Explores the role of race and consumer culture in attracting urban congregants to an evangelical church The Urban Church Imagined illuminates the dynamics surrounding white urban evangelical congregations' approaches to organizational vitality and diversifying membership. Many evangelical churches are moving to urban, downtown areas to build their congregations and attract younger, millennial members. The urban environment fosters two expectations. First, a deep familiarity and reverence for popular consumer culture, and second, the presence of racial diversity. Church leaders use these ideas when they imagine what a "city church" should look like, but they must balance that with what it actually takes to make this happen. In part, racial diversity is seen as key to urban churches presenting themselves as "in touch" and "authentic." Yet, in an effort to seduce religious consumers, church leaders often and inadvertently end up reproducing racial and economic inequality, an unexpected contradiction to their goal of inclusivity. Drawing on several years of research, Jessica M. Barron and Rhys H. Williams explore the cultural contours of one such church in downtown Chicago. They show that church leaders and congregants' understandings of the connections between race, consumer culture, and the city is a motivating factor for many members who value interracial interactions as a part of their worship experience. But these explorations often unintentionally exclude members along racial and classed lines. Indeed, religious organizations' efforts to engage urban environments and foster integrated congregations produce complex and dynamic relationships between their racially diverse memberships and the cultivation of a safe haven in which white, middle-class leaders can feel as though they are being a positive force in the fight for religious vitality and racial diversity. The book adds to the growing constellation of studies on urban religious organizations, as well as emerging scholarship on intersectionality and congregational characteristics in American religious life. In so doing, it offers important insights into racially diverse congregations in urban areas, a growing trend among evangelical churches. This work is an important case study on the challenges faced by modern churches and urban institutions in general.

The Bohemian preacher and religious reformer Jan Hus has been celebrated as a de facto saint since being burned at the stake as a heretic in 1415. Patron Saint and Prophet analyzes Hus's commemoration from the time of his death until the middle of the following century, tracing the ways in which both his supporters and his most outspoken opponents sought to determine whether he would be remembered as a heretic or saint. Phillip Haberkern examines how specific historical conflicts and exigencies affected the evolution of Hus's memoryawithin the militant Hussite movement that flourished until the mid-1430s, within the Czech Utraquist church that succeeded it, and among sixteenth-century Lutherans who viewed Hus as a forerunner and even prophet of their reform. Using close readings of written sources such as sermons and church histories, visual media including manuscript illuminations and monumental art, and oral forms of discourse such as vernacular songs and liturgical prayers, this book offers a fascinating account of how changes in media technology complemented the shifting theology of the cult of saints in order to shape early modern commemorative practices. By focusing on the ways in which the invocation of Hus catalyzed religious dissent within two distinct historical contexts, Haberkern compares the role of memory in late medieval Bohemia with the emergence of history as a constitutive religious discourse in the early modern German land. In this way, he also provides a detailed analysis of the ways in which Bohemian and German religious reformers justified their dissent from the Roman Church by invoking the past.

War on the Saints is Jessie Penn-Lewis's masterwork, wherein she outlines the occurrences of Satan within the Christian world, and the eternal battle between good and evil. The book aims to prepare and assist Christians who are caught unguarded against the onslaught of evil and deception which has ensued for thousands of years. In so doing, the reader will - assuming they heed the advice upon these pages - be better equipped versus the various obstacles, trickery and evils that Satan and his ilk will hurl in the path of the righteous. Penn-Lewis firmly believed that the devil was a master manipulator, with a keen knowledge of when and who to target in his schemes. Several of the chapters within this book detail the different techniques employed by Satan, and how to guard against them. Quotations of Scripture abound, boosting the author's authority and lending much credence to her arguments.

Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane first met on the plains of western Iowa in 1846 The Mormon prophet and the Philadelphia reformer would go on to exchange more than one hundred letters over the next three decades. This annotated collection of their correspondence reveals a great deal about these two remarkable men, while also providing crucial insight into nineteenth-century Mormonism and the historical moment in which the movement developed. Until his death in 1877, Young guided the religious, economic, and political life of the Mormon community, whose settlements spread throughout the West and provoked a profound political, legal, and even military confrontation with the American nation. Young relied on Kane, 21 years his junior, as his most trusted outside adviser, making Kane the most important non-Mormon in the history of the Church. In return, no one influenced the direction of Kane's life more than Young. The surviving letters offer crucial insights into Young's personal life and views as well as his actions as a political and religious leader. The correspondence reveals the strategies of the Latter-day Saints in relating to American culture and government during these crucial years when the "Mormon Question" was a major political, cultural, and legal issue. The letters also shed important light on the largely forgotten "Utah War" of 1857-58, triggered when President James Buchanan dispatched a military expedition to ensure federal supremacy in Utah and replace Young with a non-Mormon governor. The Prophet and the Reformer offers a complete reproduction of the exchange between Young and Kane, and provides an introduction to each letter that contextualizes and analyzes it.