An accessible and academic reading of the doctrine of justification by faith. It is often assumed that the Reformation taught justification by faith as if there was a monolithic view of the doctrine. Since We Are Justified By Faith is a collection of important essays that dispel this myth, demonstrating the diverse theologies of that period. Experts in the field, including Cameron MacKenzie, Aaron OKelly, Jeff Fisher, Kirk MacGregor, Mary Patton Baker, Karin Spiecker Stetina, David Hall, Bonnie Pattison, Timothy Shaun Price, Andre Gazal, and Chris Ross, write on the theologies of Luther, Melanchthon, Oecolampadius, Marpeck, Calvin, and the English reformers to give a nuanced reading of the doctrine in sixteenth-century Protestant theology.

A collection of 230 hymns, with music, drawn from a wide range of liberal religious sources, all written in the 20th or 21st century; many were composed by Unitarian and Unitarian Universalist writers, often drawing their imagery from other faith traditions. The collection includes songs for blessing partnerships and relationships. The compilers have drawn on a wide range of musical styles, using keys in keeping with current group vocal range.

In histories of American Presbyterianism, the southern branch of the New School Church has received little attention despite its importance to church history as a whole. This new study provides a complete account of the southern church, tracing the events and controversies that led to schism, the founding of the United Synod, and eventual reunification with the Old School, South. The author begins by reviewing the causes of the original and Old School-New School schism of 1837-1838 and the circumstances that gradually deepened the separation between the northern and southern wings of the New School. The emergence of United Synod of the South and its activities in the antebellum period and during the Civil War are considered next. The author concludes with a discussion of the final union with the Southern Presbyterian Church in 1864 and assesses the reasons why the southern New School/United Synod failed to grow and reach the potential of other Presbyterian churches of that day.

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"Draws upon previously neglected primary sources to offer a ground-breaking analysis of the intertwined political, racial, and religious dynamics at work in the institutional merging of three American Methodist denominations in 1939. Davis boldly examines the conflicted ethics behind a dominant American religious culture's justification and preservation of racial segregation in the reformulation of its post-slavery institutional presence in American society. His work provides a much-needed, critical discussion of the racial issues that pervaded American religion and culture in the early twentieth century.a
--Wendy J. Deichmann Edwards, Academic Dean and Associate Professor of History and Theology, United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio

aA discerning, sober, and troubling probing of the preoccupation within the Methodist Church with Christian nationalism, civilization as defined by white Anglo-Saxon manhood, and race, race consciousness and athe problem of the Negroa that was foundational to and constitutive of a reunited Methodism. A must read for students of early 20th century America.a
--Russell E. Richey, Emory University

In the early part of the twentieth century, Methodists were seen by many Americans as the most powerful Christian group in the country. Ulysses S. Grant is rumored to have said that during his presidency there were three major political parties in the U.S., if you counted the Methodists.

The Methodist Unification focuses on the efforts among the Southern and Northern Methodist churches to create a unified national Methodist church, and how their plan for unification came to institutionalizeracism and segregation in unprecedented ways. How did these Methodists conceive of what they had just formed as auniteda when members in the church body were racially divided?

Moving the history of racial segregation among Christians beyond a simplistic narrative of racism, Morris L. Davis shows that Methodists in the early twentieth century -- including high-profile African American clergy -- were very much against racial equality, believing that mixing the races would lead to interracial marriages and threaten the social order of American society.

The Methodist Unification illuminates the religious culture of Methodism, Methodists' self-identification as the primary carriers of "American Christian Civilization," and their influence on the crystallization of whiteness during the Jim Crow Era as a legal category and cultural symbol.

This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members' "bizarre" habit of speaking in tongues. This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love-all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church's members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of "spectacle" because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere. The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene. The focus on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal provides a road map into the church and canvasses an intimate view into the lives of its members, capturing their stories as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. This book challenges important sociological concepts like crisis to explain religious seekership and conversion, while developing new concepts such as "God Hunting" and "Holy Ghost Capital" to explain the process through which individuals become tongue-speaking Pentecostals. Church members acquire "Holy Ghost Capital" and construct a Pentecostal identity through a relationship narrative to establish personal status and power through conflicting tongue-speaking ideas. Finally, this book examines the futures of the small and large, institutionally affiliated Pentecostal Church and argues that the small Pentecostal Church is better able to resist modern rationalizing forces, retaining the charisma that sparked the initial religious movement. The power of charisma in the small church has far-reaching consequences and implications for the future of Pentecostalism and its followers.

Spanning the continents, three internationally respected theologians demonstrate how the thought and legacy of Martin Luther can serve in an ecumenical and interfaith context as a resource for a radical critique of global economics and culture. Lutheran Christianity originated in its own era of economic and cultural crisis. One of the great misinterpretations of Martin Luther has considered his heritage as fundamentally reactionary, seeking to preserve the political status quo. Instead, set free by the biblical message of liberation, this book wields Luther's theology to engage the reality of poverty, hunger, oppression, and ecological degradation caused by an imperial capitalism as the most urgent theological issues in the contemporary world. The volume demonstrates the liberating possibilities of theology done out of a biblical and Lutheran perspective for the economic and cultural crises facing the church in the present century.

TIMOTHY DWIGHT, DD, LL.D., grandson of Jonathan Edwards the elder, was born at Northampton, Massachusetts, May 14, 1752, and was graduated at Yale College at a very early age in 1769. These sermons are his Magnum Opus as he lays out the Doctrinal and Practical Truths of Holy Scripture. Volume One contains 38 sermons dealing with the Existence, Attributes, Decrees, and Works of God. Buried for more than 135 years it is high time that this brilliant and godly man were able to speak again to our needy generation.