The black church has always played a vital role in urban black communities. In this comprehensive and insightful history, Clarence Taylor examines the impact of this critical institution on city life and its efforts to provide support and leadership for urban African-American communities. Using Brooklyn as a national example, Taylor begins with the history of mainline (Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist) churches of the nineteenth century, which modified the practices of "white" churches to meet the needs of their growing congregations. These churches brought culture to their members as a mode of resistance by establishing church auxiliaries and clubs such as art and literary societies, traditionally reserved for white churches. In addition, they endorsed the education of the clergy, thereby demonstrating to American society at large that African Americans possessed the sophistication and the means to pursue and to promote culture. More exuberant and less formal than the "elite" churches, Holiness-Pentecostal churches formed the next group to influence community life in Brooklyn. By providing a stable space in which people could network, organize church and community groups, and simply socialize, they offered a myriad of activities and programs for entertainment as well as moral uplift. In short, despite the existence of firm denominational lines, the church as an institution actively answered the educational, religious, and social needs of African Americans while remaining fully involved in the general cultural and political events that affected all Americans. On a more controversial note, the book charts the successes and failures of prominent ministers, who led Brooklyncommunities through McCarthyism, the civil rights movement, Johnson's War on Poverty, and the ghettoization of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the largest African-American community in the borough. With an eye on the future, Taylor analyzes the black clergy's response to the problems endemic to urban life throughout the country, including the exodus of the black middle class to the suburbs, the erosion of government support programs, drug abuse, and the AIDS epidemic. Taylor concludes by assessing the careers of contemporary, sometimes outspoken, black ministers of Brooklyn, such as Reverend Al Sharpton, who has gained national attention. Richly illustrated with photographs, The Black Churches of Brooklyn is an eloquent evaluation of the institution that has contributed so much to the development of viable, cohesive African-American communities. Taylor brings long overdue attention to its valiant two-hundred-year-old struggle to "alter the secular while maintaining the sacred".

This is a new title in the "Facets" series. It provides an interesting and entertaining introduction to Martin Luther's thought. It shows how Luther enjoyed using humour in his interpretation of the Bible, his pastoral relationships and his encounters with death. It reveals that humour in the face of mortality is an indication of human freedom, a way of making life a divine comedy. It brings out the deeper religious meaning behind Luther's theological thought.

Rebecca's Revival is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society. Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group of German proselytizers from the Moravian Church. She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas. Protten's eventful life--the recruiting of converts, an interracial marriage, a trial on charges of blasphemy and inciting of slaves, travels to Germany and West Africa--placed her on the cusp of an emerging international Afro-Atlantic evangelicalism. Her career provides a unique lens on this prophetic movement that would soon sweep through the slave quarters of the Caribbean and North America, radically transforming African-American culture. Jon Sensbach has pieced together this forgotten life of a black visionary from German, Danish, and Dutch records, including letters in Protten's own hand, to create an astounding tale of one woman's freedom amidst the slave trade. Protten's life, with its evangelical efforts on three continents, reveals the dynamic relations of the Atlantic world and affords great insight into the ways black Christianity developed in the New World.

"Challenging and compelling . . . spirited, skilled, clear-eyed revisionism. This bold probe into politics and personalities frees the 'free grace controversy' from interpretive convention. The episode's dynamic has never been so perceptively addressed. I was stunned by the new take on Thomas Shepard. Winship has a winner . . . a vanguard contribution to early American and Puritan studies. Read this one first!"--Michael McGiffert, Editor "Emeritus, William and Mary Quarterly"

""Making Heretics" places the so-called antinomian controversy that wracked Massachusetts in the late 1630s in a broad perspective that reveals new facets of this much-studied event. Michael Winship's knowledge of transatlantic Puritanism and his extensive research into hitherto untapped sources have combined to create a more comprehensive picture than that previously available to us."--Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University

"Those who believe that the basic knowable facts of the antinomian controversy already have been established, have not yet read "Making Heretics," Built upon the fullest canvass of the evidence yet achieved by any historian, Winship's new book offers the fullest critical reconstruction of early New England's most famed event, correcting or going beyond the standard accounts at many points."--Theodore Dwight Bozeman, University of Iowa

"This book is an impressive achievement. Winship writes crisply and lucidly, admirably portraying a world in acute flux. He has an enviable grasp of the range of acceptable disagreement among the godly in normal times and how that range could contract or even explode during a crisis. His research in both printed and manuscript sources is broad and deep. Hereads texts with great care and constructs important new chronologies in the process. The result is a compelling story and a fresh synthesis."--John Murrin, Princeton University

"It has been almost forty years since the last book-length account of the 'antinomian crisis' appeared. This one will be the definitive work. Based on sound and sophisticated evidence, it offers a new conceptualization and, beyond that, gives us a fresh interpretation of New England Puritanism and Puritan politics."--Frank Lambert, author of "Inventing the Great Awakening"