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.