Conservative evangelicalism has transformed American politics, disseminating a sometimes fearful message not just through conventional channels, but through subcultures and alternate modes of communication. Within this world is a "Religion of Fear," a critical impulse that dramatizes cultural and political conflicts and issues in frightening ways that serve to contrast "orthodox" behaviors and beliefs with those linked to darkness, fear, and demonology. Jason Bivins offers close examinations of several popular evangelical cultural creations including the Left Behind novels, church-sponsored Halloween "Hell Houses," sensational comic books, especially those disseminated by Jack Chick, and anti-rock and -rap rhetoric and censorship. Bivins depicts these fascinating and often troubling phenomena in vivid (sometimes lurid) detail and shows how they seek to shape evangelical cultural identity.
As the "Religion of Fear" has developed since the 1960s, Bivins sees its message moving from a place of relative marginality to one of prominence. What does it say about American public life that such ideas of fearful religion and violent politics have become normalized? Addressing this question, Bivins establishes links and resonances between the cultural politics of evangelical pop, the activism of the New Christian Right, and the political exhaustion facing American democracy.
Religion of Fear is a significant contribution to our understanding of the new shapes of political religion in the United States, of American evangelicalism, of the relation of religion and the media, and the link between religious pop culture and politics.

Joseph W. Williams examines the changing healing practices of pentecostals in the United States over the past 100 years, from the early believers, who rejected mainstream medicine and overtly spiritualized disease, to the later generations of pentecostals and their charismatic successors, who dramatically altered the healing paradigms they inherited. Williams shows that over the course of the twentieth century, pentecostal denunciations of the medical profession often gave way to ''natural'' healing methods associated with scientific medicine, natural substances, and even psychology. By 2000, figures such as the pentecostal preacher T. D. Jakes appeared on the Dr. Phil Show, other healers marketed their books at mainstream retailers such as Wal-Mart, and some developed lucrative nutritional products that sold online and in health food stores across the nation. Exploring the interconnections, resonances, and continued points of tension between adherents and some of their fiercest rivals, Spirit Cure chronicling adherents' embrace of competitors' healing practices and illuminates pentecostals' dramatic transition from a despised minority to major players in the world of American evangelicalism and mainstream American culture.

In The Reformation of Feeling, Susan Karant-Nunn looks beyond and beneath the formal doctrinal and moral demands of the Reformation in Germany to examine the emotional tenor of the programs that the emerging creeds-revised Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism/Reformed theology-developed for their members. As revealed by the surviving sermons from this period, preaching clergy of each faith both explicitly and implicitly provided their listeners with distinct models of a mood to be cultivated. To encourage their parishioners to make an emotional investment in their faith, all three drew upon rhetorical elements that were already present in late medieval Catholicism and elevated them into confessional touchstones.
Looking at archival materials containing direct references to feeling, Karant-Nunn focuses on treatments of death and sermons on the Passion. She amplifies these sources with considerations of the decorative, liturgical, musical, and disciplinary changes that ecclesiastical leaders introduced during the period from the late fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century. Within individual sermons, Karant-Nunn also examines topical elements-including Jews at the crucifixion, the Virgin Mary's voluminous weeping below the Cross, and struggles against competing denominations-that were intended to arouse particular kinds of sentiment. Finally, she discusses surviving testimony from the laity in order to assess at least some Christians' reception of these lessons on proper devotional feeling.
This book is exceptional in its presentation of a cultural rather than theological or behavioral study of the broader movement to remake Christianity. As Karant-Nunn conclusively demonstrates, in the eyes of the Reformation's formative personalities strict adherence to doctrine and upright demeanor did not constitute an adequate piety. The truly devout had to engage their hearts in their faith.

Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, currently estimated to have at least 500 million adherents. In the movement's early years, most Pentecostal converts lived in relative poverty, leading many scholars to regard the new religion as a form of spiritual compensation. Yet the rapidly shifting social ecology of Pentecostal Christians includes many middle-class individuals, as well as an increasing number of young adults attracted by the music and vibrant worship of these churches. The stereotypical view of Pentecostals as ''other-worldly'' and disengaged from politics and social ministry is also being challenged, especially as Pentecostals-including many who are committed to working for social and political change-constitute growing minorities in many countries. Spirit and Power addresses three main questions: Where is Pentecostalism growing globally? Why it is growing? What is its social and political impact? The contributors include theologians, historians, and social scientists, bringing diverse disciplinary perspectives to these empirical questions. The essays draw on extensive survey research as well as in-depth ethnographic field methods, with analyses offering diverging and sometimes competing explanations for the growth and impact of Pentecostalism around the world. This volume puts Pentecostalism into a global context that examines not only theology and religious structures, but the social, cultural, and economic settings in which it is, or is not, growing, as well as the social and political development of Pentecostal groups in different societies around the world.

Although their statues grace downtown Hartford, Connecticut, few tourists are aware that the founding ministers of Hartford's First Church, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone (after whose English birthplace the city is named), carried a distinctive version of Puritanism to the Connecticut wilderness. Shaped by Protestant interpretations of the writings of Saint Augustine, and largely developed during the ministers' years at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and as "godly" lecturers in English parish churches, Hartford's church order diverged in significant ways from its counterpart in the churches of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Focusing especially on Hooker, Baird Tipson explores the contributions of William Perkins, Alexander Richardson, and John Rogers to his thought and practice, the art and content of his preaching, and his determination to define and impose a distinctive notion of conversion on his hearers. Hooker's colleague Samuel Stone composed The Whole Body of Divinity, a comprehensive treatment of his thought (and the first systematic theology written in the American colonies). Stone's Whole Body, virtually unknown to scholars, not only provides the indispensable intellectual context for the religious development of early Connecticut but also offers a more comprehensive description of the Puritanism of early New England than anything previously available. Hartford Puritanism argues for a new paradigm of New England Puritanism, one where Hartford's founding ministers, Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, both fully embraced and even harshened Calvin's double predestination.

William Perkins and the Making of Protestant England presents a new interpretation of the theology and historical significance of William Perkins (1558-1602), a prominent Cambridge scholar and teacher during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Though often described as a Puritan, Perkins was in fact a prominent and effective apologist for the established church whose contributions to English religious thought had an immense influence on an English Protestant culture that endured well into modern times. The English Reformation is shown to be a part of the European-wide Reformation, and Perkins himself a leading Reformed theologian. In A Reformed Catholike (1597), Perkins distinguished the theology upheld in the English Church from that of the Roman Catholic Church, while at the same time showing the considerable extent to which the two churches shared common concerns. His books dealt extensively with the nature of salvation and the need to follow a moral way of life. Perkins wrote pioneering works on conscience and 'practical divinity'. In The Arte of Prophecying (1607), he provided preachers with a guidebook to the study of the Bible and their oral presentation of its teachings. He dealt boldly and in down-to-earth terms with the need to achieve social justice in an era of severe economic distress. Perkins is shown to have been instrumental to the making of a Protestant England, and to have contributed significantly to the development of the religious culture not only of Britain but also of a broad range of countries on the Continent.

Combining vivid ethnographic storytelling and incisive theoretical analysis, New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism introduces readers to the fascinating and unexplored terrain of neo-monastic evangelicalism. Often located in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, new monastic communities pursue religiously inspired visions of racial, social, and economic justice-alongside personal spiritual transformation-through diverse and creative expressions of radical community For most of the last century, popular and scholarly common-sense has equated American evangelicalism with across-the-board social, economic, and political conservatism. However, if a growing chorus of evangelical leaders, media pundits, and religious scholars is to be believed, the era of uncontested evangelical conservatism is on the brink of collapse-if it hasn't collapsed already. Wes Markofski has immersed himself in the paradoxical world of evangelical neo-monasticism, focusing on the Urban Monastery-an influential neo-monastic community located in a gritty, racially diverse neighborhood in a major Midwestern American city. The resulting account of the way in which the movement is transforming American evangelicalism challenges entrenched stereotypes and calls attention to the dynamic diversity of religious and political points of view which vie for supremacy in the American evangelical subculture. New Monasticism and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism is the first sociological analysis of new monastic evangelicalism and the first major work to theorize the growing theological and political diversity within twenty-first-century American evangelicalism.

Evangelicals are increasingly turning their attention toward issues such as the environment, international human rights, economic development, racial reconciliation, and urban renewal. This marks an expansion of the social agenda advanced by the Religious Right over the past few decades. For outsiders to evangelical culture, this trend complicates simplistic stereotypes. For insiders, it brings contention over what "true" evangelicalism means today. The New Evangelical Social Engagement brings together an impressive interdisciplinary team of scholars to map this new religious terrain and spell out its significance. The volume's introduction describes the broad outlines of this "new evangelicalism." The editors identify its key elements, trace its historical lineage, account for the recent changes taking place within evangelicalism, and highlight the implications of these changes for politics, civic engagement, and American religion. Part One of the book discusses important groups and trends: emerging evangelicals, the New Monastics, an emphasis on social justice, Catholic influences, gender dynamics and the desire to rehabilitate the evangelical identity, and evangelical attitudes toward the new social agenda. Part Two focuses on specific issues: the environment, racial reconciliation, abortion, international human rights, and global poverty. Part Three contains reflections on the new evangelical social engagement by three leading scholars in the fields of American religious history, sociology of religion, and Christian ethics.

This is the first of Newman's Anglican works to be presented in a fully annotated edition. Newman published the first two editions in 1836 and 1837 at the height of his career within the Oxford Movement. The third edition was published in 1877, when Newman had been a Roman Catholic for thiry-two years. It represents a dialogue between the Evangelical Anglican, Anglo-Catholic, and Roman Catholic Newman. As such it is a critical work in understanding Newman's development, as well as the impact of his thought on the larger Christian Church in his century and even in this one as it comes to a close. The text of this edition is based on the edition of 1889 (with obvious errors and misprints silently corrected), the edition to be seen through the press by Newman before his death in 1890; its pagination is preserved in the margin alongside the present text to facilitate reference to the uniform edition of the collected works. The text is supplemented by an introduction and textual appendix which lists all the variant readings between the editions of 1836, 1837, 1877 and the final edition.

This book challenges the domination of the institutional church as the overriding concern of nineteenth-century religious history by taking as its starting point the nature and expression of religious ideas outside the immediate sphere of the church within the wider arena of popular culture. It considers in detail how these beliefs formed part of a richly textured language of personal, familial, and popular identity in the day-to-day lives of the inhabitants of the London Borough of Southwark between c.1880 and the outbreak of the Second World War. The study highlights the persistence of patterns dismissed as alien to the industrial and urban environment. The interaction of folk idioms with institutional religious language and practice is also considered and urban popular religion is identified as a distinctive system of belief in its own right. This study also pioneers a methodology for exploring belief and interpreting it as a popular cultural phenomenon. A wide range of source materials are drawn on including oral history. Centrality is given to understanding the ways in which individuals expressed and communicated their religious ideas.

The Jesus People movement of the late 1960s and 1970s was an important force in the lives of millions of American Baby Boomers. This unique combination of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity first appeared amid 1967's famed "Summer of Love" in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district and grew like wildfire in Southern California and in cities like Seattle, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. In 1971 the growing movement found its way into the national spotlight, attracting a great deal of contemporary media and scholarly attention. In the wake of publicity, the movement gained momentum and attracted a huge new following among evangelical church youth who enthusiastically adopted the Jesus People persona as their own. In the process, the movement spread across the country - particularly into the Great Lakes region - and coffeehouses, "Jesus Music" singers, and "One Way" bumper stickers soon blanketed the land. Within a few years, however, the movement faded and disappeared and was largely forgotten by everyone but those who had filled its ranks. God's Forever Family is the first major attempt to re-examine the Jesus People phenomenon in over thirty years. It reveals that it was one of the most important American religious movements of the second half of the 20th-century. Not only did the Jesus movement produce such burgeoning new evangelical groups as Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard movement, but the Jesus People paved the way for the huge Contemporary Christian Music industry and the rise of "Praise Music" in the nation's churches. More significantly, perhaps, it revolutionized evangelicals' relationship with youth and popular culture-important factors in the evangelical subculture's emerging engagement with the larger American culture from the late 1970s forward. God's Forever Family makes the case that the Jesus People movement not only helped create a resurgent evangelicalism but - alongside the hippie counterculture and the student movement - must be considered one of the major formative powers that shaped American youth in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The growth of Christianity in the global South is one of the most important religious stories of the last decade. In no branch of Christianity has that growth been more rapid than Pentecostalism. There are over 100 million Pentecostals in Africa, and Pentecostal practices infuse Catholic, Anglican, and Independent churches. In the traditional Catholic stronghold of Latin America, Pentecostalism now vies with Catholicism for the soul of the continent. And the largest Pentecostsal church in the world, with over 800,000 members, is in Seoul. In To the Ends of the Earth, Allan Anderson offers a historical and theological examination of the growth of global Pentecostalism. Examining such issues as revivalism, healing, gender, worship, and globalization, Anderson seeks to show how the growth of global Pentecostalism is changing the face of Christianity as a whole.

Charles Hodge (1797-1878) was one of nineteenth-century America's leading theologians, owing in part to a lengthy teaching career, voluminous writings, and a faculty post at one of the nation's most influential schools, Princeton Theological Seminary. Surprisingly, the only biography of this towering figure was written by his son, just two years after his death. Paul Gutjahr's book, therefore, is the first modern critical biography of a man some have called the Pope of Presbyterianism...Hodge's legacy is especially important to American Presbyterians. His brand of theological conservatism became vital in the 1920s, as Princeton Seminary saw itself, and its denomination, split. The conservative wing held unswervingly to the Old School tradition championed by Hodge, and ultimately founded the breakaway Orthodox Presbyterian Church. The views that Hodge developed, refined, and propagated helped shape many of the central traditions of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American evangelicalism. Hodge helped establish a profound reliance on the Bible among evangelicals, and he became one of the nation's most vocal proponents of biblical inerrancy. Gutjahr's study reveals the exceptional depth, breadth, and longevity of Hodge's theological influence and illuminates the varied and complex nature of conservative American Protestantism.

Divine healing is the essential marker of the global phenomenon of Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity. But although we know that healing is central in these movements, we know surprisingly little about how divine healing beliefs and practices reflect the interplay of local and global patterns of cultural development. The essays in this collection seek to discover what is the same and what is different about such beliefs and practices in diverse contexts, trace formal and informal lines of cultural influence across geographic and national boundaries, and ask how healing both reflects and contributes to larger processes of globalization. The collection will not only flesh out a picture of how and why spiritual healing is practiced in diverse cultural contexts and how healing practices reflect and shape the transnational spread of Christianity; it will also provide insight into the nature of globalization. The authors will attend to a wide range of issues, including the theological rationales for divine healing; the symbolic objects and ritual enactments employed; the cultural controversies surrounding these practices; the relationship between Christian healing and local or indigenous healing traditions; whether an emphasis on financial prosperity is always present; and the extent to which Pentecostal and charismatic churches are networked and the role of healing in such networks. All the essays are new to this volume.

Jonathan Edwards (1703-58) is widely recognized as America's greatest religious mind. A torrent of books, articles, and dissertations on Edwards have been released since 1949, the year that Perry Miller published the intellectual biography that launched the modern explosion of Edwards studies. This collection offers an introduction to Edwards's life and thought, pitched at the level of the educated general reader. Each chapter serves as a general introduction to one of Edwards's major topics, including revival, the Bible, beauty, literature, philosophy, typology, and even world religions. Each is written by a leading expert on Edwards's work. The book will serve as an ideal first encounter with the thought of "America's theologian."

The astonishing growth of Christianity in the global South over the course of the twentieth century has sparked an equally rapid growth in studies of ''World Christianity, '' which have dismantled the notion that Christianity is a Western religion. What, then, are we to make of the waves of Western missionaries who have, for centuries, been evangelizing in the global South? Were they merely, as many have argued, agents of imperialism out to impose Western values? In An Unpredictable Gospel, Jay Case examines the efforts of American evangelical missionaries in light of this new scholarship. He argues that if they were agents of imperialism, they were poor ones. Western missionaries had a dismal record of converting non-Westerners to Christianity. The ministries that were most successful were those that empowered the local population and adapted to local cultures. In fact, influence often flowed the other way, with missionaries serving as conduits for ideas that shaped American evangelicalism. Case traces these currents and sheds new light on the relationship between Western and non-Western Christianities.

Ranging from the medieval period to the present day, this is a brief history of church music as it has developed through the English tradition. Described as "a quick journey", it provides a broad historical survey rather than an in-depth study of the subject, and also predicts likely future trends.

In the years since 1945, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has grown rapidly in terms of both numbers and public prominence. Mormonism is no longer merely a home-grown American religion, confined to the Intermountain West; instead, it has captured the attention of political pundits, Broadway audiences, and prospective converts around the world. While most scholarship on Mormonism concerns its colorful but now well-known early history, the essays in this collection assess recent developments, such as the LDS Church's international growth and acculturation; its intersection with conservative politics in recent decades; its stances on same-sex marriage and the role of women; and its ongoing struggle to interpret its own tumultuous history. The scholars draw on a wide variety of Mormon voices as well as those of outsiders, from Latter-day Saints in Hyderabad, India, to "Mormon Mommy blogs," to evangelical "countercult" ministries. Out of Obscurity brings the story of Mormonism since the Second World War into sharp relief, explaining the ways in which a church very much rooted in its nineteenth-century prophetic and pioneering past achieved unprecedented influence in the realms of American politics and international business.

Volume 50 of the American Edition of Luther's Works is the third and final volume of letters in this series; it presents 89 letters written by Luther in the period from January 1532, to February 14, 1546, a date four days prior to Luther's death.

This is a biography of Hensley Henson, one of the most controversial religious figures in England during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book examines Henson's education at Oxford University and describes the highlights of his career as pastor of Ilford and Barking Church, as canon of Westminster Abbey, and as bishop of Hereford and Durham. It explores his involvement in political issues and his controversial views on such issues as divorce, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the anti-Semitic policies of Nazi Germany.

The introduction of hymns and hymn-singing into public worship in the seventeenth century by dissenters from the Church of England has been described as one of the greatest contributions ever made to Christian worship. Hymns, that is metrical compositions which depart too far from the text of Scripture to be called paraphrases, have proved to be one of the most effective mediums of religious thought and feeling, second only to the Bible in terms of their influence.
This comprehensive collection of essays by specialist authors provides the first full account of dissenting hymns and their impact in England and Wales, from the mid seventeenth century, when the hymn emerged out of metrical psalms as a distinct literary form, to the early twentieth century, after which the traditional hymn began to decline in importance. It covers the development of hymns in the mid seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the change in attitudes to hymns and their growing popularity in the course of the eighteenth century, and the relation of hymnody to the broader Congregational, Baptist, Methodist, and Unitarian cultures of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries.
The chapters cover a wide range of topics, including the style, language, and theology of hymns; their use both in private by families and in public by congregations; their editing, publication and reception, including the changing of words for doctrinal and stylistic reasons; their role in promoting evangelical Christianity; their shaping of denominational identities; and the practice of hymn-singing and the development of hymn-tunes.