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.

With at least fifteen million adherents around the globe, Mormonism maintains a powerful claim not only on the loyalties of believers but on the interests and imagination of non-Mormons as well. No issue in Mormonism has made more headlines than the faith's distinctive take on sex and gender. From its polygamous nineteenth-century past to its twentieth century stand against the ERA and its twenty-first century fight against same-sex marriage, the LDS Church has consistently positioned itself on the frontlines of battles over gender-related identities, roles, and rights. Even as the LDS Church has maintained a very conservative position in public debates over sex and gender, Mormon women have developed their own brand of feminism rooted in Mormon history and theology. To be a Mormon feminist is to live the tension between the visionary theology of Mormonism (for example, the faith's distinctive belief that God is a married couple, a man and woman) and its conservative institutional politics, between women's experience-based knowledge and the all-male Church hierarchy. This groundbreaking book gathers together for the first time essential writings of the contemporary Mormon feminist movement from its historic beginnings in 1970 to its vibrant present, offering a guide to the best of Mormon feminist thought and writing. This volume presents the voices of Mormon women-including historians, humorists, theologians, activists, and artists-as they have challenged assumptions and stereotypes, recovered lost histories of Mormon women's leadership, explored the empowering potential of Mormon theology, pushed for progress and change in the contemporary church, and joined their voices with other feminists of faith hoping to build a better world. Designed for use by book clubs, study groups, and classes, this highly accessible but rigorously developed book includes a timeline of key events in Mormon feminist history, discussion questions, and a topical guide.

Although often regarded as marginal or obscure, Mormonism is a significant American religious minority, numerically and politically. The successes and struggles of this U.S. born religion reveal much about how religion operates in U.S. society. Mormonism: The Basics introduces the teachings, practices, evolution, and internal diversity of this movement, whose cultural icons range from Mitt Romney to the Twilight saga, from young male missionaries in white shirts and ties to polygamous women in pastel prairie dresses. This is the first introductory text on Mormonism that tracks not only the mainstream LDS but also two other streams within the movement-the liberalized RLDS and the polygamous Fundamentalists-thus showing how Mormons have pursued different approaches to defining their identity and their place in society. The book addresses these questions. Are Mormons Christian, and why does it matter? How have Mormons worked out their relationship to the state? How have Mormons diverged in their thinking about gender and sexuality? How do rituals and regulations shape Mormon lives? What types of sacred spaces have Mormons created? What strategies have Mormons pursued to establish a global presence? Mormonism: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone wanting to understand this religion within its primarily American but increasingly globalized contexts.

For the last several decades, at the far fringes of American evangelical Christianity, has stood an intellectual movement known as Christian Reconstructionism. The movement was founded by theologian, philosopher, and historian Rousas John Rushdoony, whose near-2000-page tome The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) provides its foundation. Reconstructionists believe that the Bible provides a coherent, internally consistent, and all-encompassing worldview, and they seek to remake the entirety of society-church, state, family, economy-along biblical lines. They are strongly opposed to democracy and believe that the Constitution should be replaced by Old Testament law. And they carry their convictions to their logical conclusion, arguing, for example, for the restoration of slavery and for the imposition of the death penalty on homosexuals, adulterers, and Sabbath-breakers. In this fascinating book, Julie Ingersoll draws on years of research, Reconstructionist publications, and interviews with Reconstructionists themselves to paint the most complete portrait of the movement yet published. She shows how the Reconstructionists' world makes sense to them, in terms of their own framework. And she demonstrates the movement's influence on everything from homeschooling to some of the more mainstream elements of the Christian Right.

Drawing from research conducted in Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda, Christianity, Islam, and Liberal Democracy offers a deeper understanding on how Christian and Islamic faith communities affect the political attitudes of those who belong to them and, in turn, prospects for liberal democracy. While many analysts have thought that religious diversity in developing countries is most often an obstacle to liberal democracy that creates political instability, the book concludes just the opposite. Robert A. Dowd draws on narrative accounts, in-depth interviews, and large-scale surveys to show that Christian and Islamic religious communities are more likely to support liberal democracy in religiously diverse and integrated settings than in religiously homogeneous or segregated settings. Religious diversity, in other words, is good for liberal democracy. In religiously diverse environments, religious leaders tend to be more encouraging of civic engagement, democracy, and religious liberty. The evidence, Dowd argues, should prompt policymakers interested in cultivating religiously-inspired support for liberal democracy to aid in the formation of religiously diverse neighborhoods, cities, and political organizations.

An unexpected fusion of two major western religious traditions, Judaism and Christianity, has been developing in many parts of the world. Contemporary Christian movements are not only adopting Jewish symbols and aesthetics but also promoting Jewish practices, rituals, and lifestyles. Becoming Jewish, Believing in Jesus is the first in-depth ethnography to investigate this growing worldwide religious tendency in the global South. Focusing on an austere "Judaizing Evangelical" variant in Brazil, Carpenedo explores the surprising identification with Jews and Judaism by people with exclusively Charismatic Evangelical backgrounds. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and socio-cultural analysis, the book analyses the historical, religious, and subjective reasons behind this growing trend in Charismatic Evangelicalism. The emergence of groups that simultaneously embrace Orthodox Jewish rituals and lifestyles and preserve Charismatic Evangelical religious symbols and practices raises serious questions about what it means to be "Jewish" or "Christian" in today's religious landscape. This case study reveals how religious, ethnic, and cultural markers are being mobilized in unpredictable ways within the Charismatic Evangelical movement in much of the global South. The book also considers broader questions regarding contemporary women's attraction to gender-traditional religions. This comprehensive account of how former Charismatic Evangelicals in Brazil are gradually becoming austerely observant "Jews," while continuing to believe in Jesus, represents a significant contribution to the study of religious conversion, cultural change, and debates about religious hybridization processes.

In this first volume of his magisterial study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, Terryl L. Givens offers a sweeping account of Mormon belief from its founding to the present day. Situating the relatively new movement in the context of the Christian tradition, he reveals that Mormonism continues to change and grow.
Givens shows that despite Mormonism's origins in a biblical culture strongly influenced by nineteenth-century Restorationist thought, which advocated a return to the Christianity of the early Church, the new movement diverges radically from the Christianity of the creeds. Mormonism proposes its own cosmology and metaphysics, in which human identity is rooted in a premortal world as eternal as God. Mormons view mortal life as an enlightening ascent rather than a catastrophic fall, and reject traditional Christian concepts of human depravity and destiny. Popular fascination with Mormonism's social innovations, such as polygamy and communalism, and its supernatural and esoteric elements-angels, gold plates, seer stones, a New World Garden of Eden, and sacred undergarments-have long overshadowed the fact that it is the most enduring and even thriving product of the nineteenth century's religious upheavals and innovations.
Wrestling the Angel traces the essential contours of Mormon thought from the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young to the contemporary LDS church, illuminating both the seminal influence of the founding generation of Mormon thinkers and the significant developments in the church over almost 200 years. The most comprehensive account of the development of Mormon thought ever written, Wrestling the Angel will be essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Mormon faith.

As an electoral bloc, contemporary white evangelical Christians maintain a remarkable ideological and partisan conformity, perhaps unmatched by any other community outside of African Americans. Historically, evangelicals have supported various political parties, but their approach to civil religion, or the way that they apply the spiritual to the public realm, has, as Republican Theology argues, been consistent in its substance since the founding of the nation. Put simply, this civil religion holds that limited government and a free-market are essential to the cultivation of Christian virtue, while the livelihood of the republic depends on the virtue of its citizens. While evangelicals have long promoted conservative moral causes, from temperance and anti-obscenity in the nineteenth century to abstinence education in the twentieth, they have also aligned themselves on many other seemingly unrelated agendas: in support of the Revolution in the 1770s, on antislavery in the 1820s, against labor unionism in the 1880s, against the New Deal in the 1930s, on assertive anticommunism in the 1950s (a major theme in Billy Graham's early sermons), and in favor of deregulation and lower taxes in the 1980s.
As Benjamin T. Lynerd contends, the rise of the "New Right" movement at the end of the twentieth century had as much to do with small-government ideology as with a recovery of traditional morality. This libertarian ethos combined with restrictive public moralism is conflicted, and it creates friction both within the New Right alliance and within the church, particularly among evangelicals interested in social justice. Still, it has formed the entire subtext of evangelical participation in American politics from the 1770s into the twenty-first century. Lynerd looks at the evolution of evangelical civil religion, or "republican theology" to demonstrate how evangelicals navigate this logic.

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.

British Christian leader John Stott was one of the most influential figures of the evangelical movement during the second half of the twentieth century. Called the pope of evangelicalism by many, he helped to shape a global religious movement that grew rapidly during his career. He preached to thousands on six continents. Millions bought his books and listened to his sermons. In 2005, Time included him in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Alister Chapman chronicles Stott's rise to global Christian stardom. The story begins in England with an exploration of Stott's conversion and education, then his ministry to students, his work at All Souls Langham Place, London, and his attempts to increase evangelical influence in the Church of England. By the mid-1970s, Stott had an international presence, leading the evangelical Lausanne movement that attracted evangelicals from almost every country in the world. Chapman recounts how Stott challenged evangelicals' habitual conservatism and anti-intellectualism, showing his role in a movement that was as dysfunctional as it was dynamic. Godly Ambition is the first scholarly biography of Stott. Based on extensive examination of his personal papers, it is a critical yet sympathetic account of a gifted and determined man who did all he could to further God's kingdom and who became a Christian luminary in the process.

A sweet and heartwarming Amish romance where no disaster can conquer true love. Dairy farmer Abe Stoltzfus wants to propose to Lavinia Fisher, the beautiful young woman he's been dating, but being a traditional Amish man, he worries about how he can provide for her. Farming can be uncertain enough with weather conditions, crops not doing well, all manner of uncertainties. And after a bad summer storm and a serious injury from a rooftop tumble, Abe wants to wait until both he and his farm are back on their feet. Lavinia is relieved when Abe survives the fall, yet it seems like it's only the start of events that threaten their future together. But Lavinia is not only a talented Amish crafter, she's also the daughter of a farmer. She knows what the life of a farm wife is like and remains optimistic things will turn around. And when Abe continues to drag his feet, Lavinia makes him an interesting proposal. Will Abe be able to resist it-and her?

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.

The prosperous Cluniac priory of St John the Evangelist, Pontefract, was founded around 1090 by Robert de Lacy, remaining subject to its mother-house of La Charite-sur-Loire until the fourteenth century. The charters in this two-volume work have been arranged by type: seigniorial charters; episcopal and papal charters; royal charters; and those relating to priory property, arranged geographically according to proximity to Pontefract. The chartulary is particularly valuable for topographical studies and local and family history - in many cases the names of all witnesses have been transcribed. The manuscript was originally compiled in the first half of the thirteenth century, with additions made on blank leaves over the following centuries (not included by the editor). Volume 1, published in 1899, comprises the first 45 folios, containing 233 charters, and an introduction on the history of the priory and the de Lacy family. Each Latin charter is preceded by a brief English summary.

The prosperous Cluniac priory of St John the Evangelist, Pontefract, was founded around 1090 by Robert de Lacy, remaining subject to its mother-house of La Charite-sur-Loire until the fourteenth century. The charters in this two-volume work have been arranged by type: seigniorial charters; episcopal and papal charters; royal charters; and those relating to priory property, arranged geographically according to proximity to Pontefract. The chartulary is particularly valuable for topographical studies and local and family history - in many cases the names of all witnesses have been transcribed. The manuscript was originally compiled in the first half of the thirteenth century, with additions made on blank leaves over the following centuries (not included by the editor). Volume 2, published in 1902, contains charters 234-556, on local property holdings and leases, and an index to the whole work. Each Latin charter is preceded by a brief English summary.

Since its publication in 1989, "The Riddle of Amish Culture" has become recognized as a classic work on one of America's most distinctive religious communities. But many changes have occurred within Amish society over the past decade, from westward migrations and a greater familiarity with technology to the dramatic shift away from farming into small business which is transforming Amish culture. For this revised edition, Donald B. Kraybill has taken these recent changes into account, incorporating new demographic research and new interviews he has conducted among the Amish. In addition, he includes a new chapter describing Amish recreation and social gatherings, and he applies the concept of "social capital" to his sensitive and penetrating interpretation of how the Amish have preserved their social networks and the solidarity of their community.

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.

This book offers an authoritative overview of the history of evangelicalism as a global movement, from its origins in Europe and North America in the first half of the eighteenth century to its present-day dynamic growth in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Oceania. Starting with a definition of the movement within the context of the history of Protestantism, it follows the history of evangelicalism from its early North Atlantic revivals to the great expansion in the Victorian era, through to its fracturing and reorientation in response to the stresses of modernity and total war in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the movement's indigenization and expansion toward becoming a multicentered and diverse movement at home in the non-Western world that nevertheless retains continuity with its historic roots. The book concludes with an analysis of contemporary worldwide evangelicalism's current trajectory and the movement's adaptability to changing historical and geographical circumstances.

John Erskine was the leading evangelical in the Church of Scotland in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Educated in an enlightened setting at Edinburgh University, he learned to appreciate the epistemology of John Locke and other empiricists alongside key Scottish Enlightenment figures such as his ecclesiastical rival, William Robertson. Although groomed to follow in his father's footsteps as a lawyer, Erskine changed career paths in order to become a minister of the Kirk. He was deeply moved by the endemic revivals in the west of Scotland and determined that his contribution to the burgeoning evangelical movement on both sides of the Atlantic would be much greater as a clergyman than a lawyer. Yet Erskine was no "enthusiast." He integrated the style and moral teachings of the Moderate Enlightenment into his discourses and posited new theories on traditional views of Calvinism in his theological treatises. Erskine's thought never transgressed the boundaries of orthodoxy; his goal was to update evangelicalism with the new style and techniques of the age without sacrificing the gospel message. While widely recognized as an able preacher and theologian, Erskine's primary contribution to evangelicalism was as a disseminator. He sent correspondents like the New England pastor Jonathan Edwards countless religious and philosophical works so that he and others could learn about current ideas, update their writings, and provide an apologetic against perceived heretical authors. Erskine also was crucial in the publishing of books and pamphlets by some of the best evangelical theologians in America and Britain. Within his lifetime, Erskine's main contribution was as a propagator of an enlightened form of evangelicalism.