Scottish Puritanism, 1590-1638, is a portrait of Protestantism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Puritanism produced a community of like-minded ministers and lay people, bound together in a similar experience of conversion and Christian pilgrimage. The book also addresses the relationship between this religion and the political revolution embodied in the National Covenant.

A cultural history of fundamentalism's formative decades; Protestant fundamentalists have always allied themselves with conservative politics and stood against liberal theology and evolution From the start, however, their relationship with mass culture has been complex and ambivalent Selling the Old-Time Religion tells how the first generation of fundamentalists embraced the modern business and entertainment techniques of marketing advertising, drama, film, radio, and publishing to spread the gospel Selectively, and with more sophistlcation than has been accorded to them, fundamentalists adapted to the consumer society and popular culture with the accompanying values of materialism and immediate gratification. Selling the Old-Time Religion is written by a fundamentalist who is based at the country's foremost fundamentalist institution of higher education. It is a candid and remarkable piece of self-scrutiny that reveals the movement's first encounters with some of the media methods it now wields with well-documented virtuosity. Douglas Carl Abrams draws extensively on sermons, popular journals, and educational archives to reveal the attitudes and actions of the fundamental leadership and the laity. Abrams discusses how fundamentalists' outlook toward contemporary trends and events shifted from aloofiness to engagement as they moved inward from the margins of American culture and began to weigh in on the day's issues - from jazz to ""flappers"" - in large numbers. Fundamentalists in the 1920s and 1930s ""were willing to compromise certain traditions that defined the movement, such as premillennialism, holiness, and defense of the faith,"" Abrams concludes, ""but their flexibility with forms of consumption and pleasure strengthened their evangelistic emphasis, perhaps the movement's core."" Contrary to the myth of fundamentalism's demise after the Scopes Trial, the movement's uses of mass culture help explain their success in the decades following it. In the end fundamentalists imitated mass culture not to be like the world but to evangelize it.

This work challenges the common consensus that Luther, with his commitment to St. Paul's articulation of justification by faith, leaves no room for the Letter of St. James. Against this one-sided reading of Luther, focused only his criticism of the letter, this book argues that Luther had fruitful interpretations of the epistle that shaped the subsequent exegetical tradition. Scholarship's singular concentration on Luther's criticism of James as "an epistle of straw" has caused many to overlook Luther's sermons on James, the many places where James comes to full expression in Luther's writings, and the influence that Luther's biblical interpretation had on later interpretations of James. Based primarily on neglected Lutheran sermons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this work examines the pastoral hermeneutic of Luther and his theological heirs as they heard the voice of James and communicated that voice to and for the sake of the church. Scholars, pastors, and educated laity alike are invited to discover how Luther's theology was shaped by the Epistle of James and how Luther's students and theological heirs aimed to preach this disputed letter fruitfully to their hearers.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has 6 million members in the United States today (and 13 million worldwide). Yet, while there has been extensive study of Mormon history, comparatively little scholarly attention has been paid to contemporary Mormons. The best sociological study of Mormon life, Thomas O'Dea's The Mormons, is now over fifty years old. What is it like to be a Mormon in America today? Melvyn Hammarberg attempts to answer this question by offering an ethnography of contemporary Mormons. In The Mormon Quest for Glory Hammarberg examines Mormon history, rituals, social organization, family connections, gender roles, artistic traditions, use of media, and missionary work. He writes as a sympathetic outsider who has studied Mormon life for decades, and strives to explain the religious world of the Latter-Day Saints through the lens of their own spiritual understanding. Drawing on a survey, participant observation, interviews, focus groups, attendance at religious gatherings, diaries, church periodicals, lesson manuals, and other church literature, Hammarberg aims to present a comprehensive picture of the religious world of the Latter-Day Saints.

La necesidad de ligar y conciliar el mundo espiritual con el universo donde habita la armon a de Dios como piedra angular de la belleza, lleva al poeta a establecer "su mundo" desde donde inicia la construcci n de su propio edificio para abrir la ventana de las oscuridades a la luz, y la elevaci n de lo cotidiano a las comarcas de la belleza celestial; as en el principio era el Verbo, de qu le sirve ganar al hombre hasta el mundo entero, la fe confirma la ley, si hablase todas las lenguas, qu cosa ser el amor, c mo lo puedo entender, si a Dios quisieras pintar, tanto amor jam s he visto, adoro a un Dios que no veo, la salvaci n es un hecho, el amor, el odio, la muerte, todas las peque as y grandes cosas que hacen de cada hombre y de cada mujer, en las manos de Dios, seres irrepetibles. El aporte que Joel Suarez ha hecho para la difusi n y conocimiento de nuestra doctrina luterana, quiz s ha pasado desapercibido en gran medida; su car cter humilde y altruista as lo ha querido. Los poemas que se presentan en este libro, adem s de reflejar el alma de un poeta, tienen una amplia base doctrinal centrada en la Palabra. Joel conoce las circunstancias hist ricas que se daban hace quinientos a os, cuando Mart n Lutero emergi como un gigante para preservar la verdadera doctrina de Cristo y librarla de las garras que la hab an deformado y de qu manera. Ahora estampa a nivel de d cimas la esencia del cristianismo. Su lectura, entonces, a trav s de la diversidad de voces y tonalidades, puede deparar inesperadas sorpresas al recuperar o reencontrar esos parajes del esp ritu que alguna vez perdimos. Es muy grato redescubrir a trav s de este libro la sensibilidad espiritual de un hombre especial; una sensibilidad que merec a ser presentada de la forma apropiada, para compartirla con muchos creyentes m s.

Virulent anti-Catholicism was a hallmark of New England society from the first Puritan settlements to the eve of the American Revolution and beyond. Thus America's tactical decision during the Revolution to form alliances with Catholics in Canada and France ignited an awkward debate. The paradox arising out of this partnership has been left virtually unexamined by previous historians of the Revolution.

In Necessary Virtue Charles P. Hanson explores the disruptive effects of the American Revolution on the religious culture of New England Protestantism. He examines the efforts of New Englanders to make sense of their own shifting ideas of Catholicism and anti-Catholicism and traces the "necessary virtue" of religious toleration to its origins in pragmatic cultural politics. To some patriots, abandoning traditional anti-Catholicism meant shedding an obsolete relic of the intolerant colonial past; others saw it as a temporary concession to be reversed as soon as possible. Their Tory opponents meanwhile assailed them all as hypocrites for making common cause with the "papists" they had so recently despised. What began as a Protestant crusade succeeded only with Catholic help and later culminated in the First Amendment's formal separation of church and state. The Catholic contribution to American independence was thus controversial from the start.

In this felicitously written and informative book, Hanson raises questions about difference, tolerance, and the role of religious belief in politics and government that help us see the American Revolution in a new light. Necessary Virtue is timely in pointing to the historical contingency and, perhaps, the fragility of the church-state separation that is very much a poltical and legal issue today.

Is the longevity of the Catholic Church what Rome says it is? Were Christ's Apostles the original Catholics? Did Mary the mother of Jesus really help her Son to redeem mankind? Was the Gospel Jesus left to His disciples incomplete and in need of many additions to perfect it? This book, written by a convert from Catholicism to biblical Christianity, puts the chief claims and doctrines of the Catholic religion under the divine light of God's Word; searches for them in the halls of history; combs through the writings of apostolic fathers for evidence of their veracity.

Chapter by chapter, Scripture by Scripture, the facade of holiness and patristic authority is peeled away, and the true apostate nature of Catholicism is exposed. For evangelical Christians, this work is a gold mine of information about Catholic doctrines and how to deal with the deeply embedded beliefs of those who call themselves Roman Catholics. To the devout Catholic, this book will be either a source of enduring anger, or a bright neon arrow pointing to the eternal, soul-saving Word of God.

This companion brings together new contributions from internationally renowned scholars in order to examine the past, present, and future of Protestantism. The volume opens with an investigation into the formation of Protestant identity, looking at its historical development across Europe, North America, Asia, Australasia, and Africa. This section includes coverage of leading Protestant thinkers, such as Luther, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth. The companion then goes on to consider the interaction of Protestantism with different areas of modern life, including the arts, politics, the law, and science. The editors and contributors take seriously the shift in Protestantism from a predominantly North Atlantic perspective to a more global reality. A final section looks to the future of Protestantism, debating what will happen to both Western and non-Western Protestant movements.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.

This volume investigates Paul Tillich's relationship to Asian religions and locates Tillich in a global religious context. It appreciates Tillich's heritage within the western and eastern religious contexts and explores the possibility of global religious-cultural understanding through the dialogue of Tillich's thought and East-West religious-cultural matrix.

A half century after its founding in London in 1844, the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) became the first NGO to effectively push a modernization agenda around the globe. Soon followed by a sister organization, the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), founded in 1855, the Y-movement defined its global mission in 1889. Although their agendas have been characterized as predominantly religious, both the YMCA and YWCA were also known for their new vision of a global civil society and became major agents in the world-wide dissemination of modern "Western" bodies of knowledge. The YMCA's and YWCA's "secular" social work was partly rooted in the Anglo-American notions of the "social gospel" that became popular during the 1890s. The Christian lay organizations' vision of a "Protestant Modernity" increasingly globalized their "secular" social work that transformed notions of science, humanitarianism, sports, urban citizenship, agriculture, and gender relations. Spreading Protestant Modernity shows how the YMCA and YWCA became crucial in circulating various forms of knowledge and practices that were related to this vision, and how their work was coopted by governments and rival NGOs eager to achieve similar ends. The studies assembled in this collection explore the influence of the YMCA's and YWCA's work on highly diverse societies in South, Southeast, and East Asia, North America, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Focusing on two of the most prominent representative groups within the Protestant youth, social service, and missionary societies (the so-called "Protestant International"), the book provides new insights into the evolution of global civil society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and its multifarious, seemingly secular, legacies for today's world. Spreading Protestant Modernity offers a compelling read for those interested in global history, the history of colonialism and decolonization, the history of Protestant internationalism, and the trajectories of global civil society. While each study is based on rigorous scholarship, the discussion and analyses are in accessible language that allows everyone from undergraduate students to advanced academics to appreciate the Y-movement's role in social transformations across the world.

Martin Luther was one of the most influential figures of the last millennium, with around 900 million people worldwide belonging to Protestant churches that can trace their origins back to the Reformation which he started five hundred years ago. His thinking and his writing were always original, fresh, controversial and provocative; evoking world-changing reactions in the sixteenth century that are still echoed today. This book offers an accessible path into Luther's mode of thought, by paying close attention to the way he approached a wide range of issues in his own century, and how some of that thinking might give us new ways to approach contemporary issues. Analysing his approach to topics such as sex, freedom, prayer, evil, pilgrimage and Bible translation, Tomlin's analysis vividly illustrates the mind of a man who was very much of his time, and yet whose ideas still speak creatively to the modern world and those who follow in his footsteps. Combining scholarly insight into some of the key issues surrounding the study of Luther today with a written style that renders it easily accessible to the academic and non-specialist alike, the result is an ideal guide for those wishing to get inside the mind of this most remarkable man.

The Rotterdam City Library contains the world's largest collection of works by and about Desiderius Erasmus (1469?-1536), perhaps Rotterdam's most famous son. The origin of this unique collection dates back to the seventeenth century when the city fathers established a library in the Great or St. Laurence Church. This bibliography of the Erasmus collection lists, for the first time, all of the Rotterdam scholar's works and most of the studies written about him from his time to the present day. The collection is of vital importance to Erasmus studies and has, in many cases, provided the basic material for editions of Erasmus's complete works. In addition to the unique sixteenth-century printings listed in this book, the collection includes many translations into Estonian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Hebrew, and other languages. The Rotterdam Library has acquired publications about Erasmus that cover such topics as his life, work and times; his contemporaries; his humanism, pedagogy, pacifism, and theology; his relationship to Luther and the Reformation; and his influence on later periods. The collection numbers (as of 1989) roughly 5,000 works divided as follows: 2,500 works by Erasmus himself, 500 works edited by him, and 2,000 books and articles about him. This bibliographic resource will be of great value to Erasmus scholars, philosophy researchers, and historians studying the path of philosophical and religious thought.