens, Ahn Ei Sook, Jakob Rempel, Clarence Jordan, Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand, Tulio Pedraza, Stanimir Katanic, Samuel Kakesa, Kasai Kapata, Meserete Kristos Church, Sarah Corson, Alexander Men, Jose Chuquin, Norman Tattersall, Katherine Wu, and Ekklesiyar Yan'uwa a Nigeria. This book is part of the Bearing Witness Stories Project, a collaborative story-gathering project involving Anabaptist believers from many different traditions.

It is summer, 1940. As Hitler's armies turn mainland Europe into a mass graveyard, his feared Luftwaffe rain bombs on England. Meanwhile, amid the green hills of the Cotswolds, a nest of "enemy aliens" has been discovered: the Bruderhof, a Christian community made up of German, Dutch, and Swiss refugees, and growing numbers of English pacifists. Having fled Nazi Germany to escape persecution, the Bruderhof had at first been welcomed in England. Now, at the height of the Battle of Britain, it is feared. Curfews and travel restrictions are imposed; nasty newspaper articles appear, and local patriots initiate a boycott. Determined to remain together as a witness for peace in a war-torn world, the little group of 300 - half of them babies and young children - looks for a new home. No country in Europe or North America will take them. And so they set off across the submarine-infested Atlantic for the jungles of Paraguay... In this gripping tale of faith tested by adversity, Emmy Barth lets us hear directly from the mothers, fathers, and children involved through their letters and diaries. Especially eloquent are the voices of the women as they faced both adventure and tragedy.