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Books > Humanities > Religion & beliefs > General > History of religion
This book tells the story of the Prophet Muhammad as an inspirational role model for anyone who wants to be extraordinary.
You will learn how Muhammad shaped his personality as a child, dealt with the universal challenges of adolescence while a teenager, and then emerged as a leader in his community as a young adult. The book deliberately avoids the language of historical narration used in typical biographies of the Prophet in favor of a more informal, down-to-earth approach.
In this book, the reader will get a completely different view of Muhammad and hopefully will see how Muhammad addressed our own daily challenges, inspiring us to excel in confronting these challenges.
Although commonly regarded as a prejudice against Roman Catholics
and their religion, anti-popery is both more complex and far more
historically significant than this common conception would suggest.
As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, anti-popery is
a powerful lens through which to interpret the culture and politics
of the British-American world. In early modern England, opposition
to tyranny and corruption associated with the papacy could spark
violent conflicts not only between Protestants and Catholics but
among Protestants themselves. Yet anti-popery had a capacity for
inclusion as well and contributed to the growth and stability of
the first British Empire. Combining the religious and political
concerns of the Protestant Empire into a powerful (if occasionally
unpredictable) ideology, anti-popery affords an effective framework
for analyzing and explaining Anglo-American politics, especially
since it figured prominently in the American Revolution as well as
others. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, written by scholars
from both sides of the Atlantic working in history, literature, art
history, and political science, the essays in Against Popery cover
three centuries of English, Scottish, Irish, early American, and
imperial history between the early sixteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. More comprehensive, inclusive, and far-reaching than
earlier studies, this volume represents a major turning point,
summing up earlier work and laying a broad foundation for future
scholarship across disciplinary lines. Contributors: Craig
Gallagher, Boston College * Tim Harris, Brown University * Clare
Haynes, University of East Anglia * Susan P. Liebell, St. Joseph's
University * Brendan McConville, Boston University * Anthony
Milton, Sheffield University* Andrew Murphy, Rutgers University *
Laura M. Stevens, University of Tulsa * Cynthia J. Van Zandt,
University of New Hampshire * Peter Walker, University of Wyoming *
Gregory Zucker, Rutgers University
Evie and Lottie are twin sisters, but they couldn't be more
different. Evie's sharp and funny. Lottie's a day-dreamer. Evie's
the fighter, Lottie's the peace-maker. What they do have in common
is their Jewishness - even though the family isn't religious. When
their mother gets a high-profile job and is targeted by antisemitic
trolls on social media, the girls brush it off at first - but then
the threats start getting uglier. . . What We're Scared Of is a
taut thriller, a tale of sibling friendship and rivalry - and a
searing look at what happens when you scratch beneath the surface.
Darius Hubert (1823-1893), a French-born Jesuit, made his home in
Louisiana in the 1840s and served churches and schools in Grand
Coteau, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. In 1861, he pronounced a
blessing at the Louisiana Secession Convention and became the first
chaplain of any denomination appointed to Confederate service.
Hubert served with the First Louisiana Infantry in Robert E. Lee's
Army of Northern Virginia for the entirety of the war, afterward
returning to New Orleans, where he continued his ministry among
veterans as a trusted pastor and comrade. One of just three
full-time Catholic chaplains in Lee's army, only Hubert returned
permanently to the South after surrender. In postwar New Orleans,
he was unanimously elected chaplain of the veterans of the eastern
campaign and became well-known for his eloquent public prayers at
memorial events, funerals of prominent figures such as Jefferson
Davis, and dedications of Confederate monuments. In this first-ever
biography of Hubert, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey offers a
far-reaching account of his extraordinary life. Born in
revolutionary France, Hubert entered the Society of Jesus as a
young man and left his homeland with fellow Jesuits to join the New
Orleans mission. In antebellum Louisiana, he interacted with slaves
and free people of color, felt the effects of anti-Catholic and
anti-Jesuit propaganda, experienced disputes and dysfunction with
the trustees of his Baton Rouge church, and survived a near-fatal
encounter with Know-Nothing vigilantism. As a chaplain with the
Army of Northern Virginia, Hubert witnessed harrowing battles and
their equally traumatic aftermath in surgeons' tents and hospitals.
After the war, he was a spiritual director, friend, mentor, and
intermediary in the fractious and politically divided Crescent
City, where he both honored Confederate memory and promoted
reconciliation and social harmony. Hubert's complicated and
tumultuous life is notable both for its connection to the most
compelling events of the era and its illumination of the complex
and unexpected ways religion intersected with politics, war, and
war's repercussions.
Although evangelicals and environmentalists at large still find
themselves on opposing sides of an increasingly contentious issue,
there is a counternarrative that has received little attention.
Since the late 1970s, evangelical creation care advocates have
worked relentlessly both to find a common cause with
environmentalists and to convince fellow evangelicals to engage in
environmental debate and action. In God's Wounded World , Melanie
Gish analyzes the evolution of evangelical environmental advocacy
in the United States. Drawing on qualitative interviews,
organizational documents, and other texts, her interdisciplinary
approach focuses on the work of evangelical environmental
organizations and the motivations of the individuals who created
them. Gish positions creation care by placing mainstream
environmentalism on one side and organized evangelical
environmental skepticism on the other. The religiopolitical space
evangelical environmental leaders have established "in-between but
still within" is carefully explored, with close attention to larger
historical context as well as to creation care's political
opportunities and intraevangelical challenges. The nuanced portrait
that emerges defies simple distinctions.Not only are creation care
leaders wrestling with questions of environmental degradation and
engagement, they also must grapple with what it means to be an
evangelical living faithfully in both present-day America and the
global community. As Gish reveals, evangelical advocates' answers
to these questions place moral responsibility and mediation above
ideology and dogmatic certainty. Such a posture risks political
irrelevance in our hyperpartisan and combative political culture,
but if it succeeds it could transform the creation care movement
into a powerful advocate fora more accommodating and holistically
oriented evangelicalism.
In nineteenth-century Ghana, regional warfare rooted in profound
social and economic transformations led thousands of displaced
people to seek refuge in the small mountain kingdom of Akuapem.
There they encountered missionaries from Germany whose message of
sin and forgiveness struck many of these newcomers as irrelevant to
their needs. However, together with Akuapem's natives, these
newcomers began reformulating Christianity as a ritual tool for
social and physical healing, as well as power, in a dangerous
spiritual and human world. The result was Ghana's oldest
African-initiated variant of Christianity: a homegrown expression
of unbroken moral, political, and religious priorities. Focusing on
the southeastern Gold Coast in the middle of the nineteenth
century, Healing and Power in Ghana identifies patterns of
indigenous reception, rejection, and reformulation of what had
initially arrived, centuries earlier, as a European trade religion.
Paul Grant draws on a mixture of European and indigenous sources in
several languages, building on recent scholarship in world
Christianity to address the question of conversion through the lens
of the indigenous moral imagination. This approach considers, among
other things, the conditions in which Akuapem locals and newly
arrived displaced persons might find Christianity useful or
applicable to their needs. This is no traditional history of the
European-African religious encounter. Ghanian Christians identified
the missionaries according to preexisting political and religious
categoriesaas a new class of shrine priests. They resolved their
own social crises in ways the missionaries were unable to
understand. In effect, Christianity became an indigenous religion
years before indigenous people converted in any appreciable
numbers. By foregrounding the sacrificial idiom shared by locals,
missionaries, and native thinkers, Healing and Power in Ghana
presents a new model of scholarship for both West African history
and world Christianity.
Perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated
unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid
development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by
historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has
largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural
context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures
both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their
leaders shed light on rich and diverse commonalities among
generations of Kenya's Christian communities. Exploring the
movements' religious visions in urban Africa, A Spirit of
Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya highlights antecedent
movements set against their historical, social, economic, and
political contexts. Kyama Mugambi examines how, in their
translation of the Gospel, innovative leaders synthesized new
expressions of faith from elements of their historical and
contemporary contexts. The sum of their experiences historically
charts the remarkable journey of innovation, curation, and revision
that attends to the process of translation and conversion in
Christian history. While outlining a century of successive renewal
movements in Kenya between 1920 and 2020, the study also delves
into features of recent urban Pentecostal churches. Readers will
find a thorough historical treatment of themes such as church
structures, corporate vision, Christian formation, and theological
education. The longitudinal and comparative analysis shows how
these Pentecostal approaches to orality, kinship, and integrated
spirituality inform Kenyans' reimagination of Christianity.
\"It\'s almost upon us \" yelled a frantic voice as the ship neared
the iceberg. \"God\'s Will be done, \" prayed Mother Marie. If God
wanted her to drown in the icy Atlantic Ocean before ever reaching
Canada, His Holy Will be done. Yet perhaps . . . This book tells
what happened next, plus the many other adventures that met the
Sisters who brought the Holy Catholic Faith to Canada. 152 Pp. PB.
Impr. 18 Illus.
Dark Eyes, Lady Blue tells the story of Sister Maria of Agreda's
remarkable life. Maria was born in Agreda, Spain, in 1602, and
vowed there as a nun at age seventeen. From birth to her death in
1665, she never left the small town. Yet her accomplishments had a
lasting impact in Spain and as far away as the American Southwest,
where she is celebrated to this day. Although cloistered in
Agreda's Monastery of the Immaculate Conception, Maria grew to be a
renowned mystic, a widely read author, and an advisor to the King
of Spain. She experienced religious ecstasy that inspired her
visionary writings and - quite remarkably - communications with the
Jumano Indians of what would later become the states of Texas and
New Mexico. When Spanish missionaries met the Jumano Indians, their
chief expressed a desire to be baptized because of the supernatural
visits from the mystical ""lady in blue."" This fresh telling of
Maria's story is one that will appeal to readers young and old and
provides an unforgettable perspective on early American exploration
of Texas and New Mexico.
In this groundbreaking book, Selina O'Grady examines how and why
the post-Christian and the Islamic worlds came to be as tolerant or
intolerant as they are. She asks whether tolerance can be expected
to heal today's festering wound between these two worlds, or
whether something deeper than tolerance is needed. Told through
contemporary chronicles, stories and poems, Selina O'Grady takes
the reader through the intertwined histories of the Muslim,
Christian and Jewish persecutors and persecuted. From Umar, the
seventh century Islamic caliph who laid down the rules for the
treatment of religious minorities in what was becoming the greatest
empire the world has ever known, to Magna Carta John who seriously
considered converting to Islam; and from al-Wahhab, whose own
brother thought he was illiterate and fanatical, but who created
the religious-military alliance with the house of Saud that still
survives today, to Europe's bloody Thirty Years war that wearied
Europe of murderous inter-Christian violence but probably killed
God in the process. This book is an essential guide to
understanding Islam and the West today and the role of religion in
the modern world.
Dubbed the "Billy Sunday of China" for the staggering number of
people he led to Christ, John Song has captured the imagination of
generations of readers. His story, as it became popular in the
West, possessed memorable, if not necessarily true, elements: Song
was converted while he studied in New York at Union Theological
Seminary in 1927, but his modernist professors placed him in an
insane asylum because of his fundamentalism. Upon his release, he
returned to China and drew enormous crowds as he introduced
hundreds of thousands of people to the Old-Time Religion. In John
Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man ,
Daryl Ireland upends conventional images of John Song and
theologically conservative Chinese Christianity. Working with never
before used sources, this groundbreaking book paints the picture of
a man who struggled alongside his Chinese contemporaries to find a
way to save their nation. Unlike reformers who attempted to update
ancient traditions, and revolutionaries who tried to escape the
past altogether, Song hammered out the contours of a modern Chinese
life in the furnace of his revivals. With sharp storytelling and
careful analysis, Ireland reveals how Song ingeniously reformulated
the Christian faith so that it was transformative and transferrable
throughout China and Southeast Asia. It created new men and women
who thrived in the region's newly globalized cities. Song's style
of Christianity continues to prove resilient and still animates the
extraordinary growth of the Chinese church today.
The ancient world, much like our own, thrived on cultural diversity
and exchange. The riches of this social reality are evident in the
writings of Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman eras. Jewish authors
drew on the wide range of Greek literary conventions and gave fresh
expressions to the proud traditions of their faith and ethnic
identity. They did not hesitate to modify and adapt the forms they
received from the surrounding culture, but their works stand as
legitimate participants in Greco-Roman literary tradition. In Greek
Genres and Jewish Authors , Sean Adams argues that a robust
understanding of ancient genre facilitates proper textual
interpretation. This perspective is vital for insight on the
author, the work's original purpose, and how the original readers
would have received it. Adopting a cognitive-prototype theory of
genre, Adams provides a detailed discussion of Jewish authors
writing in Greek from ca. 300 BCE to ca. 135 CEaincluding New
Testament authorsaand their participation in Greek genres. The nine
chapters focus on broad genre divisions (e.g., poetry, didactic,
philosophy) to provide studies on each author's engagement with
Greek genres, identifying both representative and atypical
expressions and features. The book's most prominent contribution
lies in its data synthesis to provide a macroperspective on the
ways in which Jewish authors participated in and adapted Greek
genresain other words, how members of a minority culture
intentionally engaged with the dominant culture's literary
practices alongside traditional Jewish features, resulting in
unique text expressions. Greek Genres and Jewish Authors provides a
rich resource for Jewish, New Testament, and classical scholars,
particularly those who study cultural engagement, development of
genres, and ancient education.
Evangelicalism has left its indelible mark on American history,
politics, and culture. It is also true that currents of American
populism and politics have shaped the nature and character of
evangelicalism. This story of evangelicalism in America is thus
riddled with paradox. Despite the fact that evangelicals, perhaps
more than any other religious group, have benefited from the First
Amendment and the separation of church and state, several prominent
evangelical leaders over the past half century have tried to
abrogate the establishment clause of the First Amendment. And
despite evangelicalism's legacy of concern for the poor, for women,
and for minorities, some contemporary evangelicals have repudiated
their own heritage of compassion and sacrifice stemming from Jesus'
command to love the least of these. In Evangelicalism in America
Randall Balmer chronicles the history of evangelicalismaits origins
and development as well as its diversity and contradictions. Within
this lineage Balmer explores the social varieties and political
implications of evangelicalism's inception as well as its present
and paradoxical relationship with American culture and politics.
Balmer debunks some of the cherished myths surrounding this
distinctly American movement while also prophetically speaking
about its future contributions to American life.
Why have Western societies that were once overwhelmingly Christian
become so secular? Looking to the feelings and faith of ordinary
people, the award-winning author of Protestants Alec Ryrie offers a
bold new history of atheism. We think we know the history of faith:
how the ratio of Christian believers has declined and a secular age
dawned. In this startlingly original history, Alex Ryrie puts faith
in the dock to explore how religious belief didn't just fade away.
Rather, atheism bloomed as a belief system in its own right.
Unbelievers looks back to the middle ages when it seemed impossible
not to subscribe to Christianity, through the crisis of the
Reformation and to the powerful, challenging cultural currents of
the centuries since. As this history shows, the religious journey
of the Western world was lived and steered not just by published
philosophy and the celebrated thinkers of the day - the
Machiavellis and Michel de Montaignes - but by men and women at
every level of society. Their voices and feelings permeate this
book in the form of diaries, letters and court records. Tracing the
roots of atheism, Ryrie shows that our emotional responses to the
times can lead faith to wax and wane: anger at a corrupt priest or
anxiety in a turbulent moment spark religious doubt as powerfully
as any intellectual revolution. With Christianity under contest and
ethical redefinitions becoming more and more significant,
Unbelievers shows that to understand how something as intuitive as
belief is shaped over time, we must look to an emotional history -
one with potent lessons for our still angry and anxious age.
Days after the assassination of his prime minister in the middle of
Rome in November 1848, Pope Pius IX found himself a virtual
prisoner in his own palace. The wave of revolution that had swept
through Europe now seemed poised to put an end to the popes'
thousand-year reign over the Papal States, if not indeed to the
papacy itself. Disguising himself as a simple parish priest, Pius
escaped through a back door. Climbing inside the Bavarian
ambassador's carriage, he embarked on a journey into a fateful
exile. Only two years earlier Pius's election had triggered a wave
of optimism across Italy. After the repressive reign of the dour
Pope Gregory XVI, Italians saw the youthful, benevolent new pope as
the man who would at last bring the Papal States into modern times
and help create a new, unified Italian nation. But Pius found
himself caught between a desire to please his subjects and a
fear-stoked by the cardinals-that heeding the people's pleas would
destroy the church. The resulting drama-with a colorful cast of
characters, from Louis Napoleon and his rabble-rousing cousin
Charles Bonaparte to Garibaldi, Tocqueville, and Metternich-was
rife with treachery, tragedy, and international power politics.
David Kertzer is one of the world's foremost experts on the history
of Italy and the Vatican, and has a rare ability to bring history
vividly to life. With a combination of gripping, cinematic
storytelling, and keen historical analysis rooted in an
unprecedented richness of archival sources, The Pope Who Would Be
King sheds fascinating new light on the end of rule by divine right
in the west and the emergence of modern Europe.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906a1945) remains one of the most enigmatic
figures of the twentieth century. His life evokes fascination,
eliciting attention from a wide and diverse audience. Bonhoeffer is
rightly remembered as theologian and philosopher, ethicist and
political thinker, wartime activist and resister, church leader and
pastor, martyr and saint. These many sides to Bonhoeffer do not
give due prominence to the aspect of his life that wove all the
disparate parts into a coherent whole: Bonhoeffer as preacher. In
Dietrich: Bonhoeffer and the Theology of a Preaching Life Michael
Pasquarello traces the arc of Bonhoeffer's public career,
demonstrating how, at every stage, Bonhoeffer focused upon
preaching, both in terms of its ecclesial practice and the theology
that gave it life. Pasquarello chronicles a period of
preparationaBonhoeffer's study of Luther and Barth, his struggleto
reconcile practical ministry with preaching, andhis discovery of
preaching's ethic of resistance. Next Pasquarello describes
Bonhoeffer's maturation as a preacherahis crafting a homiletic
theology, as well as preaching's relationship to politics and
public confession. Pasquarello follows Bonhoeffer's forced
itinerancy until he became, ultimately, a preacher without any
congregation at all. In the end, Bonhoeffer's life was his best
sermon. Dietrich presents Bonhoeffer as an exemplar in the
preaching tradition of the church. His exercise of theological and
homiletical wisdom in particular times, places, and
circumstancesaBerlin, Barcelona, Harlem, London,
Finkenwaldeareveals the particular kind of intellectual, spiritual,
and moral formation required for faithful, concrete witness to the
gospel in the practice of proclamation, both then and now.
Bonhoeffer's story as a pastor and teacher of preachers provides a
historical example of how the integration of theology and ministry
is the fruit of wisdom cultivated through a life of discipleship
with others in prayer, study, scriptural meditation, and mutual
service.
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