Through his ethnographic study of the fishermen and their religious beliefs, Webster speaks to larger debates about religious radicalism, materiality, economy, language, and the symbolic. These debates also call into question assumptions about the decline of religion in modern industrial societies.

This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/charismatic Christianities: how do women lead churches? This study fills this lacuna by examining the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal movement - Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson.

This book opens up histories of childhood and youth in South African historiography. It looks at how childhoods changed during South Africa's industrialisation, and traces the ways in which institutions, first the Dutch Reformed Church and then the Cape government, attempted to shape white childhood to the future benefit of the colony.

This book explores the Society of Friend's Atlantic presence through its creation and use of networks, including intellectual and theological exchange, and through the movement of people. It focuses on the establishment of trans-Atlantic Quaker networks and the crucial role London played in the creation of a Quaker community in the North Atlantic.

Twelve scholars from the biblical, historical, theological, and philosophical disciplines engage in a conversation on the transforming work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. The essays are held together by an enduring focus and concern to explore the relationship between the work of the Holy Spirit and Christian formation, discipleship, personal and social transformation. The book points toward the integration of theory and practice, theology and spirituality, and the mutual interest in fostering dialogue across disciplines and ecclesial traditions.

This book does not only deal with the history, but also with the effects of the Reformation over the mentality, education and scientifical research among Hungarians during the last five centuries. The spirit of the Reformation has not only been a church-forming factor, but also a force of nation-building and salvation. This volume includes 17 studies of Hungarian Reformed theologians presented at a conference in November 2016. The main goal was to give an overview of the most recent research results in history and theology regarding Reformation and its effects over society and mentality among Hungarians. The contributors come from various Hungarian theological universities from the Carpathian basin, thus the book is an overview of their research topics and results. The City Cluj-Napoca was, became and remained an important center of the Reformation, as significant events took place in its surroundings as well. The Faculty of Reformed Theology of the Babes-Bolyai University and the Protestant Theological Institute has always functioned in an environment, where the challenges of multi-confessionalism and multiethnicity are also present beside interdisciplinarity.

New England Puritan sermon culture was primarily an oral phenomenon, and yet its literary production has been understood mainly through a print legacy. In Jeremiah's Scribes, Meredith Marie Neuman turns to the notes taken by Puritan auditors in the meetinghouse in order to fill out our sense of the lived experience of the sermon. By reconstructing the aural culture of sermons, Neuman shifts our attention from the pulpit to the pew to demonstrate the many ways in which sermon auditors helped to shape this dominant genre of Puritan New England. Tracing the material transmission of sermon texts by readers and writers, hearers and notetakers, Jeremiah's Scribes challenges the notion of stable authorship by individual ministers. Instead, Neuman illuminates a mode of textual production that pervaded communities and occurred in the overlapping media of print, manuscript, and speech. Even printed sermons, she demonstrates, bore the traces of their roots in the oral culture of the meetinghouse. Bringing material considerations to bear on anxieties over the perceived relationship between divine and human language, Jeremiah's Scribes broadens our understanding of all Puritan literature. Neuman examines the controlling logic of the sermon in relation to nonsermonic writing-such as conversion narrative-ultimately suggesting the fundamental permeability among disparate genres of Puritan writing.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones. Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling. This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

While there are a growing number of researchers who are exploring the political and social aspects of the global Renewal movement, few have provided sustained socio-economic analyses of this phenomenon. The editors and contributors to this volume offer perspectivesin light of the growth of the Renewal movement in the two-thirds world.

Based on interview material with a wide range of Protestant clergy in Northern Ireland, this book examines how Protestant identity impacts on the possibility of peace and stability and argues for greater involvement by the Protestant churches in the transition from conflict to a 'post-conflict' Northern Ireland.

From Abraham to Paul provides a readable presentation of factual information and responsible conclusions about this basic feature of biblical research.

The Revival of Evangelicalism presents a critical analysis of the evangelical movement in the national Church. It emphasises the manner in which the movement both continued along certain pre-Disruption lines and evolved to represent a broader spectrum of Reformed Presbyterian doctrine and piety during the long reign of Queen Victoria. The author interweaves biographical case studies of influential figures who played key roles in the process of revival and recovery, including William Muir, Norman MacLeod and A. H. Charteris. Based on a diverse range of primary sources, the book places the chronological development of 'established evangelicalism' within the broader context of British imperialism, German biblical criticism, European Romanticism and Victorian print culture.

In Understanding Your Mormon Neighbor, Ross Anderson seeks to help Christians relate to Latter-day Saints by giving insights into Mormon life and culture. Anderson's work is supported both by his lifetime of experiences growing up Mormon and by current research that utilizes many Latter-day Saints' own sources. This book explains the core stories that form the Mormon worldview, shares the experiences that shape the community identity of Mormonism, and shows how Mormons understand truth. Anderson shares how most Mormons see themselves and others around them, illuminating why people join the LDS Church and why many eventually leave. Latter-day Saints will find the descriptions of their values, practices, and experiences both credible and familiar. Understanding Your Mormon Neighbor suggests how Christians can befriend Latter-day Saints with confidence and sensitivity and share the grace of God wisely within their relationships. Anderson includes discussion questions for individuals and small groups, black and white photographs and charts, and an appendix that includes 'Are Mormons Christians?' and 'Should I Vote for a Mormon?'

The papers collected in this volume view important moments of decision for the German Evangelical Church in the 19th and 20th centuries and illuminate their consequences for the formation of a popular church independent of the state. A main focus is on the period of the National Socialist dictatorship from 1933 to 1945 and the struggle between Church and State. A regional focus is placed on Hesse.

By re-examining the central themes of Reformation theology, Chung clearly and carefully describes the fundamental shape of Reformation thinking and introduces the reader to what was and is at stake in the Reformation's insistence on the centrality of the Gospel.

Since its first appearance in 1991, The European Reformation has offered a clear, integrated, and coherent analysis and explanation of how Christianity in Western and Central Europe from Iceland to Hungary, from the Baltic to the Pyrenees splintered into separate Protestant and Catholic identities and movements. Catholic Christianity at the end of the Middle Ages was not at all a uniformly 'decadent' or corrupt institution: it showed clear signs of cultural vigour and inventiveness. However, it was vulnerable to a particular kind of criticism, if ever its claims to mediate the grace of God to believers were challenged. Martin Luther proposed a radically new insight into how God forgives human sin. In this new theological vision, rituals did not 'purify' people; priests did not need to be set apart from the ordinary community; the church needed no longer to be an international body. For a critical 'Reformation moment', this idea caught fire in the spiritual, political, and community life of much of Europe. Lay people seized hold of the instruments of spiritual authority, and transformed religion into something simpler, more local, more rooted in their own community. So were born the many cultures, liturgies, musical traditions and prayer lives of the countries of Protestant Europe. This new edition embraces and responds to developments in scholarship over the past twenty years. Substantially re-written and updated, with both a thorough revision of the text and fully updated references and bibliography, it nevertheless preserves the distinctive features of the original, including its clearly thought-out integration of theological ideas and political cultures, helping to bridge the gap between theological and social history, and the use of helpful charts and tables that made the original so easy to use.