Sociologist Jeffrey Guhin spent a year and a half embedded in four high schools in the New York City area - two of them Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian. At first pass, these communities do not seem to have much in common. But under closer inspection Guhin finds several common threads: each school community holds to a conservative approach to gender and sexuality, a hostility towards the theory of evolution, and a deep suspicion of secularism. All possess a double-sided image of America, on the one hand as a place where their children can excel and prosper, and on the other hand as a land of temptations that could lead their children astray. He shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the secular world, both in school and online. Guhin develops his study of boundaries in the book's first half to show how the school communities teach their children who they are not; the book's second half shows how the communities use "external authorities" to teach their children who they are. These "external authorities" - such as Science, Scripture, and Prayer - are experienced by community members as real powers with the ability to issue commands and coerce action. By offloading agency to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and 143 formal interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to sociology, religious studies, and education.

The medieval dissenters known as 'Waldenses', named after their first founder, Valdes of Lyons, have long attracted careful scholarly study, especially from specialists writing in Italian, French and German. Waldenses were found across continental Europe, from Aragon to the Baltic and East-Central Europe. They were long-lived, resilient, and diverse. They lived in a special relationship with the prevailing Catholic culture, making use of the Church's services but challenging its claims. Many Waldenses are known mostly, or only, because of the punitive measures taken by inquisitors and the Church hierarchy against them. This volume brings for the first time a wide-ranging, multi-authored interpretation of the medieval Waldenses to an English-language readership, across Europe and over the four centuries until the Reformation. Contributors: Marina Benedetti, Peter Biller, Luciana Borghi Cedrini, Euan Cameron, Jacques Chiffoleau, Albert de Lange, Andrea Giraudo, Franck Mercier, Grado Giovanni Merlo, Georg Modestin, Martine Ostorero, Damian J. Smith, Claire Taylor, and Kathrin Utz Tremp.

This cultural and institutional history explores the careers of men who served in Rome's Office of Ceremonies during the papal court's growth period (c.1466-1528), in order to understand how the smallest papal college stands as a model of early modern curial advancement. The experiences and textual contributions of three ceremonialists, Agostino Patrizi, Johann Burchard, and Paris de' Grassi, show diverse strategies and origins, but similar concerns and achievements. In a period of heightened competition and increasing pressure for regularization and reform, the Office's professionalization and their combined office-holding, networks, and textual production, reveal how early modern curialists got ahead. This study shows the complexity of successful advancement strategies that were cultivated over decades and stretched far beyond papal support.

God's Story, Our Story is an introduction to Christian faith from an Anabaptist perspective. It can be used in a group of people considering baptism, or by someone who just wants to mull over faith questions on their own before--or even after--they say yes to God's Story.

Clergy have historically been represented as figures of authority, wielding great influence over our society. During certain periods of American history, members of the clergy were nearly ever-present in public life. But men and women of the clergy are not born that way, they are made. And therefore, the matter of their education is a question of fundamental public importance. In Clergy Education in America, Larry Golemon shows not only how our conception of professionalism in religious life has changed over time, but also how the education of religious leaders have influenced American culture. Tracing the history of clergy education in America from the Early Republic through the first decades of the twentieth century, Golemon tracks how the clergy has become increasingly diversified in terms of race, gender, and class in part because of this engagement with public life. At the same time, he demonstrates that as theological education became increasingly intertwined with academia the clergy's sphere of influence shrank significantly, marking a turn away from public life and a decline in their cultural influence. Clergy Education in America offers a sweeping look at an oft-overlooked but critically important aspect of American public life.