This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/charismatic Christianities: how do women lead churches? This study fills this lacuna by examining the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal movement - Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson.

This book features a new perspective on a French religious diaspora. In ""From a Far Country"", Catharine Randall examines Huguenots and their less-known cousins the Camisards, offering a fresh perspective on the important role these French Protestants played in settling the New World. The Camisard religion was marked by more ecstatic expression than that of the Huguenots, not unlike differences between Pentecostals and Protestants. Both groups were persecuted and emigrated in large numbers, becoming participants in the broad circulation of ideas that characterized the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Randall vividly portrays this French Protestant diaspora through the lives of three figures: Gabriel Bernon, who led a Huguenot exodus to Massachusetts and moved among the commercial elite; Ezechiel Carre, a Camisard who influenced Cotton Mather's theology; and Elie Neau, a Camisard-influenced writer and escaped galley slave who established North America's first school for blacks. Like other French Protestants, these men were adaptable in their religious views, a quality Randall points out as quintessentially American. In anthropological terms they acted as code shifters who manipulated multiple cultures. While this malleability ensured that French Protestant culture would not survive in externally recognizable terms in the Americas, Randall shows that the culture's impact was nonetheless considerable.

Pauli Murray (1910-1985) was a poet, lawyer, activist, and priest, as well as a significant figure in the civil rights and women's movements. Throughout her careers and activism, Murray espoused faith in an American democracy that is partially present and yet to come.
In the 1940s Murray was in the vanguard of black activists to use nonviolent direct action. A decade before the Montgomery bus boycott, Murray organized sit-ins of segregated restaurants in Washington DC and was arrested for sitting in the front section of a bus in Virginia. Murray pioneered the category Jane Crow to describe discrimination she experienced as a result of racism and sexism. She used Jane Crow in the 1960s to expand equal protection provisions for African American women. A co-founder of the National Organization of Women, Murray insisted on the interrelation of all human rights. Her professional and personal relationships included major figures in the ongoing struggle for civil rights for all Americans, including Thurgood Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt.
In seminary in the 1970s, Murray developed a black feminist critique of emerging black male and white feminist theologies. After becoming the first African American woman Episcopal priest in 1977, Murray emphasized the particularity of African American women's experiences, while proclaiming a universal message of salvation.
The Dream Is Freedom examines Murray's substantial body of published writings as well personal letters, journals, and unpublished manuscripts. Azaransky traces the development of Murray's thought over fifty years, ranging from Murray's theologically rich democratic criticism of the 1930s to her democratically inflected sermons of the 1980s. Pauli Murray was an innovative democratic thinker, who addressed how Americans can recognize differences, signaled the role of history and memory in shaping democratic character, and called for strategic coalition building to make more justice available for more Americans.

A new critical edition of Henry VIII's 1526 public letter to Martin Luther, enabling readers to examine how Henry VIII wanted his subjects to regard the German heresiarch. A modern critical edition of Henry VIII's second published work against Martin Luther. This open letter to Luther, printed at the king's command in December 1526, was in reply to a private letter addressed to him by Luther the previous year. Its particular interest lies in the fact that, unlike his better known Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, published five years before, Henry's open letter was released not only in Latin but also in an official Englishtranslation, with a special English preface added by the king for the edification of his subjects. This edition thus enables modern readers to hear what Henry had to say about Luther in his own words, and how he wanted his subjects to regard the German heresiarch. This critical edition is based on a previously unrecognised presentation manuscript which furnishes the earliest surviving text of both letters. In addition, it offers editions and newtranslations of a range of related texts, including Luther's reply to Henry and further contributions to the burgeoning controversy from several of the most prominent Catholic opponents of Luther in Europe. For Henry's letter, like his earlier book, became for a while a European sensation, reprinted in towns and cities from Cologne to Cracow. This fully annotated edition includes a substantial introduction which for the first time tells the full history of Henry's second controversy with Luther, and which sets that story in the broader context of the lengthy and fractious relationship between the two men from the time of Luther's emergence in 1517 until his death in 1546.