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.

From Justin Bieber, to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, to the controversial documentary Jesus Camp (2006), the New Apostolic Reformation's influence can be seen everywhere in mainstream America. Beginning with an examination of the Latter Rain, Church Growth and Shepherding movements, this book explores how the new Reformation has become one of the most powerful movements in modern evangelical Christianity and a major influence on American political and cultural life. The author describes the New Apostolic Reformation's organization, how the movement spread and its national and international objectives.

Teaching Spirits offers a thematic approach to Native American religious traditions. Within the great multiplicity of Native American cultures, Joseph Epes Brown has perceived certain common themes that resonate within many Native traditions. He demonstrates how these themes connect with each other, whilst at the same time upholding the integrity of individual traditions. Brown illustrates each of these themes with in-depth explorations of specific native cultures including Lakota, Navajo, Apache, Koyukon, and Ojibwe. Brown demonstrates how Native American values provide an alternative metaphysics that stand opposed to modern materialism. He shows how these spiritual values provide material for a serious rethinking of modern attitudes, as well as how they may help non-native peoples develop a more sensitive response to native concerns. Throughout, he draws on his extensive personal experience with Black Elk, who came to symbolize for many the greatness of the imperiled native cultures.

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"These two edited volumes bring together a variety of authors to offer a rear combination: they focus on religion in urban America and on particular cities, namely New York City and Chicago...They are necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand this area."
--"Sociology of Religion"

"In "New York Glory" the usually peripheral becomes foreground, and the core background."
--"Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion"

"The editors are to be encouraged for gathering together original material from some of the most current research on relgions in the city."
--"American Jewish History"

""New York Glory" is a very welcome attempt to describe and to some extent explain and understand the multifaceted and dynamic religious and spiritual landscape of New York City. It is a rich source book of the religious demography of NYC."
--Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies"

"The chief virtue of this collection lies in the fact that it is the first of its kind, the first to explore the diverse religious life of New York City at the turn of the twenty-first century."
--"The Journal of Religion"

Is New York a post-secular city? Massive immigration and cultural changes have created an increasingly complex social landscape in which religious life plays a dynamic role. Yet the magnitude of religion's impact on New York's social life has gone unacknowledged.

New York Glory gathers together for the first time the best research on religion in contemporary New York City. It includes contributors from every major research project on religion in New York to provide a comprehensive look at the current state of religion in the city. Moving beyondbroad surveys into specific case studies of communities and institutions, it provides a window onto the diversity of religious life in New York.

From Italian Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Russian Jews to Zen Buddhists, Rastafarians, and Pentecostal Latinas, New York Glory both captures the richness of religious life in New York City and provides an important foundation for our understanding of the current and future shape of religion in America.

Nathan Lee Kaplan develops a talmudic perspective on management ethics. By analyzing the central ethical dilemmas of corporate managers in light of applicable traditions from the Oral Torah, this book offers a critical bridge between the contemporary business corporation and rabbinic Judaism's foundational tradition. The issues studied thereby include organizational culture, fraud and corruption, whistle-blowing, investor and employment relations, executive compensation, corporate social responsibility and environmental sustainability.

Religious Studies: The Key Concepts is an accessible, A-Z resource, defining and explaining key terms and ideas central to the study of religion. Exploring broad and recurring themes which are applicable in both eastern and western religions, cross-cultural examples are provided for each term to give a comprehensive overview of the subject. Subjects covered include:

• afterlife
• comparative religion
• festivals
• ethics
• gender
• monotheism
• world religions
• modernity
• pilgrimage
• theism
• secularization

With cross referencing and further reading provided throughout, this book provides an inclusive map of the discipline, and is an essential reference for all students, academics and researchers.

Every year, there are several hundred attacks on India's Christians. These attacks are carried out by violent anti-minority activists, many of them provoked by what they perceive to be Christians' propensity for aggressive proselytization, and/or by rumored or real conversions to the faith. In this violence, Pentecostal Christians are disproportionately targeted. Bauman finds that the violence against Pentecostals and Pentecostalized Evangelicals in India is not just a matter of current social, cultural, political, and interreligious dynamics internal to India, but is rather related to identifiable historical trends, as well as to historical and contemporary transnational flows of people, power, and ideas. Based on extensive interviews and ethnographic work, and drawing upon the vast scholarly literature on interreligious violence, Hindu nationalism, and Christianity in India, this volume accounts for this disproportionate targeting through a detailed analysis of Indian Christian history, contemporary Indian politics, Indian social and cultural characteristics, and Pentecostal belief and practice. While some of the factors in the targeting of Pentecostals are obvious and expected (e.g., their relatively greater evangelical assertiveness), other significant factors are less acknowledged and more surprising, among them the marginalization of Pentecostals by "mainstream" Christians, the social location of Pentecostal Christians, and transnational flows of missionary personnel, theories, and funds.

First published in 1953, this volume by I. H. N. Evans describes the Dusun people of the Tempasuk region in what was formerly North Borneo (now Sabah in East Malaysia). Based on the author's own research and extensive personal experience, the volume presents a detailed account of the cultural and religious beliefs of the Dusun people, as well as their rites, ceremonies, and traditions. The volume also includes sixty-five Dusun folk-stories, two appendices, and a unique collection of photographs taken by the author himself.

Winner of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Best First Book Prize of the American Society of Church History Named a Society for U. S. Intellectual History Notable Title in American Intellectual History The story of liberal religion in the twentieth century, Matthew S. Hedstrom contends, is a story of cultural ascendency. This may come as a surprise-most scholarship in American religious history, after all, equates the numerical decline of the Protestant mainline with the failure of religious liberalism. Yet a look beyond the pews, into the wider culture, reveals a more complex and fascinating story, one Hedstrom tells in The Rise of Liberal Religion. Hedstrom attends especially to the critically important yet little-studied arena of religious book culture-particularly the religious middlebrow of mid-century-as the site where religious liberalism was most effectively popularized. By looking at book weeks, book clubs, public libraries, new publishing enterprises, key authors and bestsellers, wartime reading programs, and fan mail, among other sources, Hedstrom is able to provide a rich, on-the-ground account of the men, women, and organizations that drove religious liberalism's cultural rise in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Critically, by the post-WWII period the religious middlebrow had expanded beyond its Protestant roots, using mystical and psychological spirituality as a platform for interreligious exchange. This compelling history of religion and book culture not only shows how reading and book buying were critical twentieth-century religious practices, but also provides a model for thinking about the relationship of religion to consumer culture more broadly. In this way, The Rise of Liberal Religion offers both innovative cultural history and new ways of seeing the imprint of liberal religion in our own times.

This book argues that in the digital era, a reinvention of democracy is urgently necessary. It discusses the mounting evidence showing that digitalisation is pushing classical parliamentary democracy to its limits, offering examples such as how living in a filter bubble and debating with political bots is profoundly changing democratic communication, making it more emotional, hysterical even, and less rational. It also explores how classical democracy involves long, slow thinking and decision processes, which don't fit to the ever-increasing speed of the digital world, and examines the technical developments some fear will lead to governance by algorithms.In the digitalised world, democracy no longer functions as it has in the past. This does not mean waving goodbye to democracy - instead we need to reinvent it. How this could work is the central theme of this book.

This collection of essays explores the complex relationship between religion and multiculturalism and the role of the state and law in the creation of boundaries. Western secular democracies are composed of increasingly religiously diverse populations. The idea of "multiculturalism" was formed as a constructive response to this phenomenon, but, in many areas of the globe, support for multiculturalism is challenged by attempts to preserve the cultural and legal norms of the majority.
The State of Israel offers a particularly pertinent case study, and is a central focus of this collection. The contributors to this volume address the concepts of religious difference and diversity, as well as the various ways in which states and legal systems understand and respond to them. Mappingthe Legal Boundaries of Belonging shows that, as a consequence of a purportedly secular human rights perspective, state laws may appear to define religious identity in a way that contradicts the definition found within a particular religion. Both state and religion make the same mistake, however, if they take a court decision that emphasizes individual belief and practice as a direct modification of a religious norm: the court lacks the power to change the internal authoritative definition of who belongs to a particular faith. Similarly, in the pursuit of a particular model of social diversity, the state may adopt policies that imply a particular private/public distinction foreign to some religious traditions.
This volume, which includes contributions from leading scholars in the field, will be an invaluable resource to anyone seeking to understand the legal meaning and impact of religious diversity.

Annette Ranko analyses the Muslim Brotherhood's challenging of the Mubarak regime and the ensuing struggle between the two from 1981 to 2011. She furthermore traces how the group evolved throughout the process of that struggle. She studies how the Brotherhood's portrayal of itself as an attractive alternative to the regime provoked the Mubarak regime to level anti-Brotherhood propaganda in the state-run media in order to contain the group's appeal amongst the public. The author shows how the regime's portrayal of the Brotherhood and the Brotherhood's engagement with it have evolved over time, and how this ideational interplay has combined with structural institutional aspects in shaping the group's behaviour and ideology.

The Souls of Yoruba Folk explores the spiritual lives and experiences of sixteen Africans of Yoruba descent in Canada, and investigates how they make meaning of their Indigenous heritage within the geopolitical space of Eurocentric Canadian culture. The book highlights how Yoruba peoples in the African diaspora strategically utilize their Indigenous spiritual knowledges as decolonizing tools of navigation, subversion, and resistance to colonial oppression in the purportedly 'multicultural' space of Canada. The author powerfully weaves together literature of Yoruba peoples from multiple contexts, spanning the African continent and its diaspora, including the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and Europe. With its strong emphasis on equity and the usefulness of spirituality in contexts of schooling, education, teaching, and learning, The Souls of Yoruba Folk is ideal for critical and multicultural education courses, and will be especially useful for educators and researchers in the areas of critical interdisciplinary studies, sociology, women's studies/feminism, anti-racist scholarship and pedagogy, critical education, Canadian studies, equity and religious studies, and African/Black diasporic studies.

The 2001 yearbook aims to fill a gap that has become more and more conspicuous among the wealth of scholarly periodicals in the field of Jewish Studies. It covers Jewish Culture in its broadest sense, i.e. encompassing various academic disciplines - literature, languages and linguistics, philosophy, art, sociology, politics and history - and reflects binary oppositions such as religious and secular, high and low, written and oral, male and female culture.

This book develops a theory of existential security. It demonstrates that the publics of virtually all advanced industrial societies have been moving toward more secular orientations during the past half century, but also that the world as a whole now has more people with traditional religious views than ever before. This second edition expands the theory and provides new and updated evidence from a broad perspective and in a wide range of countries. This confirms that religiosity persists most strongly among vulnerable populations, especially in poorer nations and in failed states. Conversely, a systematic erosion of religious practices, values and beliefs has occurred among the more prosperous strata in rich nations.

For those who own it, wealth can have extraordinary advantages. High levels of wealth can enhance educational attainment, create occupational opportunities, generate social influence, and provide a buffer against financial emergencies. Even a small amount of savings can improve security, mitigate the effects of job loss and other financial setbacks, and improve well-being dramatically. Although the benefits of wealth are significant, they are not enjoyed uniformly throughout the United States. In the United States, because religion is an important part of cultural orientation, religious beliefs should affect material well-being. This book explores the way religious orientations and beliefs affect Americans' incomes, savings, and net worth.

For those who own it, wealth can have extraordinary advantages. High levels of wealth can enhance educational attainment, create occupational opportunities, generate social influence, and provide a buffer against financial emergencies. Even a small amount of savings can improve security, mitigate the effects of job loss and other financial setbacks, and improve well-being dramatically. Although the benefits of wealth are significant, they are not enjoyed uniformly throughout the United States. In the United States, because religion is an important part of cultural orientation, religious beliefs should affect material well-being. This book explores the way religious orientations and beliefs affect Americans' incomes, savings, and net worth.

Desde perspectivas provenientes de la Filologia, la Historia y la Filosofia, esta coleccion intenta reevaluar el factor religioso en el Siglo de las Luces espanol e hispanoamericano. Sondea los puntos esenciales de la critica a la religion durante la revolucion cientifica y la Ilustracion en un contexto en el cual el catolicismo era omnipresente. Se investiga asimismo el impacto del ideario ilustrado en las esferas de la ciencia y de la literatura, dos esferas que empezaron a distanciarse de la religion en esta epoca. ?De que fuentes y generos textuales se sirvieron los pensadores ilustrados y sus opositores? ?Que estrategias retoricas utilizaron? ?Existe una influencia de la moral cristiana en las transformaciones de las normas poeticas?

Religion is now high on the public agenda, with recent events focusing the world's attention on Islam in particular. This book provides a unique historical and comparative analysis of the place of religion in the emergence of modern secular society. Bryan S. Turner considers the problems of multicultural, multi-faith societies and legal pluralism in terms of citizenship and the state, with special emphasis on the problems of defining religion and the sacred in the secularisation debate. He explores a range of issues central to current debates: the secularisation thesis itself, the communications revolution, the rise of youth spirituality, feminism, piety and religious revival. Religion and Modern Society contributes to political and ethical controversies through discussions of cosmopolitanism, religion and globalisation. It concludes with a pessimistic analysis of the erosion of the social in modern society and the inability of new religions to provide 'social repair'.

Religion is now high on the public agenda, with recent events focusing the world's attention on Islam in particular. This book provides a unique historical and comparative analysis of the place of religion in the emergence of modern secular society. Bryan S. Turner considers the problems of multicultural, multi-faith societies and legal pluralism in terms of citizenship and the state, with special emphasis on the problems of defining religion and the sacred in the secularisation debate. He explores a range of issues central to current debates: the secularisation thesis itself, the communications revolution, the rise of youth spirituality, feminism, piety and religious revival. Religion and Modern Society contributes to political and ethical controversies through discussions of cosmopolitanism, religion and globalisation. It concludes with a pessimistic analysis of the erosion of the social in modern society and the inability of new religions to provide 'social repair'.

For decades, Operation World has been the world's leading resource for people who want to impact the nations for Christ through prayer. Its twofold purpose has been to inform for prayer and to mobilize for mission. Now the research team of Operation World offers this abridged version of the 7th edition called Pray for the World as an accessible resource to facilitate prayer for the nations. The Operation World researchers asked Christian leaders in every country, "How should the body of Christ throughout the world be praying for your country?" Their responses provide the prayer points in this book, with specific ways your prayers can aid the global church. When you hear a country mentioned in the news, you can use Pray for the World to pray for it in light of what God is doing there. Each entry includes: Timely challenges for prayer and specific on-the-ground reports of answers to prayer Population and people group statistics Charts and maps of demographic trends Updates on church growth, with a focus on evangelicals Explanations of major currents in economics, politics and society Join millions of praying people around the world. Hear God's call to global mission. And watch the world change.

Coptic contributions to the formative theological debates of Christianity have long been recognized. Less well known are other, equally valuable, Coptic contributions to the transmission and preservation of technical and scientific knowledge, and a full understanding of how Egypt's Copts survived and interacted with the country's majority population over the centuries. Studies in Coptic Culture attempts to examine these issues from divergent perspectives. Through the careful examination of select case studies that range in date from the earliest phases of Coptic culture to the present day, twelve international scholars address issues of cultural transmission, cross-cultural perception, representation, and inter-faith interaction. Their approaches are as varied as their individual disciplines, covering literary criticism, textual studies, and comparative, literature as well as art historical, archaeo-botanical, and historical research methods. The divergent perspectives and methods presented in this volume will provide a fuller picture of what it meant to be Coptic in centuries past and prompt further research and scholarship into these subjects.

The office of bishop in the Episcopal Church in the United States has long begged attention from historians. Yankee Bishops: Apostles in the New Republic, 1783 to 1873 is the first collective examination of the American episcopate and offers critical insight into the theory and practice of episcopal ministry in these formative years. In this period, one hundred men were elected and consecrated to the episcopal order and exercised oversight. These bishops firmly believed their office to mirror the primitive pattern of apostolic ministry. How this primitive ideal of episcopacy was understood and lived out in the new republic is the main focus of this study. Yankee Bishops is also the first book to scrutinize and analyze as a body the sermons preached at episcopal consecrations. These valuable texts are important for the image and role of the bishop they propagate and the theology of episcopacy expounded. The final portrait that emerges of the bishop in these years is chiefly that of a sacramental and missionary figure to whom the pastoral staff came to be bestowed as a fitting symbol of office. These bishops were truly apostolic pioneers who carved out a new, vigorous model of ministry in the Anglican Communion. Yankee Bishops will be a primary source in Anglican and ecumenical studies and of general interest to the reader of American religious and social history.