The Devil's Mousetrap approaches the thought of three colonial New England divines --Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Edward Taylor-- from the perspective of literary theory, illuminating their work's allusive language and intellectual backgrounds.

Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced.
The author's argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan religious culture. It was costly to establish and maintain a vital Puritan church, for the needs were many, including educated ministers who commanded substantial salaries; public education so that the laity could be immersed in the Bible and devotional literature (substantial expenses in themselves); the building of meeting houses; and the furnishing of communion tables--all and more were required for the maintenance of Puritan piety.
Second, the author analyzes how the Puritans gradually developed the evangelical impulse to broadcast the seeds of grace as widely as possible. The spread of Puritan churches throughout most of New England was fostered by the steady devotion of material resources to the maintenance of an intense and demanding religion, a devotion made possible by the belief that money sown to the spirit would reap divine rewards.
In 1651, about 20,000 English colonists were settled in some 30 New England towns, each with a newly formed Puritan church. A century later, the population had grown to 350,000, and there were 500 meetinghouses for Puritan churches. This book tells the story of this remarkable century of growth and adaptation through intertwined histories of two Massachusetts churches, one in Boston and one in Westfield, a village on the remote western frontier, from their foundings in the 1660's to the religious revivals of the 1740's. In conclusion, the author argues that the Great Awakening was a product of the continuous cultivation of traditional religion, a cultural achievement built on New England's economic development, rather than an indictment and rejection of its Puritan heritage.

Recent years have seen the entry of large numbers of women into the ordained clergy of Protestant churches. Nesbitt here analyses the extent to which the large-scale entry of women into the ministry has affected the occupation.

'It is rare for a book to be both erudite and amusing at the same time, and this book has succeeded. It has changed the common but unacceptable image of the Puritans as dull, solemn, melancholy misanthropes' - Horton Davies, author of The Worship of the American Puritans For over four centuries, 'puritan' has been a synonym for dour, joyless, and repressed. In Puritans at Play, Bruce Daniels reappraises the accuracy of this grim portrait by examining leisure and recreation in colonial and revolutionary New England. Chapters on music, dinner parties, dancing, sex, alcohol, taverns, and sports are presented in a lively style making this book as entertaining as it is illuminating.

Women in the Presence is a study of the religious lives of middle-class laywomen. Focusing on the ways in which the members of one Bible study group for women at a suburban Presbyterian church articulate their beliefs and define their communicative boundaries, the book reveals a style of managing privacy, diversity, and fellowship that displays distinct strengths and poignant prohibitions. Based on eighteen months of participant-observation fieldwork, complemented by extensive individual interviews, Jody Shapiro Davie shows that often the deepest beliefs of group members are voiced only indirectly and that crucial elements of their personal beliefs are not discussed at all among the group. Women in the Presence makes apparent some of the difficulties and complexities of contemporary middle-class religious life in America: the fear of self-revelation that leads to spiritual isolation; denominational efforts not to alienate anyone that result in polite, superficial, and lifeless churches; and the conventions of middle-class culture that repress the individual's desire for sincere and active engagement with the life of the soul. Approaching a middle-class American church through an anthropologist-folklorist's eyes, Women in the Presence offers a fresh perspective on the pursuit of spirituality by mainstream Protestant women. Unique in its field, this book will be of interest to the general reader and to scholars concerned with congregational studies, women and religion, vernacular religion and belief, and the anthropology of contemporary American religious life.

Escaping from narrative history, this book takes a deep look at the Catholic question in eighteenth-century Ireland. It asks how people thought about Catholicism, Protestantism and their society, in order to reassess the content and importance of the religious conflict. In doing this, Dr Cadoc Leighton provides a study of very wide appeal, which offers new and thought-provoking ways of looking not only at the eighteenth century but at modern Irish history in general. It also places Ireland clearly within the mainstream of European historical developments.

Examines the tolerance between Catholics and Protestants in a period when vicious sectarian strife was the rule of the day. Tolerance here means more than mere coexistence but a daily interaction between people without regard for their faith.

Available for the first time in trade paperback, this authoritative biography of the great religious leader was hailed by Time magazine as "the most readable Luther biography in English". This edition showcases the intricate woodcuts and engravings that enhance the text and give the flavor of the era in which Martin Luther lived. More than 100 woodcuts and engravings.

You're engaged And now you are knee-deep in planning the details of the wedding. But are you also getting ready for what comes after the wedding? Alice and Robert Fryling bring over twenty-five years of marriage experience to this workbook designed to guide you through open and honest communication about the things that will really matter in your marriage: money time communication sex family work faith This isn't just a book you read--it's a book you experience together. Its interactive style allows you and your future spouse to explore its biblically-based counsel and challenging questions together or with a pastor. And with three chapters tailored specifically to your first few months together, you can even use A Handbook for Engaged Couples after the wedding. Set aside time now to develop a marriage that starts well and grows to lasting maturity.

Gnosticism is a term covering a group of heresies that for a time had great influence within the early church, including: belief in the existence of a hidden or secret revelation available only to the initiated; rejection of the physical world as evil or impure; and stress on the radical individuality of the spiritual self. In this book Philip Lee finds parallels between gnosticism and belief and practice in contemporary North American Proestantism. Sharply attacking conservatives and liberals alike, Lee spares no one in this penetrating and provocative assessment of the current stage of religion and its effects on values and society at large. The book concludes with a call for a return to orthodoxy and a series of prescriptions for reform. Lee will add a short preface for this paperback edition.

This volume is a collection of five satires from the Reformation period, written between 1517 and 1526. In her Introduction to the work, Rummel explains that the battle between reformers and champions of the old faith was waged on many fronts, "not only by preachers thundering from the pulpits, theologians facing each other in acrimonious disputations, and church authorities issuing censures and condemnations." This collection focuses on the impact and importance of a supporting cast of satirists whose ad hoc productions reached a wider audience, in a more visceral manner, than the rational approach which typified scholarly theological arguments. Rummel explains: "Satire, a genre that requires finely honed language skills, was the preferred weapon of the humanists, who by and large sympathizes with the reformers." The humanists and reformers were often so closely associated in the reading publicas mind that the earliest phase of the Reformation was sometimes interpreted as a quarrel between philogists and theologians, a manifestation of professional jealousies. Thus Erasmus claimed that the debates of his time were the result of antagonism between the faculties of Arts and Theology. Three of the selections contained in the volume represent the Reformers, and two support the Catholics, the "Papists" of the title. These satirical essays, circulated widely among educated laypersons, use wit and biting humor to ridicule and discredit their adversaries and belong to a genre which was part of a larger body of sixteenth-century satire. The proliferation of satires became a concern of authorities who moved to suppress what they called "hate-mongering." Officials banned the publication ofanonymously authored writings, effectively ending the publication of the satires, which were largely published either anonymously or carried only the name of the publisher. As a result, many of the pieces did not survive to the present day, many more are only known to us through obscure references in other literature. This volume brings to light five of these satiric pieces, written in the pivotal period when the Reformation ceased to be a protest and organized itself as a full-fledged movement. The topical issues featured in each satire are brought into historical context by a headnote explaining the circumstances surrounding its publication and giving bibliographical information about the satireas author. The witty style makes this collection entertaining reading and the impact of these writings sheds new light on the history of the Reformation.

This study focuses on the Colloquy of Montbeliard, a theological debate in 1586 between the Lutheran Jacob Andreae and the Calvinist Thoeodore Beza. Montbeliard, the site of the Colloquy, epitomized the complex array of shifting political alliances and religious tensions which characterized the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Augsburg. A French speaking Reformed county, Montbeliard found itself under the jurisdiction of the lutheran Duke of Wurttemberg, who sought to impose his religion on the region. The people and clergy of Montbeliard resisted strenuously, and this tense situation was exacerbated by a continuing influx of Reformed Huguenot refugees from France. The ostensible purpose of the Colloquy was to determine if the Lutherans and Reformed were in sufficient agreement on the docturine of the Eucharist to permit intercommunion. Raitt's research of the documents surrounding the Colloguy, however, has revealed that the calling of the Colloquy, was the result of high level political intrigue. In fact, the Colloquy represented a last-ditch effort on the part of Henry of Navarre, with the Palatine Elector John Casimir and Queen Elizabeth of England, to unite the Protestant forces of Europe against Rome and the papal Allies. Raitt uncovers the background and details of this incident and analyses the nature and implications of the underlying theological conflict.

More than forty years ago, conservative Christianity emerged as a major force in American political life. Since then the movement has been analyzed and over-analyzed, declared triumphant and, more than once, given up for dead. But because outside observers have maintained a near-relentless focus on domestic politics, the most transformative development over the last several decadesthe explosive growth of Christianity in the global southhas gone unrecognized by the wider public, even as it has transformed evangelical life, both in the US and abroad. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders offers a daring new perspective on conservative Christianity by shifting the lens to focus on the world outside US borders. Melani McAlister offers a sweeping narrative of the last fifty years of evangelical history, weaving a fascinating tale that upends much of what we know-or think we know-about American evangelicals. She takes us to the Congo in the 1960s, where Christians were enmeshed in a complicated interplay of missionary zeal, Cold War politics, racial hierarchy, and anti-colonial struggle. She shows us how evangelical efforts to convert non-Christians have placed them in direct conflict with Islam at flash points across the globe. And she examines how Christian leaders have fought to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS in Africa while at the same time supporting harsh repression of LGBTQ communities. Through these and other stories, McAlister focuses on the many ways in which looking at evangelicals abroad complicates conventional ideas about evangelicalism. We can't truly understand how conservative Christians see themselves and their place in the world unless we look beyond our shores.

This volume is a collection of five satires from the Reformation period, written between 1517 and 1526. In her Introduction to the work, Rummel explains that the battle between reformers and champions of the old faith was waged on many fronts, "not only by preachers thundering from the pulpits, theologians facing each other in acrimonious disputations, and church authorities issuing censures and condemnations." This collection focuses on the impact and importance of a supporting cast of satirists whose ad hoc productions reached a wider audience, in a more visceral manner, than the rational approach which typified scholarly theological arguments. Rummel explains: "Satire, a genre that requires finely honed language skills, was the preferred weapon of the humanists, who by and large sympathizes with the reformers." The humanists and reformers were often so closely associated in the reading publicas mind that the earliest phase of the Reformation was sometimes interpreted as a quarrel between philogists and theologians, a manifestation of professional jealousies. Thus Erasmus claimed that the debates of his time were the result of antagonism between the faculties of Arts and Theology. Three of the selections contained in the volume represent the Reformers, and two support the Catholics, the "Papists" of the title. These satirical essays, circulated widely among educated laypersons, use wit and biting humor to ridicule and discredit their adversaries and belong to a genre which was part of a larger body of sixteenth-century satire. The proliferation of satires became a concern of authorities who moved to suppress what they called "hate-mongering." Officials banned the publication ofanonymously authored writings, effectively ending the publication of the satires, which were largely published either anonymously or carried only the name of the publisher. As a result, many of the pieces did not survive to the present day, many more are only known to us through obscure references in other literature. This volume brings to light five of these satiric pieces, written in the pivotal period when the Reformation ceased to be a protest and organized itself as a full-fledged movement. The topical issues featured in each satire are brought into historical context by a headnote explaining the circumstances surrounding its publication and giving bibliographical information about the satireas author. The witty style makes this collection entertaining reading and the impact of these writings sheds new light on the history of the Reformation.

This book examines the mentality of the upper and middle classes during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was an age obsessed by the idea of catastrophes; by wars, famines, pestilences, revolutions, floods, volcanoes, and - especially - the great commercial upheavals which periodically threatened to topple the world's first capitalist system. Thanks to the dominant evangelical ethos of the day, such sufferings seemed to be part of God's plan, and governments took a harsh attitude toward social underdogs, whether bankrupts or paupers, in order not to interfere with the dispensations of providence. Free Trade was adopted, not as the agent of growth it was later seen to be, but in order to restrain an economy which seemed to be racing out of control. In the 1850s and 1860s, however, a different attitude to social problems developed along with evolutionary approaches to the physical and animal worlds and a new understanding of God, who came to be regarded less as an Arnoldian headmaster and more like Santa Claus. At the centre of this ideology, and throwing light upon it, was a new way of understanding the Atonement.

Bringing together essays by a leading intellectual and religious historian, The Divided Heart is a collection of recent reflections, sometimes with a considerable autobiographical element, by Henry F. May on the conflict between Protestantism and the Enlightenment that runs throughout the history of American culture. Summarizing May's opinions on recent historiographical arguments, the introduction to The Divided Heart tells of his own development as a historian, major influences upon his thinking, and how his practicing assumptions grew. Covering religion, there are essays on early American history, Jonathan Edwards, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Reinhold Niebuhr, and "reflections on the uneasy relation" between religion and American intellectual history. Relating to the Enlightenment, there are essays on the Constitution and the "Jeffersonian Moment." Suggesting a new and interdisciplinary approach, May's last essay deals with the end of the Enlightenment and the beginning of Romanticism, an area of history with which he has never before dealt.

This investigation of the transformative religious changes of the 16th and 17th centuries in England, arise from Patrick Collinson's 1986 Anstey Memorial Lectures at the University of Kent. The book examines the effects of these changes on the nation, the town and family and their culture. It is about the birth of a new and in some ways different England, the one that we know and about the painful complications attending that birth, including the English Civil War. It looks at the implications of the Protestant Reformation for English national self-consciousness.;Patrick Collinson is author of "The Elizabethan Puritan Movement", "Archbishop Grindal 1519-1583", "The Religion of Protestants" and "Godly People - Essays in English Protestantism and Puritanism".

Brian Beck has had a long and distinguished career in Methodist studies, having additionally served as President of the UK Methodist Conference and helped lead the international Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. This book is the first time that Beck's seminal work on Methodism has been gathered together. It includes eighteen essays from the last twenty-five years, covering many different aspects of Methodist thought and practice. This collection is divided into two main sections. Part I covers Methodism's heritage and its implications, while Part II discusses wider issues of Methodism's identity. The chapters themselves examine the work of key figures, such as John Wesley and J. E. Rattenbury, as well as past and present forms of Methodist thought and practice. As such, this book is important reading for any scholar of Methodism as well as students and academics of religious studies and theology more generally.

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' - conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today - to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals' experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

Protestant nonconformity was one of the most significant influences in nineteenth-century Britain, and has rightly received considerable attention from historians. At both local and national level much of its influence was channelled through, and inspired by, the activities and utterances of the professional minister. The names of the most successful were often household words in the Victorian period, and most have attracted a biographer. Yet neither the experiences nor the careers of these pulpit princes were necessarily those of the typical minister - almost nine thousand of them in 1900 - who served in the chapels of the main dissenting denominations. Using simple sampling and statistical techniques, Kenneth D. Brown sets out to recreate the lives, both private and professional, of this less celebrated but faithful and more representative body of men, rescuing them from the anonymity of the past.

History has long viewed French Protestants as Calvinists. Refusing to Kiss the Slipper re-examines the Reformation in francophone Europe, presenting for the first time the perspective of John Calvin's evangelical enemies and revealing that the French Reformation was more complex and colorful than previously recognized. Michael Bruening brings together a cast of Calvin's opponents from various French-speaking territories to show that opposition to Calvinism was stronger and better organized than has been recognized. He examines individual opponents, such as Pierre Caroli, Jerome Bolsec, Sebastian Castellio, Charles Du Moulin, and Jean Morely, but more importantly, he explores the anti-Calvinist networks that developed around such individuals. Each group had its own origins and agenda, but all agreed that Calvin's claim to absolute religious authority too closely echoed the religious sovereignty of the pope. These oft-neglected opponents refused to offer such obeisance-to kiss the papal slipper-arguing instead for open discussion of controversial doctrines. They believed Calvin's self-appointed leadership undermined the bedrock principle of the Reformation that the faithful be allowed to challenge religious authorities. This book shows that the challenge posed by these groups shaped the way the Calvinists themselves developed their reform strategies. Bruening's work demonstrates that the breadth and strength of the anti-Calvinist networks requires us to abandon the traditional assumption that Huguenots and other francophone Protestants were universally Calvinist.

Thomas Green examines the Scottish Reformation from a new perspective - the legal system and lawyers. For the leading lawyers of the day, the Scottish Reformation presented a constitutional and jurisdictional crisis of the first order. In the face of such a challenge moderate judges, lawyers and officers of state sought to restore order in a time of revolution by retaining much of the medieval legacy of Catholic law and order in Scotland. Green covers the Wars of the Congregation, the Reformation Parliament, the legitimacy of the Scottish government from 1558 to 1561, the courts of the early Church of Scotland and the legal significance of Mary Stewart's personal reign. He also considers neglected aspects of the Reformation, including the roles of the Court of Session and of the Court of the Commissaries of Edinburgh.

Recovers the religious origins of the War on Drugs Many people view the War on Drugs as a contemporary phenomenon invented by the Nixon administration. But as this new book shows, the conflict actually began more than a century before, when American Protestants began the temperance movement and linked drug use with immorality. Christian Nationalism and the Birth of the War on Drugs argues that this early drug war was deeply rooted in Christian impulses. While many scholars understand Prohibition to have been a Protestant undertaking, it is considerably less common to consider the War on Drugs this way, in part because racism has understandably been the focal point of discussions of the drug war. Antidrug activists expressed—and still do express--blatant white supremacist and nativist motives. Yet this book argues that that racism was intertwined with religious impulses. Reformers pursued the “civilizing mission,” a wide-ranging project that sought to protect “child races” from harmful influences while remodeling their cultures to look like Europe and the United States. Most reformers saw Christianity as essential to civilization and missionaries felt that banning drugs would encourage religious conversion and progress. This compelling work of scholarship radically reshapes our understanding of one of the longest and most damaging conflicts in modern American history, making the case that we cannot understand the War on Drugs unless we understand its religious origins.

In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism. But while the Scofield took hold in the United States, the belief system from which it emerged, Dispensationalism, was not primarily a homegrown American phenomenon. In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals. Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.