'...a masterly study.' Alister McGrath, Theological Book Review '...a splendid read.' J.J.Scarisbrick, TLS '...profound, witty...of immense value.' David Loades, History Today Historians have always known that the English Reformation was more than a simple change of religious belief and practice. It altered the political constitution and, according to Max Weber, the attitudes and motives which governed the getting and investment of wealth, facilitating the rise of capitalism and industrialisation. This book investigates further implications of the transformative religious changes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for the nation, the town, the family, and for their culture.

This book is unique in recording the history of all the Protestant churches in Ireland in the twentieth century, though with particular focus on the two largest - the Presbyterian and the Church of Ireland. It examines the changes and chances in those churches during a turbulent period in Irish history, relating their development to the wider social and political context. Their structures and beliefs are examined, and their influence both in Ireland and overseas is assessed.

This is a contemporary, eyewitness account of the life of Martin Luther translated into English. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479-1552) was present in the great hall at the Diet of Worms on April 18, 1521 when Luther made his famous declaration before Emperor Charles V: "Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me. Amen". Afterward, Cochlaeus sought Luther out, met him at his inn, and privately debated with him. Luther wrote of Cochlaeus, "may God long preserve this most pious man, born to guard and teach the Gospel of His church, together with His word, Amen". However, the confrontation left Cochlaeus convinced that Luther was an impious and malevolent man. Over the next 25 years, Cochlaeus barely escaped the Peasant's War with his life. He debated with Melanchthon and the reformers of Augsburg. It was Cochlaeus who conducted the authorities to the clandestine printing press in Cologne, where William Tyndale was preparing the first English translation of the New Testament (1525). For an eyewitness account of the Reformation - and the beginnings of the Catholic Counter-Reformation - no other historical document matches the first-hand experience of Cochlaeus. After Luther's death, it was rumoured that demons seized the reformer on his death-bed and dragged him off to Hell. In response to these rumours, Luther's friend and colleague, Philip Melanchthon wrote and published a brief encomium of the reformer in 1548. Cochlaeus consequently completed and published his monumental life of Luther in 1549. This volume brings the two documents head-to-head in a confrontation postponed for more than four hundred and fifty years. In addition, this book supplies a life of Cochlaeus, plus a full scholarly apparatus for readers who wish to make a broader study of the period.

An examination of the role played by civil society in the legitimization of South Africa's apartheid regime and its racial policy. This book focuses on the interaction of dominant groups within the Dutch Reformed Church and the South African state over the development of race policy within the broader context of state civil society relations. This allows a theoretical examination and typology of the variety of state civil society relations. Additionally, the particular case study demonstrates that civil society's existence in and authoritarian situations can deter the establishment of democracy when components of civil society identify themselves with exclusive, ethnic interests.

This book analyses the most sung contemporary congregational songs (CCS) as a global music genre. Utilising a three-part music semiology, this research engages with producers, musical texts, and audiences/congregations to better understand contemporary worship for the modern church and individual Christians. Christian Copyright Licensing International data plays a key role in identifying the most sung CCS, while YouTube mediations of these songs and their associated data provide the primary texts for analysis. Producers and the production milieu are explored through interviews with some of the highest profile worship leaders/songwriters including Ben Fielding, Darlene Zschech, Matt Redman, and Tim Hughes, as well as other music industry veterans. Finally, National Church Life Survey data and a specialized survey provide insight into individual Christians' engagement with CCS. Daniel Thornton shows how these perspectives taken together provide unique insight into the current global CCS genre, and into its possible futures.

This book focuses on Christological-Monotheism, an underexplored area which combines two disciplines of theological appraisal often addressed as separate subjects. Christological-Monotheism is currently underexplored in the literature, and even more underexplored is an inclusion of inclusion of the meaning of "Christological-Monotheism" from the perspectives of Christian voices from the "Oneness Pentecostal" faith tradition. Oneness Pentecostalism offers opposing perspectives to what is considered 'fixed orthodoxy' within the Christian faith traditions: i.e., its views differ on doctrines relating to the nature of God and Christ from accepted norms. This project seeks to include various Oneness Pentecostal interpretations to commonly held perspectives, and explore what such might look like when juxtapose with Christian orthodoxy. Moreover, it rereads perspectives about the relationship between God and Christ offered by both traditions in the contexts of earlier contributors to Christian history, all the way to the Second Temple Jewish periods, and includes similar patterns exposed by various groups/scholars along this trajectory.

Barnett traces the Christian critique of the Church and its history in Protestant (English) and Catholic (Italian) thought from the Reformation to the Enlightenment. More than 150 years of bitter polemic between the two great confessions and their religious dissidents produced an unprecedented, comparative historical and sociological anticlericalism. In the last decades of the 17th century, English dissenting thought was pregnant with a critique of the Church, which came to be termed the "Deist" view of Church history: by 1700 the cornerstone of high "Enlightenment anticlerical thought" was in ascent. This work is intended for departments of history (courses in early modern European history, intellectual history), religious studies and philosophy.

Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians' misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives - how they could literally change their minds. Shakespeare's achievement, accomplished for the English stage by a translation of the Italian grotesque, was to display for audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible: you didn't have to read it.

This Volume explores the enormous impact the ethos of Muscular Christianity has had an on modern civil society in English-speaking nations and among the peoples they colonized. First codified by British Christian Socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, explicitly religious forms of the ideology have persistently re-emerged over ensuing decades: secularized, essentialized, and normalized versions of the ethos - the public school spirit, the games ethic, moral masculinity, the strenuous life - came to dominate and to spread rapidly across class, status, and gender lines. These developments have been appropriated by the state to support imperial military and colonial projects. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century apologists and critics alike widely understood Muscular Christianity to be a key engine of British colonialism. This text demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the entire history of Muscular Christianity comes chiefly from contemporary post-colonial studies. The papers explore fascinating case materials from Canada, the U.S., India, Japan, Papua, New Guinea, the Spanish Caribbean, and in Britain in a joint effort to outline a truly international, post-colonial sport history. This book was published as a special issue of the International Journal of the History of Sport.

The book sheds light on various chapters in the long history of Protestant-Jewish relations, from the Reformation to the present. Going beyond questions of antisemitism and religious animosity, it aims to disentangle some of the intricate perceptions, interpretations, and emotions that have characterized contacts between Protestantism and Judaism, and between Jews and Protestants. While some papers in the book address Luther's antisemitism and the NS-Zeit, most papers broaden the scope of the investigation: Protestant-Jewish theological encounters shaped not only antisemitism but also the Jewish Reform movement and Protestant philosemitic post-Holocaust theology; interactions between Jews and Protestants took place not only in the German lands but also in the wider Protestant universe; theology was crucial for the articulation of attitudes toward Jews, but music and philosophy were additional spheres of creativity that enabled the process of thinking through the relations between Judaism and Protestantism. By bringing together various contributions on these and other aspects, the book opens up directions for future research on this intricate topic, which bears both historical significance and evident relevance to our own time.

Puppet, Protestant partisan, or Erasmian humanist: which, if any, was Thomas Cranmer? Although he was a key participant in the changes to English life brought about by the Reformation, his reticent nature and lack of extensive personal writings have left a vacuum. For the first time this book examines little-used manuscript sources to reconstruct Cranmer's personal and theological development.

Part of a 14-volume work covering writings in American religious history with specific attention to trends in American Protestantism; church and state; theological issues; social Christianity; women in religion; native American religion; regional and black religion; fundamentalism and creationism.

James Ussher (1581-1656), one of the most important religious scholars and Protestant leaders of the seventeenth century, helped shape the Church of Ireland and solidify its national identity. In Catholicity and the Covenant of Works, Harrison Perkins addresses the development of Christian doctrine in the Reformed tradition, paying particular attention to the ways in which Ussher adopted various ideas from the broad Christian tradition to shape his doctrine of the covenant of works, which he utilized to explain how God related to humanity both before and after the fall into sin. Perkins highlights the ecumenical premises that underscored Reformed doctrine and the major role that Ussher played in codifying this doctrine, while also shedding light on the differing perspectives of the established churches of Ireland and England. Catholicity and the Covenant of Works considers how Ussher developed the doctrine of a covenant between God and Adam that was based on law, and illustrates how he related the covenant of works to the doctrines of predestination, Christology, and salvation.

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athis book of offers a degree of courageous moral engagement that builds at least a tenuous bridge across the cultural divide.a
--Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

a Nelson has given us a wonderfully intimate glimpse into how rituals and belief animate the religious experiences of black-southerners. This is an important work that will challenge scholars of religion and race to rethink the nature of religious experience.a
--American Journal of Sociology

"Nelson reveals the spiritual lives of black Southerners like few authors before him. In beautifully written and theoretically engaging prose, the ritual experience of low country worshippers emerges in rich and compelling detail. This book will surely deepen our understanding of power and authority in African American religious life."
--Marla Frederick, author of "Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith"

"A very welcome book, not just for what we learn about one African American congregation, but for its reminder of what it means to see the world with religious eyes. Nelson's guided tour of a Charleston, South Carolina, pentecostal AME church is both enlightening and elegantly written. This book will shift the terms of debate about the role of ritual and experience in American religious life."
--Jim Spickard, University of Redlands

Dreams and visions, prophetic words from God about "dusty souls," speaking in tongues while "in the spirit"--narratives of these and similar events comprise the heart of Every Time I Feel the Spirit. This in-depth study of a Black congregation in Charleston, South Carolina provides a window intothe tremendously important yet still largely overlooked world of African American religion as the faith is lived by ordinary believers.

For decades, scholars have been preoccupied with the relation between Black Christianity, civil rights, and social activism. Every Time I Feel the Spirit is about black religion as religion. It focuses on the everyday experience of religion in the church, congregants' relationships with God, and the role that God and Satan play in congregants' lives--not only as objects of belief but as actual agents. It explores the concepts of religious experience and religious ritual, while emphasizing the attributions that people make to the operation of spiritual forces and beings in their lives.

Through interviews and field work, Nelson uncovers what religious people themselves see as important about their faith while extending and refining sociological understandings of religious ritual and religious experience.

Patrick Collinson is the leading historian of English religion in the years after the Reformation. The topics covered by this collection of essays ranges from Thomas Cranmer, who was burnt at the stake after repeated recantations in 1556, to William Sancroft, the only other post-Reformation archbishop of Canterbury to have been deprived of office. Patrick Collinson's work explores the complex interactions between the inclusive and exclusive tendencies in English Protestantism, focusing both on famous figures, such as John Foxe and Richard Hooker, and on the individual reactions of lesser figures to the religious challenges of the time. Two themes throughout are the importance of the Bible and the emergence of Puritanism inside the Church of England.

Contradicting the widely held but false belief that all Latinos are Catholic, this book offers a concise one-volume introduction to America's Latino Protestants, the fastest growing segment of U.S. Protestantism today. Los Protestantes: An Introduction to Latino Protestantism in the United States, the first to provide a broad introduction to this rapidly growing population. At its core is an exploration of the group's demographics, denominational tendencies, and potential for continued growth. Current information is supported by a survey of the history of Latino Protestants in the United States, which dates back to the efforts of missionaries in the mid-19th century. Los Protestantes brings together data from formerly disparate studies of various aspects of the community to create an insightful overview. The work presents brief descriptions of principal denominations and organizations among Latino Protestants. It notes marked differences that separate Latino Protestants from other U.S. Protestants, and it examines an evolving Protestant/Latino ethno-religious identity. Readers will come away from this study more clearly understanding the current state of Latino Protestantism in the United States, as well as where Latino Protestants fit in the overall picture of U.S. religion. A graph charting the various types of Latino identification with Latino culture A graph showing the implications of this identification for probable church attendance An extensive bibliography of most published materials on Latino Protestantism since the mid-19th century

The first book to address the role of correspondence in the study of religion, Debating the Faith: Religion and Letter Writing in Great Britain, 1550-1800 shows how letters shaped religious debate in early-modern and Enlightenment Britain, and discusses the materiality of the letters as well as questions of form and genre. Particular attention is paid to the contexts in which letters were composed, sent, read, distributed, and then destroyed, copied or printed, in periods of religious tolerance or persecution. The opening section, 'Protestant identities', examines the importance of letters in the shaping of British protestantism from the underground correspondence of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary I to dissident letters after the Act of Toleration. 'Representations of British Catholicism', explores the way English, Irish and Scottish Catholics, whether in exile or at home, defined their faith, established epistolary networks, and addressed political and religious allegiances in the face of adversity. The last part, 'Religion, science and philosophy', focuses on the religious content of correspondence between natural scientists and philosophers.

The first in a series of volumes offering new translations of selected writings from C.F.W. Walther. This volume offers a translation of what is regarded as Walther's most important contributions to American and worldwide Lutheranism, a series of lectures on the subject of the proper distinction between Law and Gospel.