Expanding a hypothesis the author first developed in his earlier publications, this is an examination not merely of the extent to which ministers of the Church of Scotland, depending on their factional loyalties, sharply differed in the messages they sought to convey to their own congregations (and through the medium of print to the wider world) on a wide spectrum of contemporary issues, but also of how their own personalities impacted on their sermons, often revealing their innate political as well as their theological leanings. In a wide-ranging and thoughtful Introduction, Crawford argues that politics and the pulpit have been inter-dependent from the middle ages - but more especially since the Reformation when political preaching became synonymous with the preaching of men like Luther, Calvin and, in Scotland, Knox. Subsequent chapters analyse key Enlightenment issues including the stance of the Kirk - and of individual ministers - on patronage, the stage, heresy, political reform, patriotism, America, popery and slavery, as articulated from the chair of verity. Additionally, and unusually in an Enlightenment historian, the author is able to deploy an impressive understanding of legal history in order to extend the scope of his study, specifically to cover the related (but imperfectly understood) issue of pulpit censure.

When Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses (reputedly nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg), he unwittingly launch a movement that would dramatically change the course of European history. This superb short introduction to Martin Luther, written by a leading authority on Luther and the Reformation, presents this pivotal figure as historians now see him. Instead of singling him out as a modern hero, historian Scott Hendrix emphasizes the context in which Luther worked, the colleagues who supported him, and the opponents who adamantly opposed his agenda for change. The author explains the religious reformation and Luther's importance without ignoring the political and cultural forces, like princely power and Islam, which led the reformation down paths Luther could neither foresee nor influence. The book pays tribute to Luther's genius but also recognizes the self-righteous attitude that alienated contemporaries. The author offers a unique explanation for that attitude and for Luther's anti-Jewish writings, which are especially hard to comprehend after the Holocaust.

In No Depression in Heaven, Alison Collis Greene demonstrates how the Great Depression and New Deal transformed the relationship between church and state. Grounded in Memphis and the Delta, this book traces the collapse of voluntarism, the link between southern religion and the New Deal, and the gradual alienation of conservative Christianity from the state. At the start of the Great Depression, churches and voluntary societies provided the only significant source of aid for those in need in the South. Limited in scope, divided by race, and designed to control the needy as much as to support them, religious aid collapsed under the burden of need in the early 1930s. Hungry, homeless, and out-of-work Americans found that they had nowhere to turn at the most desolate moment of their lives. Religious leaders joined a chorus of pleas for federal intervention in the crisis and a permanent social safety net. They celebrated the New Deal as a religious triumph. Yet some complained that Franklin Roosevelt cut the churches out of his programs and lamented their lost moral authority. Still others found new opportunities within the New Deal. By the late 1930s, the pattern was set for decades of religious and political realignment. More than a study of religion and politics, No Depression in Heaven uncovers the stories of men and women who endured the Depression and sought in their religious worlds the spiritual resources to endure material deprivation. Its characters are rich and poor, black and white, mobile sharecroppers and wealthy reformers, enamored of the federal government and appalled by it. Woven into this story of political and social transformation are stories of southern men and women who faced the greatest economic disaster of the twentieth century and tried to build a better world than the one they inhabited.