While television today is taken for granted, Americans in the 1950s faced the challenge of negotiating the new medium's place in the home and in American culture in general. Protestant leaders--both mainstream and evangelical--began to think carefully about what television meant for their communities and its potential impact on their work. Using the American Protestant experience of the introduction of television, Rosenthal illustrates the importance of the interplay between a new medium and its users in an engaging book suitable for general readers and students alike.

Exploring the work of William Blake within the context of Methodism - the largest 'dissenting' religious group during his lifetime - this book contributes to ongoing critical debates surrounding Blake's religious affinities by suggesting that, contrary to previous thinking, Blake held sympathies with certain aspects of Methodism.

Specialist historians have long known the usefulness of this 1869 book, now more easily available for anyone interested in the history of London, its buildings, and its religious and social world, in an enhanced edition. William Beck was a Quaker architect, and Frederick Ball grew up in the rambling old Devonshire House building, centre of British Quakerism at the time. Their survey of London Quaker history was part of a mid-19th century awakening of Friends to the significance of their own past. This facsimile reprint contains a new introduction, by Simon Dixon PhD, author of the thesis "Quaker Communities in London 1667-c1714," and Quaker writer and editor Peter Daniels. Where possible, illustrations have been inserted of the buildings described in the book, and there is a comprehensive new index.

This guide serves as a valuable introduction to the documentary heritage and tradition of the third largest group of protestants in the southern United States. A companion to Harold Prince's A Presbyterian Bibliography (1983), it locates and describes the unpublished papers of PCUS ministers. It also documents the larger southern tradition by including selected materials from the antebellum period and from other Presbyterian denominations. The result is a listing of resources for the study of the PCUS as well as southern Presbyterianism. It aims to promote and encourage research in Presbyterian history; to make files, diaries, sermons, minutes, letters more intelligible; and finally, to emphasize the continuing relevance of these materials in contemporary church life. Robert Benedetto's forty-eight-page introduction includes a survey of nine subject areas: theology, education, church and society, international missions, national missions, women, racial ethnic ministries, ecumenical relations, and worship and music. Each area highlights major research and provides a concise orientation to the life and mission of the denomination. Each survey is followed by a brief listing of manuscript materials. The Guide itself includes manuscript collections from the Department of History (Montreat) and other repositories. This thorough volume concludes with a bibliography of PCUS reference works and a complete name and subject index.

The Jehovah's Witnesses endured intense persecution under the Nazi regime, from 1933 to 1945. Unlike the Jews and others persecuted and killed by virtue of their birth, Jehovah's Witnesses had the opportunity to escape persecution and personal harm by renouncing their religious beliefs. The vast majority refused and throughout their struggle, continued to meet, preach, and distribute literature. In the face of torture, maltreatment in concentration camps, and sometimes execution, this unique group won the respect of many contemporaries. Up until now, little has been known of their particular persecution.

Although this work takes proper notice of its origins in John Wesley's 18th-century movement in England, it assumes that in America the people called Methodists developed in distinctive fashion. The volume examines this American version, its organization, leadership, and form of training and incorporating new members. The authors treat Methodism as defined by conferences bound together by a commitment to episcopal leadership and animated by various forms of lay piety. Offering a fresh perspective based on sound, modern scholarship, this study will be of interest to scholars, students, and anyone interested in church history. American Methodists early organized into conferences that defined Methodist space and time and served as the locus of power. At the same time, they created a strong episcopal form of church government, subject to the body of preachers in conference, but free to lead and direct the organization as a whole. This mission was clear, well understood, and suited to the ethos of a growing America--"to spread scriptural holiness in the land and to create a desire to flee from the wrath to come." By the middle of the 19th century, Methodists in America had grown from an insignificant sect to America's largest Protestant group. Essential to that growth were structures and processes of lay involvement, particularly class meetings and Sunday schools.

Joel Osteen, Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, and Brian McLaren pastor some the largest churches in the nation, lead vast spiritual networks, write best-selling books, and are among the most influential preachers in American Protestantism today. Spurred by the phenomenal appeal of these religious innovators, sociologist Shayne Lee and historian Phillip Luke Sinitiere investigate how they operate and how their style of religious expression fits into America's cultural landscape. Drawing from the theory of religious economy, the authors offer new perspectives on evangelical leadership and key insights into why some religious movements thrive while others decline.

Holy Mavericks provides a useful overview of contemporary evangelicalism while emphasizing the importance of "supply-side thinking" in understanding shifts in American religion. It reveals how the Christian world hosts a culture of celebrity very similar to the secular realm, particularly in terms of marketing, branding, and publicity. Holy Mavericks reaffirms that religion is always in conversation with the larger society in which it is embedded, and that it is imperative to understand how those religious suppliers who are able to change with the times will outlast those who are not.

The first of three theological volumes, this volume is devoted tofour of John Wesley's foundational treatises on soteriology. These treatises include, first, Wesley s extract from the Homilies of the Church of England, which he published to convince his fellow Anglican clergy that the evangelical emphasis on believers experiencing a conscious assurance of God s pardoning love was consistent with this standard of Anglican doctrine. Next comes Wesley s extract of Richard Baxter s Aphorisms of Justification, aimed more at those who shared his evangelical emphasis, invoking this honored moderate Puritan to challenge antinomian conceptions of the doctrine of justification by faith. This is followed by Wesley s abridgement of the Shorter Catechism issued by the Westminster Assembly in his Christian Library, where he affirms broad areas of agreement with this standard of Reformed doctrine while quietly removing items with which he disagreed. The fourth item is Wesley s extended response to the Dissenter John Taylor on the doctrine of original sin, which highlights differences within the broad Arminian camp, with Wesley resisting a drift toward naively optimistic views of human nature that he discerned in Taylor. "

Tracing the religious history of Siler City, North Carolina, Chad E. Seales argues that southern whites cultivated their own regional brand of American secularism and employed it, alongside public religious performances, to claim and regulate public spaces. Over the course of the twentieth century, they wielded secularism to segregate racialized bodies, to challenge local changes resulting from civil rights legislation, and to respond to the arrival of Latino migrants. Combining ethnographic and archival sources, Seales studies the themes of industrialization, nationalism, civility, privatization, and migration through the local history of Siler City; its neighborhood patterns, Fourth of July parades, Confederate soldiers, minstrel shows, mock weddings, banking practices, police shootings, Good Friday processions, public protests, and downtown mural displays. Offering a spatial approach to the study of performative religion, The Secular Spectacle presents a generative narrative of secularism from the perspective of evangelical Protestants in the American South.

Although much has been written on the Afro-Catholic syncretic religions of Vodou, Candomble, and Santeria, the Spiritual Baptists--an Afro-Caribbean religion based on Protestant Christianity--have received little attention. This work offers the first detailed examination of the Spiritual Baptists or "Converted". Based on 18 months of fieldwork on the Island of St. Vincent (where the religion arose) and among Vincentian immigrants in Brooklyn, Zane's analysis makes a contribution to the literature on African-American and African Diaspora religion and the anthropology of religion more generally.

Many interpreters argue that Karl Barth's rejection of the Roman Catholic analogia entis was based upon a mistaken interpretation of the principle, and many scholars also contend that late in his career, Barth changed his mind about the analogia entis, either by withdrawing his rejection of it or by adopting some form of it as his own. This book challenges both views, and by doing so, it opens up new avenues for ecumenical dialogue between Protestants and Roman Catholics. In short, this book establishes that Barth did not make a mistake when he rejected the analogia entis and that he also never wavered on his critique of it; he did, however, change his response to it-not by breaking with his earlier thought, but by deepening it so that a true Christological dialogue could take place between Protestant and Roman Catholic theologians. This conclusion will be used to point the way to new terrain for ecumenical dialogue in contemporary discussions.

Philip Jenkins looks at how the image of the cult evolved and why panics about such groups occur at certain times. He examines the deep roots of cult scares in American history, offering the first-ever history and analysis of cults and their critics from the 19th century to the present day. Contrary to popular belief, Jenkins shows, cults and anti-cult movements were not an invention of the 1960's, but in fact are traceable to the mid- 19th century, when Catholics, Mormons and Freemasons were equally denounced for violence, fraud and licentiousness. He finds that, although there are genuine instances of aberrant behaviour, a foundation of truth about fringe religious movements is all but obscured by a vast edifice of myth, distortion and hype.

The Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character may have been working-class, but this did not reflect its social origins. This book shows that while the Primitive Methodist Connexion's mature social character was working-class, this did not reflect its social origins. It was never the church of the working class, the great majority of whose churchgoers went elsewhere: rather it was the church whose commitment to its emotional witness was increasingly incompatible with middle-class pretensions. Sandy Calder shows that the Primitive Methodist Connexion was a religious movementled by a fairly prosperous elite of middle-class preachers and lay officials appealing to a respectable working-class constituency. This reality has been obscured by the movement's self-image as a persecuted community of humble Christians, an image crafted by Hugh Bourne, and accepted by later historians, whether Methodists with a denominational agenda to promote or scholars in search of working-class radicals. Primitive Methodists exaggerated their hardships and deliberately under-played their social status and financial success. Primitive Methodism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became the victim of its own founding mythology, because the legend of a community of persecuted outcasts, concealing its actual respectability, deterred potential recruits. SANDY CALDER graduated with a PhD in Religious Studies from the Open University and has previously worked in the private sector.

In recent years, millions of people have joined churches such as the Seventh-day Adventist which prosper enormously in different parts of the world. The Road to Clarity is one of the first ethnographic in-depth studies of this phenomenon. It is a vivid account based on almost two years of participation in ordinary church members' daily religious and non-religious lives. The book offers a fascinating inquiry into the nature of long-term commitment to Adventism among rural people in Madagascar. Eva Keller argues that the key attraction of the church lies in the excitement of study, argument, and intellectual exploration. This is a novel approach which challenges utilitarian and cultural particularist explanations of the success of this kind of Christianity.

Analyzes the rise and decline of Lutheran orthodoxy.