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.

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction. 1. A Brief History of Mormons 2. Are Mormons Christian? Why Does It Matter? 3. Building God’s Kingdom: Mormons and Church-State Relations 4. Mormons and Sex: Gender, Sexuality, and Family 5. The Shape of a Mormon Life: Lived Religion 6. Making a Place: Sacred Space in Mormonism 7. Taking Mormonism Global: Challenges of International Expansion Chronology

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.

This book shows that new centers of Christianity have taken root in the global south. Although these communities were previously poor and marginalized, Stephen Offutt illustrates that they are now socioeconomically diverse, internationally well connected, and socially engaged. Offutt argues that local and global religious social forces, as opposed to other social, economic, or political forces, are primarily responsible for these changes.

Many people have become angry and frustrated with organized religion and evangelical Christianity, in particular. Too often the church has proven to be a source of pain rather than a place of hope. Forgive Us acknowledges the legitimacy of much of the anger toward the church. In truth, Christianity in America has significant brokenness in its history that demands recognition and repentance. Only by this path can the church move forward with its message of forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.

Forgive Us is thus a call to confession. From Psalm 51 to the teachings of Jesus to the prayers of Nehemiah, confession is the proper biblical response when God s people have injured others and turned their backs on God s ways. In the book of Nehemiah, the author confesses not only his own sins, but also the sins of his ancestors. The history of the American church demands a Nehemiah-style confession both for our deeds and the deeds of those who came before us.

In each chapter of Forgive Us two pastors who are also academically trained historians provide accurate and compelling histories of some of the American church s greatest shortcomings. Theologian Soong-Chan Rah and justice leader Lisa Sharon Harper then share theological reflections along with appropriate words of confession and repentance.

Passionate and purposeful, Forgive Us will challenge evangelical readers and issue a heart-felt request to the surrounding culture for forgiveness and a new beginning."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Winner of the 2014 Christianity Today Book of the Year First Place Winner of the Religion Newswriters Association's Non-fiction Religion Book of the Year The Jesus People movement was a unique combination of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity. It first appeared in the famed "Summer of Love" of 1967, in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, and spread like wildfire in Southern California and beyond, to cities like Seattle, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. In 1971 the growing movement found its way into the national media spotlight and gained momentum, attracting a huge new following among evangelical church youth, who enthusiastically adopted the Jesus People persona as their own. Within a few years, however, the movement disappeared and was largely forgotten by everyone but those who had filled its ranks. God's Forever Family argues that the Jesus People movement was one of the most important American religious movements of the second half of the 20th-century. Not only do such new and burgeoning evangelical groups as Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard trace back to the Jesus People, but the movement paved the way for the huge Contemporary Christian Music industry and the rise of "Praise Music" in the nation's churches. More significantly, it revolutionized evangelicals' relationship with youth and popular culture. Larry Eskridge makes the case that the Jesus People movement not only helped create a resurgent evangelicalism but must be considered one of the formative powers that shaped American youth in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Did the Labour Party, in Morgan Phillips' famous phrase, owe 'more to Methodism than Marx'? Were the founding fathers of the party nurtured in the chapels of Nonconformity and shaped by their emphases on liberty, conscience and the value of every human being in the eyes of God? How did the Free Churches, traditionally allied to the Liberal Party, react to the growing importance of the Labour Party between the wars? This book addresses these questions at a range of levels: including organisation; rhetoric; policies and ideals; and electoral politics. It is shown that the distinctive religious setting in which Labour emerged indeed helps to explain the differences between it and more Marxist counterparts on the Continent, and that this setting continued to influence Labour approaches towards welfare, nationalisation and industrial relations between the wars. In the process Labour also adopted some of the righteousness of tone of the Free Churches. This setting was, however, changing. Dropping their traditional suspicion of the State, Nonconformists instead increasingly invested it with religious values, helping to turn it through its growing welfare functions into the provider of practical Christianity. This nationalisation of religion continues to shape British attitudes to the welfare state as well as imposing narrowly utilitarian and material tests of relevance upon the churches and other social institutions. The elevation of the State was not, however, intended as an end in itself. What mattered were the social and individual outcomes. Socialism, for those Free Churchmen and women who helped to shape Labour in the early twentieth century, was about improving society as much as systems.