Offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally, by studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas. In the Haitian diaspora, as in Haiti itself, the majority of Haitians have long practiced Catholicism or Vodou. However, Protestant forms of Christianity now flourish both in Haiti and beyond. In the Bahamas, where approximately one in five people are now Haitian-born or Haitian-descended, Protestantism has become the majority religion for immigrant Haitians. In My Soul Is in Haiti, Bertin M. Louis, Jr. has combined multi-sited ethnographic research in the United States, Haiti, and the Bahamas with a transnational framework to analyze why Protestantism has appealed to the Haitian diaspora community in the Bahamas. The volume illustrates how devout Haitian Protestant migrants use their religious identities to ground themselves in a place that is hostile to them as migrants, and it also uncovers how their religious faith ties in to their belief in the need to "save" their homeland, as they re-imagine Haiti politically and morally as a Protestant Christian nation. This important look at transnational migration between second and third world countries shows how notions of nationalism among Haitian migrants in the Bahamas are filtered through their religious beliefs. By studying local transformations in the Haitian diaspora of the Bahamas, Louis offers a greater understanding of the spread of Protestant Christianity, both regionally and globally.

From the author of the acclaimed biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, new perspectives on how Luther and others crafted his larger-than-life image Martin Luther was a controversial figure during his lifetime, eliciting strong emotions in friends and enemies alike, and his outsized persona has left an indelible mark on the world today. Living I Was Your Plague explores how Luther carefully crafted his own image and how he has been portrayed in his own times and ours, painting a unique portrait of the man who set in motion a revolution that sundered Western Christendom. Renowned Luther biographer Lyndal Roper examines how the painter Lucas Cranach produced images that made the reformer an instantly recognizable character whose biography became part of Lutheran devotional culture. She reveals what Luther's dreams have to say about his relationships and discusses how his masculinity was on the line in his devastatingly crude and often funny polemical attacks. Roper shows how Luther's hostility to the papacy was unshaken to the day he died, how his deep-rooted anti-Semitism infused his theology, and how his memorialization has given rise to a remarkable flood of kitsch, from "Here I Stand" socks to Playmobil Luther. Lavishly illustrated, Living I Was Your Plague is a splendid work of cultural history that sheds new light on the complex and enduring legacy of Luther and his image.

In the early nineteenth century, antebellum America witnessed a Second Great Awakening led by evangelical Protestants who gathered in revivals and contributed to the blossoming of social movements throughout the country. Preachers and reformers promoted a Christian lifestyle, and evangelical fervor overtook entire communities. One such community in Smithfield, New York, led by activist Gerrit Smith, is the focus of Hadley Kruczek-Aaron's study. In this incisive volume, Kruczek-Aaron demonstrates that religious ideology - specifically a lifestyle of temperance and simplicity as advocated by evangelical Christians - was as important an influence on consumption and daily life as socioeconomic status, purchasing power, access to markets, and other social factors. Investigating the wealthy Smith family's material worlds - meals, attire, and domestic wares - Kruczek-Aaron reveals how they engaged their beliefs to maintain a true Christian home. While Smith spread his practice of lived religion to the surrounding neighborhood, incongruities between his faith and his practice of that faith surface in the study, demonstrating the trials he and all convertsfaced while striving to lead a virtuous life. Everyday Religion reveals how class, gender, ethnicity, and race influenced the actions of individuals attempting to walk in God's light and the dynamics that continue to shape how this history is presented and commemorated today.

The Convent of Wesel was long believed to be a clandestine assembly of Protestant leaders in 1568 that helped establish foundations for Reformed churches in the Dutch Republic and northwest Germany. However, Jesse Spohnholz shows that that event did not happen, but was an idea created and perpetuated by historians and record keepers since the 1600s. Appropriately, this book offers not just a fascinating snapshot of Reformation history but a reflection on the nature of historical inquiry itself. The Convent of Wesel begins with a detailed microhistory that unravels the mystery and then traces knowledge about the document at the centre of the mystery over four and a half centuries, through historical writing, archiving and centenary commemorations. Spohnholz reveals how historians can inadvertently align themselves with protagonists in the debates they study and thus replicate errors that conceal the dynamic complexity of the past.

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The Reformation in Germany" provides readers with a strong narrative overview of the most recent work on this topic. It addresses the central concerns of Reformation historiography as well as providing a distinct interpretation of the movement.

The book examines the spread and reception of the evangelical movement, the historical dynamic created by the fusion of religious ideas and the social context, the religious imagination of the common man and utopian visions of reform, and the relationship between political culture and religious change. The narrative goes on to consider the long-term legacy of the Reformation movement in Germany. The book provides readers with a fresh perspective on the movement, one which seeks to understand its rise and evolution as a historical process in constant dialogue with the cultural and political context of the age.

The Nonconformists of England and Wales, the Protestants outside the Church of England, were particularly numerous in the Victorian years. These Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, Quakers, Unitarians, and others helped shape society and made their mark in politics. This book explains the main characteristics of each denomination and examines the circumstances that enabled them to grow. It evaluates the main academic hypothesis about their role and points to signs of their subsequent decline in the twentieth century. Here is a succinct account of an important dimension of the Christian past in Britain.

The cultural conflict that increasingly divides American society is particularly evident within Protestant Christianity. Liberals and evangelicals clash in bitter competition for the future of their respective subcultures. In this book, James Wellman examines this conflict as it is played out in the American Northwest.
Drawing on an in-depth study of twenty-four of the area's fastest-growing evangelical churches and ten vital liberal Protestant congregations, Wellman captures the leading trends of each group and their interaction with the wider American culture. He finds a remarkable depth of disagreement between the two groups on almost every front.
Where evangelicals are willing to draw sharp lines on gay marriage and abortion, liberals complain about evangelical self-righteousness and disregard for personal freedoms. Liberals prefer the moral power of inclusiveness, while evangelicals frame their moral stances as part of a metaphysical struggle between good and evil. The entrepreneurial nature of evangelicalism translates into support of laissez-faire capitalism and democratic political advocacy. Liberals view both policies with varying degrees of apprehension. Such differences are significant on a national scale, with implications for the future of American Protestantism in particular and American culture in general.
Both groups act in good faith and with good intentions, and each maintains a moral core that furthers its own identity, ideology, ritual, mission, and politics. In some situations, they share similar attitudes despite having different beliefs. Attending church services and interviewing senior pastors, lay leaders and new members, Wellman is able toprovide new insights into the convenient categories of "liberal" and "evangelical," the nature of the conflict, and the myriad ways both groups affect and are affected by American culture.

A gripping story of how an entire family, deeply enmeshed in Mormonism for thirty years, found their way out and found faith in Jesus Christ. For thirty years, Lynn Wilder, once a tenured faculty member at Brigham Young University, and her family lived in, loved, and promoted the Mormon Church. Then their son Micah, serving his Mormon mission in Florida, had a revelation: God knew him personally. God loved him. And the Mormon Church did not offer the true gospel. Micah's conversion to Christ put the family in a tailspin. They wondered, Have we believed the wrong thing for decades? If we leave Mormonism, what does this mean for our safety, jobs, and relationships? Is Christianity all that different from Mormonism anyway? As Lynn tells her story of abandoning the deception of Mormonism to receive God's grace, she gives a rare look into Mormon culture, what it means to grow up Mormon, and why the contrasts between Mormonism and Christianity make all the difference in the world. Whether you are in the Mormon Church, are curious about Mormonism, or simply are looking for a gripping story, Unveiling Grace will strengthen your faith in the true God who loves you no matter what.

Douglas Ansdell traces the history of the Highland church from 1690 to 1900. A general treatise, it fills a long existing gap in Scottish historical literature.

'Religion and the Rise of History' is the rst study to apply the ideal type or model-building methodology of Otto Hintze (1861-1940) to Western historical thought or to what R.G. Collingwood called "The Idea of History," for it contains succinct and useful models for seeing and teaching classical, Christian, and modern professional historiography. It is also the rst work to suggest that, in addition to his well-known paradoxical, simul, and/or "at-the-same-time" way of thinking, Martin Luther also held to a path that was deeply incarnational, dynamic, and/or "in-with-and under." This dual vision strongly in uenced Leibniz, Hamann, and Herder, and was therefore a matter of considerable signi cance for the rise of a distinctly modern form of historical consciousness (commonly called "historicism") in Protestant Germany. Building upon this, Smith's essay suggests a new time period for the formative age of modern German thought, culture, and education: "The Cultural Revolution in Germany," This age began in the early 1760s and culminated in 1810 with the founding of the University of Berlin, the rst fully "modern" and "modernising" university. The university rst became the recognized center for the study of history through the work of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), who derived his individualising way of thinking mainly from Luther. Smith goes on to detail the rise of history from a calling to a profession, and how the discussion between Troeltsch, Meinecke, and Hintze concerning the nature of modern historical thought was of central importance for the reorientation of Western social-historical thought in the twentieth century. Leonard S. Smith is Emeritus Professor of History at California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, California. "Leonard Smith's book is, in its origins and goals, a deeply pedagogical work. He addresses a central problem in the history of eighteenth-century German and European thought, the emergence of a new, evolutionary view of history called 'historicism'. Enabled by Luther's incarnational theology, historicism received its first formulation, Smith argues, from Leibniz and his successors and achieved its public place in the new University of Berlin (est. 1810). This book is a splendid marriage of classical themes with new and original insights. Everyone interested in the evolution of European historical thought should read it." - Thomas A. Brady Jr., University of California, Berkeley "This book breaks new ground in showing how Martin Luther shaped the philosophical pioneers of a new worldview based upon the study of history. A textbook for minds curious about a philosophy of history." - Eric W. Gritsch, Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) is often considered the Father of Modern Theology, known for his attempt to reconcile traditional Christian doctrines with philosophical criticisms and scientific discoveries. Despite the influence of his work on significant figures like Karl Barth, he has been largely ignored by contemporary theologians. Focussing on Schleiermacher's doctrine of sin, this book demonstrates how Schleiermacher has not only been misinterpreted, but also underestimated, and deserves a critical re-examination. The book approaches Schleiermacher on sin with respect to three themes: one, its power to transcend an intractable metaethical dilemma at the heart of modern debates over sin; two, its intended compatibility with natural science; and three, to re-evaluating its place, and so Schleiermacher's place, in the history of theology. It solves and dissolves problems arising simultaneously from natural science, confessional theology, ethics, and metaphysics in a single, integrated account using Schleiermacher's understudied thought from his dogmatics The Christian Faith. In contrast to the account sometimes given of modern theology as marked by a break with "Greek metaphysics," Schleiermacher's account is shown to stand in stark contrast by retrieving, not excising, ancient thought in service of an account of sin adequate to natural science. This is a vital rediscovery of a foundational voice in theology. As such, it will greatly appeal to scholars of Modern Theology, theological ethics, and the history of Modern Christianity.

In the late fifteenth century, Burgundy was incorporated in the kingdom of France. This, coupled with the advent of Protestantism in the early sixteenth century, opened up new avenues for participation in public life by ordinary Burgundians and led to considerably greater interaction between the elites and the ordinary people. Mack Holt examines the relationship between the ruling and popular classes from Burgundy's re-incorporation into France in 1477 until the Lanturelu riot in Dijon in 1630, focusing on the local wine industry. Indeed, the vineyard workers were crucial in turning back the tide of Protestantism in the province until 1630 when, following royal attempts to reduce the level of popular participation in public affairs, Louis XIII tried to remove them from the city altogether. More than just a local study, this book shows how the popular classes often worked together with local elites to shape policies that affected them.

Jesus Christ was both the unique Son of God-the Messiah foretold in Scripture-and a man of his time and culture. Charts of the Gospels and the Life of Christ helps you to know him better by clearly organizing the facts that surrounded his life. Whether you're a student, pastor, teacher, or simply someone who wants to take your study of the Bible deeper, this book helps you to see Jesus from a variety of perspectives. Divided into four sections, notable topics include: A Harmonistic Overview of the Four Gospels Sections Found in All Four Gospels Old Testament Citations in the Gospels Roman Rulers of the Land Where Christ Lived Periods of the Life of Christ Christ's Parables in the Presence/Absence of His Enemies The Kingdom in the Teachings of Jesus and the Gospels ZondervanCharts are ready references for those who need the essential information at their fingertips. Accessible and highly useful, the books in this library offer clear organization and thorough summaries of issues, subjects, and topics that are key for Christian students and learners. The visuals and captions will cater to any teaching methodology, style, or program.

"An Introduction to German Pietism" provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualism.

Taking into account new discoveries in the field, Douglas H. Shantz " "focuses on features of Pietism that made it religiously and culturally significant. He discusses the social and religious roots of Pietism in earlier German Radicalism and situates Pietist beginnings in three cities: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle. Shantz also examines the cultural worlds of the Pietists, including Pietism and gender, Pietists as readers and translators of the Bible, and Pietists as missionaries to the far reaches of the world. He not only considers Pietism's role in shaping modern western religion and culture but also reflects on the relevance of the Pietist religious paradigm of today.

The first survey of German Pietism in English in forty years, An Introduction to German Pietism provides a narrative interpretation of the movement as a whole. The book's accessible tone and concise portrayal of an extensive and complex subject make it ideal for courses on early modern Christianity and German history. The book includes appendices with translations of German primary sources and discussion questions.

As celebrations of the five-hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther's initiation of the most dramatic reform movement in the history of Christianity approach, 47 essays by historians and theologians from 15 countries provide insight into the background and context, the content, and the impact of his way of thought. Nineteenth-century Chinese educational reformers, twentieth-century African and Indian social reformers, German philosophers and Christians of many traditions on every continent have found in Luther's writings stimulation and provocation for addressing modern problems. This volume offers studies of the late medieval intellectual milieus in which his thought was formed, the hermeneutical principles that guided his reading and application of the Bible, the content of his formulations of Christian teaching on specific topics, his social and ethic thought, the ways in which his contemporaries, both supporters and opponents, helped shape his ideas, the role of specific genre in developing his positions on issues of the day, and the influences he has exercised in the past and continues to exercise today in various parts of the world and the Christian church. Authors synthesize the scholarly debates and analysis of Luther's thinking and point to future areas of research and exploration of his thought.

A record of material and spiritual gifts to churches, compiled from 3000 wills made over 180 years. Reads like a medieval detective story. A splendid book... should be treated as a companion volume to The Stripping of the Altars. JULIAN LITTEN, CHURCH TIMES In the late medieval churches of the former deanery of Dunwich there are many features which were provided by testamentary gifts; this study of three thousand wills from fifty-two Suffolk parishes, written between 1370 and 1547, records such material and spiritual bequests. Many purchased prayer (the prayers of the poor being particularly sought), vital for the swift passage of the soul through Purgatory; other testators left instructions for the acquisition of liturgical books, church plate and embroideredvestments. Gifts and outright donations also provided stained glass, seven-sacrament fonts and rood-screens which have survived. The wills give no hint of the destruction that was to come - a medieval chancel with vacant niches and whitewashed walls says more than the wills are prepared to tell - but the pennies and shillings which had helped towards building expenses in this coastal district of East Anglia produced at least two of the finest parish churches in the country within a few decades of the Reformation. The late JUDITH MIDDLETON-STEWART was a tutor for the Board of Continuing Education for the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia.

Five hundred years ago a monk nailed his theses to a church gate in Wittenberg. The sound of Luther's mythical hammer, however, was by no means the only aural manifestation of the religious Reformations. This book describes the birth of Lutheran Chorales and Calvinist Psalmody; of how music was practised by Catholic nuns, Lutheran schoolchildren, battling Huguenots, missionaries and martyrs, cardinals at Trent and heretics in hiding, at a time when Palestrina, Lasso and Tallis were composing their masterpieces, and forbidden songs were concealed, smuggled and sung in taverns and princely courts alike. Music expressed faith in the Evangelicals' emerging worships and in the Catholics' ancient rites; through it new beliefs were spread and heresy countered; analysed by humanist theorists, it comforted and consoled miners, housewives and persecuted preachers; it was both the symbol of new, conflicting identities and the only surviving trace of a lost unity of faith. The music of the Reformations, thus, was music reformed, music reforming and the reform of music: this book shows what the Reformations sounded like, and how music became one of the protagonists in the religious conflicts of the sixteenth century.

This edited book offers an engaging portrait into a vital, religious movement inside this southern Africa country. It tells the story of a community of faith that is often overlooked in the region. The authors include leading scholars of religion, theology, and politics from Botswana and Zimbabwe. The insights they present will help readers understand the place of Pentecostal Christianity in this land of many religions. The chapters detail a history of the movement from its inception to the present. Chapters focus on specific Pentecostal churches, general doctrine of the movement, and the movement's contribution to the country. The writing is deeply informed and features deep historical, theological, and sociological analysis throughout. Readers will also learn about the socio-political and economic relevance of the faith in Zimbabwe as well as the theoretical and methodological implications raised by the Pentecostalisation of society. The volume will serve as a resource book both for teaching and for those doing research on various aspects of the Zimbabwean society past, present, and future. It will be a good resource for those in schools and university and college departments of religious studies, theology, history, politics, sociology, social anthropology, and related studies. Over and above academic and research readers, the book will also be very useful to government policy makers, non-governmental organizations, and civic societies who have the Church as an important stakeholder.

In Imitatio Christi: The Poetics of Piety in Early Modern England, Nandra Perry explores the relationship of the traditional devotional paradigm of imitatio Christi to the theory and practice of literary imitation in early modern England. While imitation has long been recognized as a central feature of the period's pedagogy and poetics, the devotional practice of imitating Christ's life and Passion has been historically regarded as a minor element in English Protestant piety. Perry reconsiders the role of the imitatio Christi not only within English devotional culture but within the broader culture of literary imitation. She traces continuities and discontinuities between sacred and secular notions of proper imitation, showing how imitation worked in both contexts to address anxieties, widespread after the Protestant Reformation, about the reliability of "fallen" human language and the epistemological value of the body and the material world. The figure of Sir Philip Sidney-Elizabethan England's premier defender of poetry and internationally recognized paragon of Christian knighthood-functions as a nexus for Perry's treatment of a wide variety of contemporary literary and religious genres, all of them concerned in one way or another with the ethical and religious implications of imitation. Throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, the Sidney legacy was appropriated by men and women, Catholics and Protestants alike, making it an especially useful vehicle for tracing the complicated relationship of imitatio Christi to the various literary, confessional, and cultural contexts within and across which it often operated. Situating her project within a generously drawn version of the Sidney "circle" allows Perry to move freely across the boundaries that often delimit treatments of early modern English piety. Her book is a call for renewed attention to the imitation of Christ as a productive category of literary analysis, one that resists overly neat distinctions between Catholic and Protestant, sacred and secular, literary art and cultural artifact.

The leitmotif of Freedom in Response, as the title suggests, is a reasoned exposition of the nature of freedom, as it is presented in the Bible and developed by such later theologians as Martin Luther. Oswald Bayer considers Luther's teachings on pastoral care, marriage, and the three estates, bringing in Kant and Hegel as conversation partners, together with Kant's friend and critic, the innovative theologian and philosopher Johann Georg Hamann.
Oswald Bayer is a major contemporary Lutheran theologian, but so far little of his work has been translated from German into English. This selection of essays indicates the depth and range of his thought on issues relating to theological ethics.

In Rhetoric of the Protestant Sermon in America: The Pulpit at the Turn of the Millennium, ten scholars analyze notable sermons from the fifty-year span between 1965 and 2015, during which the Protestant sermon has undergone significant change in the United States. Contributors examine how this turbulent time period witnessed a variety of important shifts in the arguments, evidences, and rhetorical strategies employed by contemporary preachers. Because religious practice is inextricably tangled in the culture, politics, and economy of its historical situation, the public expression of a faith is certain to move with the times. In their treatment of race, sex, gender, class, and citizenship, sermons apply ancient texts to current events and controversies, often to revealing effect. This collection, thoughtfully edited by Eric C. Miller and Jonathan J. Edwards, demonstrates how the genre of the Protestant sermon has evolved-or resisted evolution-across the years. Scholars of religion, rhetoric, communication, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.

This book presents the work of leading hermeneutical theorists alongside emerging thinkers, examining the current state of hermeneutics within the Pentecostal tradition. The volume's contributors present constructive ideas about the future of hermeneutics at the intersection of theology of the Spirit, Pentecostal Christianity, and other disciplines. This collection offers cutting-edge scholarship that engages with and pulls from a broad range of fields and points toward the future of Pneumatological hermeneutics. The volume's interdisciplinary essays are broken up into four sections: philosophical hermeneutics, biblical-theological hermeneutics, social and cultural hermeneutics, and hermeneutics in the social and physical sciences.

American Protestant Christianity is often described as a two-party system divided into liberals and conservatives. This book clarifies differences between the intellectual positions of these two groups by advancing the thesis that the philosophy of the modern period is largely responsible for the polarity of Protestant Christian thought. A second thesis is that the modern philosophical positions driving the division between liberals and conservatives have themselves been called into question. It therefore becomes opportune to ask how theology ought to be done in a postmodern era, and to envision a rapprochement between theologians of the left and right. A concluding chapter speculates specifically on the era now dawning and the likelihood that the compulsion to separate the spectrum into two distinct camps will be precluded by the coexistence of a wide range of theological positions from left to right. Nancey C. Murphy is Associate Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, and the author of Reasoning and Rhetoric in Religion, also published by Trinity Press. Her book Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning earned the American Academy of Religion's Award for Excellence.