The term 'Western esotericism' refers to a wide range of spiritual currents including alchemy, Hermeticism, Kabbala, Rosicrucianism, and Christian theosophy, as well as several practical forms of esotericism like cartomancy, geomancy, necromancy, alchemy, astrology, herbalism, and magic. The early presence of esotericism in North America has not been much studied, and even less so the indebtedness to esotericism of some major American literary figures. In this book Arthur Versluis breaks new ground, showing that many writers of the so-called American Renaissance drew extensively on and were inspired by Western esoteric currents. Before offering his detailed analysis of the esoteric elements in the writings of figures from the American Renaissance, Versluis offers an overview of esotericism in Europe and its offshoots in colonial America.

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement of our time. The unexpected birth of the modern-day Pentecostal movement at the doorsteps of the twentieth century is as perplexing as its continuing existence and unprecedented expansion worldwide. Once marginalized from public discourse, Pentecostals have entered into mainstream culture, religion, politics, academia, and social action. However, the unprecedented growth of Pentecostalism in all its diversity has led to characterizations ripe with platitudes, stereotypes, and misrepresentations. This Guide for the Perplexed sheds light on the most persistent contrasts characterizing the Pentecostal movement: the tension between local manifestations and global Pentecostalism, the inconsistency between spiritual discernment and charismatic excess, the gap between rampant denominationalism and the pursuit of Christian unity, the disparity between poverty among many Pentecostals and the popularity of the prosperity gospel, the division between Oneness Pentecostals and their trinitarian counterparts, and the worldview of Pentecostals beyond the confines of a religious movement. Those tensions form the essence of global Pentecostalism and represent the emergence of a global Christian world.

This book offers the first cultural history of Universalism and the Universalist idea - the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Ann Bressler argues that Universalism begins as a radical, eschatological, and communally-oriented faith and only later became a 'comfortably established' progressive and individualistic one. Although Universalists are usually classed with Unitarians as pioneering Protestant liberals, says Bressler, they were in fact quite different from both contemporary and later liberalism in their ideas and goals. Unitarians began by rejecting the Calvinist idea of sin as corporate, universal, and absolute, replacing it with their moral self-cultivation. Universalists, on the other hand, accepted the Calvinist view of absolute corporeal sinfulness but insisted on absolute corporeal salvation. Bressler's surprising claim is that Universalists, in their defiance of individualistic moralism, were for much of the 19th century the only consistent Calvinists in America. Bressler traces the emergence of the Universalists' 'improved' Calvinism and its gradual erosion over the course of the 19th century.

Emily B. Baran offers a gripping history of how a small, American-based religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, found its way into the Soviet Union after World War II, survived decades of brutal persecution, and emerged as one of the region's fastest growing religions after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991. In telling the story of this often misunderstood faith, Baran explores the shifting boundaries of religious dissent, non-conformity, and human rights in the Soviet Union and its successor states. Soviet Jehovah's Witnesses are a fascinating case study of dissent beyond urban, intellectual nonconformists. Witnesses, who were generally rural, poorly educated, and utterly marginalized from society, resisted state pressure to conform. They instead constructed alternative communities based on adherence to religious principles established by the Witnesses' international center in Brooklyn, New York. The Soviet state considered Witnesses to be the most reactionary of all underground religious movements, and used extraordinary measures to try to eliminate this threat. Yet Witnesses survived, while the Soviet system did not. After 1991, they faced continuing challenges to their right to practice their faith in post-Soviet states, as these states struggled to reconcile the proper limits on freedom of conscience with European norms and domestic concerns. Dissent on the Margins provides a new and important perspective on one of America's most understudied religious movements.

George Eldon Ladd was a pivotal figure in the resurgence of evangelical scholarship in America during the years after the Second World War. Ladd's career as a biblical scholar can be seen as a quest to rehabilitate evangelical thought both in content and image, a task he pursued at great personal cost. Best known for his work on the doctrine of the Kingdom of God, Ladd moved from critiquing his own movement to engaging many of the important theological and exegetical issues of his day.
Ladd was a strong critic of dispensationalism, the dominant theological system in conservative evangelicalism and fundamentalism, challenging what he perceived to be its anti-intellectualism and uncritical approach to the Bible. In his impressive career at Fuller Theological Seminary, Ladd participated in scholarly debates on the relationship between faith and historical understanding, arguing that modern critical methodologies need not preclude orthodox Christian belief. Ladd also engaged the thought of Rudolf Bultmann, the dominant theological figure of his day. Ladd's main focus, however, was to create a work of scholarship from an evangelical perspective that the broader academic world would accept. When he was unsuccessful in this effort, he descended into depression, bitterness, and alcoholism. But Ladd played an important part in opening doors for later generations of evangelical scholars, both by validating and using critical methods in his own scholarly work, and also by entering into dialogue with theologians and theologies outside the evangelical world.
It is a central theme of this book that Ladd's achievement, at least in part, can be measured in the number of evangelical scholarswho are today active participants in academic life across a broad range of disciplines.

The thesis of this study is that Christian Science was a manifestation of the unrest gripping the United States after the Civil War. The age in which the movement flowered was, at once, sordid and gilded, commercial and optimistic. The stormy way through which the new religion passed was, in a sense, the road upon which all new ideas and schemes are tried. Mrs. Eddy's vision was subjected to reasoned and irrational scrutiny for 40 years. In truth, Christian Science belonged only tenuously to a modern era. It reflected the prevailing optimism, progressivism, utopianism, and feminism of the Gilded Age but did not illuminate the stage with a unique light of its own.