Religious life in early America is often equated with the fire-and-brimstone Puritanism best embodied by the theology of Cotton Mather. Yet, by the nineteenth century, American theology had shifted dramatically away from the severe European traditions directly descended from the Protestant Reformation, of which Puritanism was in the United States the most influential. In its place arose a singularly American set of beliefs. In America's God, Mark Noll has written a biography of this new American ethos.
In the 125 years preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, theology played an extraordinarily important role in American public and private life. Its evolution had a profound impact on America's self-definition. The changes taking place in American theology during this period were marked by heightened spiritual inwardness, a new confidence in individual reason, and an attentiveness to the economic and market realities of Western life. Vividly set in the social and political events of the age, America's God is replete with the figures who made up the early American intellectual landscape, from theologians such as Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel W. Taylor, William Ellery Channing, and Charles Hodge and religiously inspired writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine Stowe to dominant political leaders of the day like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. The contributions of these thinkers combined with the religious revival of the 1740s, colonial warfare with France, the consuming struggle for independence, and the rise of evangelical Protestantism to form a common intellectual coinage based on a rising republicanism and commonsense principles. As this Christian republicanism affirmeditself, it imbued in dedicated Christians a conviction that the Bible supported their beliefs over those of all others. Tragically, this sense of religious purpose set the stage for the Civil War, as the conviction of Christians both North and South that God was on their side served to deepen a schism that would soon rend the young nation asunder.
Mark Noll has given us the definitive history of Christian theology in America from the time of Jonathan Edwards to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. It is a story of a flexible and creative theological energy that over time forged a guiding national ideology the legacies of which remain with us to this day.

Though a directive principle of the constitution, a uniform civil code of law has never been written or instituted in India. As a result, in matters of personal law the segment of law concerning marriage, dowry, divorce, parentage, legitimacy, wills, and inheritance individuals of different backgrounds must appeal to their respective religious laws for guidance or rulings. But balancing the claims of religious communities with those of a modern secular state has caused some intractable problems for India as a nation. Religion and Personal Law in Secular India provides a comprehensive look into the issues and challenges that India faces as it tries to put a uniform civil code into practice.

Contributors include Granville Austin, Robert D. Baird, Srimati Basu, Kevin Brown, Paul Courtright, Rajeev Dhavan, Marc Galanter, Namita Goswami, Laura Dudley Jenkins, Jayanth Krishnan, Gerald James Larson, John H. Mansfield, Ruma Pal, Kunal M. Parker, William D. Popkin, Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Sylvia Vatuk, and Arvind Verma."

The nineteenth-century history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Max Perry Mueller argues, illuminates the role that religion played in forming the notion of three ""original"" American races-red, black, and white-for Mormons and others in the early American Republic. Recovering the voices of a handful of black and Native American Mormons who resolutely wrote themselves into the Mormon archive, Mueller threads together historical experience and Mormon scriptural interpretations. He finds that the Book of Mormon is key to understanding how early followers reflected but also departed from antebellum conceptions of race as biblically and biologically predetermined. Mormon theology and policy both challenged and reaffirmed the essentialist nature of the racialized American experience. The Book of Mormon presented its believers with a radical worldview, proclaiming that all schisms within the human family were anathematic to God's design. That said, church founders were not racial egalitarians. They promoted whiteness as an aspirational racial identity that nonwhites could achieve through conversion to Mormonism. Mueller also shows how, on a broader level, scripture and history may become mutually constituted. For the Mormons, that process shaped a religious movement in perpetual tension between its racialist and universalist impulses during an era before the concept of race was secularized.

The central character in Susan Naquin's extraordinary new book is the city of Peking during the Ming and Qing periods. Using the city's temples as her point of entry, Naquin carefully excavates Peking's varied public arenas, the city's transformation over five centuries, its human engagements, and its rich cultural imprint.
This study shows how modern Beijing's glittering image as China's great and ancient capital came into being and reveals the shifting identities of a much more complex past, one whose rich social and cultural history Naquin splendidly evokes. Temples, by providing a place where diverse groups could gather without the imprimatur of family or state, made possible a surprising assortment of community-building and identity-defining activities. By revealing how religious establishments of all kinds were used for fairs, markets, charity, tourism, politics, and leisured sociability, Naquin shows their decisive impact on Peking and, at the same time, illuminates their little-appreciated role in Chinese cities generally. Lacking most of the conventional sources for urban history, she has relied particularly on a trove of commemorative inscriptions that express ideas about the relationship between human beings and gods, about community service and public responsibility, about remembering and being remembered. The result is a book that will be essential reading in the field of Chinese studies for years to come.

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atlantic. In the years prior to the massacre, Americans dubbed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the "Mormon problem" as it garnered national attention for its "unusual" theocracy and practice of polygamy. In the aftermath of the massacre, many Americans viewed Mormonism as a real religious and physical threat to white civilization. Putting the Mormon Church on trial for its crimes against American purity became more important than prosecuting those responsible for the slaughter. Religious historian Janiece Johnson analyzes how sensational media attention used the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre to enflame public sentiment and provoke legal action against Latter-day Saints. Ministers, novelists, entertainers, cartoonists, and federal officials followed suit, spreading anti-Mormon sentiment to collectively convict the Mormon religion itself. This troubling episode in American religious history sheds important light on the role of media and popular culture in provoking religious intolerance that continues to resonate in the present.

On September 11, 1857, a small band of Mormons led by John D. Lee massacred an emigrant train of men, women, and children heading west at Mountain Meadows, Utah. News of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, as it became known, sent shockwaves through the western frontier of the United States, reaching the nation's capital and eventually crossing the Atlantic. In the years prior to the massacre, Americans dubbed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the "Mormon problem" as it garnered national attention for its "unusual" theocracy and practice of polygamy. In the aftermath of the massacre, many Americans viewed Mormonism as a real religious and physical threat to white civilization. Putting the Mormon Church on trial for its crimes against American purity became more important than prosecuting those responsible for the slaughter. Religious historian Janiece Johnson analyzes how sensational media attention used the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre to enflame public sentiment and provoke legal action against Latter-day Saints. Ministers, novelists, entertainers, cartoonists, and federal officials followed suit, spreading anti-Mormon sentiment to collectively convict the Mormon religion itself. This troubling episode in American religious history sheds important light on the role of media and popular culture in provoking religious intolerance that continues to resonate in the present.

In this theoretically rich work, Mason Kamana Allred unearths the ways Mormons have employed a wide range of technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences that contribute to the growth of their religious systems of meaning. Drawing on methods from cultural history, media studies, and religious studies, Allred focuses specifically on technologies of vision that have shaped Mormonism as a culture of seeing. These technologies, he argues, were as essential to the making of Mormonism as the humans who received, interpreted, and practiced their faith. While Mormons' uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition's use of visual technology, Allred excavates older practices and technologies for negotiating the spirit, such as panorama displays and magic lantern shows. Fusing media theory with feminist new materialism, he employs media archaeology to examine Mormons' ways of performing distinctions, beholding as a way to engender radical visions, and standardizing vision to effect assimilation. Allred's analysis reveals Mormonism as always materially mediated and argues that religious history is likewise inherently entangled with media.

In this theoretically rich work, Mason Kamana Allred unearths the ways Mormons have employed a wide range of technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences that contribute to the growth of their religious systems of meaning. Drawing on methods from cultural history, media studies, and religious studies, Allred focuses specifically on technologies of vision that have shaped Mormonism as a culture of seeing. These technologies, he argues, were as essential to the making of Mormonism as the humans who received, interpreted, and practiced their faith. While Mormons' uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition's use of visual technology, Allred excavates older practices and technologies for negotiating the spirit, such as panorama displays and magic lantern shows. Fusing media theory with feminist new materialism, he employs media archaeology to examine Mormons' ways of performing distinctions, beholding as a way to engender radical visions, and standardizing vision to effect assimilation. Allred's analysis reveals Mormonism as always materially mediated and argues that religious history is likewise inherently entangled with media.

Comments from Sri Swami Satchidananda on the yogic perspective on that portion of the Holy Bible known as the Beatitudes. This booklet has the flavor of a public talk; it is illustrated with photographs.

Interviews with 30 converts from the 1930s and 1940s are a component of Barry Chevanne's book, a look into the origins and practices of Rastafarianism. From the direct accounts of these early members, he is able to reconstruct pivotal episodes in Rastafarian history to offer a look into a subgroup of Jamaican society whose beliefs took root in the social unrest of the 1930s. The little that most people know about Rastafarianism has come through the Jamaican music, Reggae, which resonates with the contemporary social and political struggle of the poverty-stricken cities of Trenchtown and Kingston. Bob Marley and the Wailers, for instance, with their politically charged lyrics about the ghetto, became emissaries for the Jamaican poor. Here Chevannes traces Rastafarianism back to 1930's prophet Marcus Garvey and his mass coalition against racial oppression and support of a free Africa. Before Garvey, few Jamaicans, the overwhelming majority of whom had been brought to the island from Africa and enslaved by Europeans, held positive attitudes about Africa. The rise of black nationalism, however, provided the movement with its impetus to organise a system of beliefs. Likewise, Chevannes explores the movement's roots in the Jamaican peasantry, which underwent distinct phases of development between 1834 and 1961 as freed slaves became peasants. The peasants established themselves in the recesses of the island and many eventually moved to cities, where the economic and social hardship already inherent in Jamaican society, was even more desolate. Between 1943 and 1960, detrimental social changes transformed Jamaica's rapidly expanding cities. Kingston's population grew by 86 percent, and crime and disease were rampant. It was under this severe social decay that Rastafari became a hospice for the uprooted and derelict masses. As a spiritual philosophy, Rastafarianism is linked to societies of runaway slaves or maroons and derives from both the African Myal religion and the Revivalist Zion churches. Like the revival movement, Rastafarianism embraces the 400-year-old doctrine of repatriation. Rastas believe that they and all Africans who have migrated are but exiles in ""Babylon"" and are destined to be delivered out of captivity by a return to Zion or Africa - the land of their ancestors and the seat of Jah Rastafari himself, Haile Selassie I, the former emperor of Ethiopia. ""Rastafari"" is a work with an historical and ethnographic approach that seeks to correct several misconceptions in existing literature - the true origin of dreadlocks, for instance. It should be of interest to religion scholars, historians, scholars of Black studies, and a general audience interested in the movement and how Rastafarians settled in other countries.