This book examines how biblical interpretation promoted both violent persecution and religious liberty in colonial America. Frequently, the Bible was a violent force in Puritan New England, where ministers and magistrates used biblical passages to justify the punishment of many religious radicals. Encouraged by the Bible, Puritans whipped and imprisoned Baptists, banished a variety of radicals from the Puritan colonies, and even sent Quakers to the gallows. Among those banished was Roger Williams, the advocate of religious liberty who also founded the colony of Rhode Island and established the first Baptist church in America. Williams opposed the Puritans' use of the Bible to persecute radicals who rejected the state's established religion. In retaliation against the use of scripture for violent purposes, Williams argued that religious liberty was a biblical concept that offered the only means of eliminating the religious wars and persecutions that plagued the seventeenth century. Empowered by his interpretation of scripture, Williams posed a serious challenge to a colonial society in which the Bible was the paramount guide in every aspect of life, both public and private.

As Byrd reveals, Williams's biblical case for religious liberty was multifaceted. He drew from a wide range of scriptural texts and wrestled with a variety of interpreters. By focusing on Williams's biblical opposition to religious persecution, this book demonstrates the importance of the Bible to violence, religious liberty, and the relationship between church and state in early American history. Included is a reference guide to Williams's biblical interpretation which features the only biblical indices to hispublished works, accompanied by rankings of his biblical citations in various categories, including his most cited biblical passages throughout his career.

"Both evangelicalism and feminism are controversial movements that provoke complex loyalties and ambivalence within the church and the world at large. In spite of a considerable degree of shared history, they are quite often defined against each other. Most of the rhetoric from and about the movements assumes that there are few connections and little overlap, and that individuals might locate themselves within one or the other, but not within both. Yet some evangelical women in the academy find themselves living on the boundary between feminism and evangelicalism, or on the boundaries between the multiple forms of both feminism and evangelicalism."--from the first chapter What happens when evangelicalism meets feminism? In their own biblical and theological training, Nicola Creegan and Christine Pohl have each lived at the intersection of these two movements They now both teach in Christian institutions of higher education where others follow along a similar pathway. They have a story to tell about their experience along with those of ninety other women they surveyed who have lived on the boundary between evangelicalism and feminism. They explore what it was like for evangelical women who pursued doctorates in biblical and theological studies. What were their experiences as they taught and wrote, were mentored and became mentors? What are the theological issues they faced, and how did they respond? How have they negotiated professional, family and church commitments? This well-informed, multidimensional and sensitive narrative of women's experience will be illuminating for anyone involved in the academic theological world.

This study explores the idea voiced by journalist Henry McDonald that the Protestant, Unionist and Loyalist tribes of Ulster are '...the least fashionable community in Western Europe'. A cast of contributors including prominent politicians, academics, journalists and artists explore the reasons informing public perceptions attached to this community.

This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the Korean Protestant Right's gendered politics. Specifically, the volume explores the Protestant Right's responses and reactions to the presumed weakening of hegemonic masculinity in Korea's post-hypermasculine developmentalism context. Nami Kim examines three phenomena: Father School (an evangelical men's manhood and fatherhood restoration movement), the anti-LGBT movement, and Islamophobia/anti-Muslim racism. Although these three phenomena may look unrelated, Kim asserts that they represent the Protestant Right's distinct yet interrelated ways of engaging the contested hegemonic masculinity in Korean society. The contestation over hegemonic masculinity is a common thread that runs through and connects these three phenomena. The ways in which the Protestant Right has engaged the contested hegemonic masculinity have been in relation to "others," such as women, sexual minorities, gender nonconforming people, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.

Over a decade of qualitative research, Assata Zerai has observed both incremental moves toward inclusiveness and strategies employed to accomplish long-term changes while conducting case studies of five multicultural Protestant churches in sites across the United States. With an interpretive approach, she explores these centers of worship and theorizes the conditions under which progressive social change occurs in some U.S. Protestant congregations. Understanding the daily practices of change and entrenchment in Protestant congregations and the intentional work to replace dominating structures with liberating ones may provide keys to creating multicultural, antiracist, feminist, and sexually inclusive volitional communities more broadly. Intersectionality in Intentional Communities argues that making a significant advance toward inclusion requires change in the underlying social structures of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, class, and other marginalizing influences. In order to isolate this phenomenon, Zerai conducted fieldwork and archival research among an African American and four multiracial U.S. churches. Different from a university or other public institution in which members are legally required to support diversity and related values, Zerai believes that volitional communities may provide a best-case scenario for how, motivated by higher ideals, members may find ways to create inclusive communities. Zerai's research has a broad empirical base, encompassing five sites: a largely African American urban megachurch in the Midwest; a large Midwestern multiracial/multicultural church; a large urban multiracial/multicultural church in the eastern United States; a small, suburban Midwestern multiracial church; and an inclusive Midwestern college town church. In this book, Zerai further explores important connections between U.S. Protestant Christian congregations and political activism.

The unique character of Rudolf Bultmann's thought has been missed by many traditional studies that cast him in exegetical or hermeneutic frameworks. His methods of source criticism and his concept of 'demythologizing'have led some to reject his thought in toto, otherstolabel him as a subjectivist. Tim Labron steps out of such traditional studies by reading Bultmann as a unique scholar and leading to the keys that unlockthe distinct character of Bultmann's thought, namely, John 1,14 and the principle of justification by faith.Bultmann uses them in aparallel function - to burn the traditional subject-object hierarchies and self-made foundationsto the ground. Labron shows the implications this hadfor theology, religious studies and philosophy.

This open access book presents fresh ethnographic work from the regions of Africa and Melanesia-where the popularity of charismatic Christianity can be linked to a revival and transformation of witchcraft. The volume demonstrates how the Holy Spirit has become an adversary to the reconfirmed presence of witches, demons, and sorcerers as manifestations of evil. We learn how this is articulated in spiritual warfare, in crusades, and in healing or witch-killing raids. The contributors highlight what happens to phenomena that people address as locally specific witchcraft or sorcery when re-molded within the universalist Pentecostal demonology, vocabulary, and confrontational methodology.

This book studies Korean American girls between thirteen and nineteen and their formation with regard to self, gender, and God in the context of Korean American protestant congregational life. It develops a hybrid methodology of de-colonial aims and indigenous research methods, aiming to facilitate transformative life in faith communities.

A Quest for Security is the first book-length biography of Samuel Parris, the man who led the 1692 struggle against the scourge of witchcraft. While an examination of Samuel Parris's actions reveals his crucial part in the witchcraft crisis, this biography also serves as a reminder of the concern of early Americans to sustain economic independence for their families. Fully documented with endnotes and featuring a complete bibliography of primary and secondary works, this volume fills a noticeable gap in the literature on Salem witchcraft. The first chapter looks at Samuel Parris's early years. Born in London in 1653, Parris moved with his family to Barbados in the 1660s where both his uncle and father had prospered as sugar planters. Next, the book examines his stay in Boston where he met with modest success as a merchant and started a family. The book then recounts the eight years Parris spent in Salem Village as that divided community's pastor. Beginning with his "call to the clergy," the book examines his life as a Puritan pastor, and then covers the conflict in his congregation. In the first year of his ministry, a faction had developed that sought to oust Parris by refusing to pay him. Next the book covers Parris's actions in the spring of 1692 which changed a seemingly ordinary case of a handful of accusations into a full-scale witchhunt. Convinced that an organized witch cult threatened his congregation, Parris sought to root out all conspirators. His leadership in the effort led to an ever increasing escalation of accusations. When the episode finally ended, family members of some of the twenty executed "witches" conducted a campaign that ultimately resulted in Parris's removalfrom the pulpit. The final chapter looks at Parris's last years, in which he moved from one small Massachusetts community to another. Parris died in obscurity in 1720. But he achieved his most important goal--that of providing material security for his children.

As historians have gradually come to recognize, the involvement of women was central to the anti-slavery cause in both Britain and the United States. Like their male counterparts, women abolitionists did not all speak with one voice. Among the major differences between women were their religious affiliations, an aspect of their commitment that has not been studied in detail. Yet it is clear that the desire to live out and practice their religious beliefs inspired many of the women who participated in anti-slavery activities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This book examines the part that the traditions, practices, and beliefs of English Protestant dissent and the American Puritan and evangelical traditions played in women's anti-slavery activism. Focusing particularly on Baptist, Congregational, Presbyterian and Unitarian women, the essays in this volume move from accounts of individual women's participation in the movement as printers and writers, to assessments of the negotiations and the occasional conflicts between different denominational groups and their anti-slavery impulses. Together the essays in this volume explore how the tradition of English Protestant Dissent shaped the American abolitionist movement, and the various ways in which women belonging to the different denominations on both sides of the Atlantic drew on their religious beliefs to influence the direction of their anti-slavery movements. The collection provides a nuanced understanding of why these women felt compelled to fight for the end of slavery in their respective countries.

One of the most significant developments within contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon - known as New Calvinism - and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thrive in the hypermodern Western world. His paradigm uses and expands on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations that has rarely been applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders' strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that in the end, evangelicalism in the United States consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the "cultural entropy" of secularization, as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

Strategic to the study of popular evangelical movements, this volume provides a thorough description of the holdings of one of the major evangelical resource centers in the United States. The Billy Graham Center, with its focus on efforts by Evangelicals around the world to spread the Christian Gospel, with a special emphasis on North America, has developed a superb array of sources to document this vigorous yet largely uncharted aspect of modern Christianity. The special strengths of the Graham Center's Library, Museum, and Archives are documented here. Books, magazines, photographs, paintings, artifacts, diaries, letters, and files of Christian organizations are among the types of sources described. Two appendices, comprising 20 percent of this volume, give detailed summaries of holdings in 161 other archives and libraries throughout the United States. Also included are 61 photographs of artifacts and documents from the Graham Center. This guide includes three main chapters on the Library, Museum, and Archives of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Chapters on the collections of the Library and Museum discuss their thematic strengths, featured holdings, and services. A lengthy chapter on the Archives provides an overview, an annotated catalog of its more than 525 collections, and a list of subjects treated in each collection. Two appendices provide extensive descriptions of other archival and library collections around the country. A comprehensive index of subjects and names quickly helps researchers determine what the Graham Center and other North American research centers offer. The user can enjoy a general overview or receive direct information on a specific topic. This volume is designed for the varied interests of pastor, missionary, scholar, journalist, or interested layperson.

In America, as in Britain, the Victorian era enjoyed a long life, stretching from the 1830s to the 1910s. It marked the transition from a pre-modern to a modern way of life. Ellen White's life (1827-1915) spanned those years and then some, but the last three months of a single year, 1844, served as the pivot for everything else. When the Lord failed to return on October 22, as she and other followers of William Miller had predicted, White did not lose heart. Fired by a vision she experienced, White played the principal role in transforming a remnant minority of Millerites into the sturdy sect that soon came to be known as the Seventh-day Adventists. She and a small group of fellow believers emphasized a Saturday Sabbath and an imminent Advent. Today that flourishing denomination posts twenty million adherents globally and one of the largest education, hospital, publishing, and missionary outreach programs in the world. Over the course of her life White generated 50,000 manuscript pages and letters, and produced 40 books that have enjoyed extremely wide circulation. She ranks as one of the most gifted and influential religious leaders in American history, and Ellen Harmon White tells her story in a new and remarkably informative way. Some of the contributors identify with the Adventist tradition, some with other Christian denominations, and some with no religious tradition at all. Taken together their essays call for White to be seen as a significant figure in American religious history and for her to be understood her within the context of her times.

This volume is a comprehensive collection of articles on Bunyan as well as including several broader views of the Nonconformist tradition.

In the course of the nineteenth century, the boundaries that divided Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany were redrawn, challenged, rendered porous and built anew. This book addresses this redrawing. It considers the relations of three religious groups-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews-and asks how, by dint of their interaction, they affected one another.Previously, historians have written about these communities as if they lived in isolation. Yet these groups coexisted in common space, and interacted in complex ways. This is the first book that brings these separate stories together and lays the foundation for a new kind of religious history that foregrounds both cooperation and conflict across the religious divides. The authors analyze the influences that shaped religious coexistence and they place the valences of co-operation and conflict in deep social and cultural contexts. The result is a significantly altered understanding of the emergence of modern religious communities as well as new insights into the origins of the German tragedy, which involved the breakdown of religious coexistence.

It is equally true that the Reformation was inspired and defined by the Bible and that the Bible was reshaped by the intellectual, political, and cultural forces of the Reformation. In this book, a distinguished scholar-whose contributions to the field of religious studies have won him wide renown-explores this relationship, examining both the role of the Bible in the Reformation and the effect of the Reformation on the text of the Bible, Biblical studies, preaching and exegesis, and European culture in general. Jaroslav Pelikan begins by discussing the philological foundations of the "reformation" of the Biblical text, focusing on the revival of Greek and Hebrew language study and the important contributions to textual criticism by humanist scholars. He then examines the changing patterns of interpretation and communication of the Biblical text, the proliferation of vernacular versions of scripture and their impact on various national cultures, and the impact of the Reformation Bible on art, music, and literature of the period. The book is richly illustrated with examples of early printed editions of Bibles, commentaries, sermons, vernacular translations, and other works with Biblical themes, all of which are identified and discussed. The book serves as the catalog for a major exhibition of early Bibles and Reformation texts that has been organized at Bridwell Library, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, and will also be shown at the Yale Center for British Art, the Houghton Library and the Widener Library at Harvard University, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Copublished with the Bridwell Library, Southern Methodist University