The Vanderbilt Divinity School is one of only four university-based interdenominational institutions in the United States, and the only one in the South. As such, its history provides a distinct vantage point for viewing what has occurred in theological education since the latter part of the nineteenth century. In this book, the contributors explore the school's history in terms of four main themes:

Engagement with southern culture, present from the beginnings of the university but taking on special significance in the mid-twentieth century around the issue of race;

The transition from an institution of the church (Methodist) to an independent and interdenominational school with a liberal Protestant orientation;

The development of the modern research university, evident in the establishment of a graduate program in religion in addition to its program for the profession of ministry;

From the 1950s, a growing concern with diversity and inclusivity, in keeping with national and international issues and developments both religious and cultural, which has broadened the school's sense of ecumenism and deepened its commitments to social justice.

Conflict has played an important part in shaping the history of the Vanderbilt Divinity School, from struggles over initial visions to questions of financial support and institutional control, from local debates over academic freedom to national issues of social justice. Especially noteworthy are the transformations the school has undergone since 1960: the "James Lawson affair," where the divinity school faculty resigned over the expulsion of an African American graduate student who was organizing local lunch counter sit-ins; the impact of social change on the school since the late 1960s; and the contributions of women and African Americans, including their appointment to the faculty.

This is the commemorative edition for the 4th International Conference on the Church of the East in China. This is a collection of essays used as background research to seek and find the lost churches of the Silk Road. The author has used the "Da Qin Jing Jiao" Stone to provide clues for searching for the reported churches and monasteries that we built during the Tang dynasty. For later periods material from Mogao and other artifacts have been used in the investigation.

This book addresses several dimensions of the transformation of English Nonconformity over the course of an important century in its history. It begins with the question of education for ministry, considering the activities undertaken by four major evangelical traditions (Congregationalist, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian) to establish theological colleges for this purpose, and then takes up the complex three-way relationship of ministry/churches/colleges that evolved from these activities. As author Dale Johnson illustrates, this evolution came to have significant implications for the Nonconformist engagement with its message and with the culture at large. These implications are investigated in chapters on the changing perception or understanding of ministry itself, religious authority, theological questions (such as the doctrines of God and the atonement), and religious identity.
In Johnson's exploration of these issues, conversations about these topics are located primarily in addresses at denominational meetings, conferences that took up specific questions, and representative religious and theological publications of the day that participated in key debates or advocated contentious positions. While attending to some important denominational differences, The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 1825-1925 focuses on the representative discussion of these topics across the whole spectrum of evangelical Nonconformity rather than on specific denominational traditions.
Johnson maintains that too many interpretations of nineteenth-century Nonconformity, especially those that deal with aspects of the theological discussion within these traditions, have tended to depict such developments as occasions of decline from earlier phases of evangelical vitality and appeal. This book instead argues that it is more appropriate to assess these Nonconformist developments as a collective, necessary, and deeply serious effort to come to terms with modernity and, further, to retain a responsible understanding of what it meant to be evangelical. It also shows these developments to be part of a larger schema through which Nonconformity assumed a more prominent place in the English culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This is an overview of the presence of Christianity in China over 20 centuries. It is not meant to be an exhaustive review but a personal exploration for lost Churches and Christian communities who entered China along the network of roads we call the Silk Road.

Gunner and Mark Wales are a father and son detective team who solve international crime related to Asia. Gunner is a polymath and eccentric, scholar of many languages and odd bits of knowledge. His son Mark is a detective in the United States who is a dedicated professional who is reluctantly drawn by his father into murder mysteries that require his skill and his father's quirky interests.

I believe it takes a lifetime to learn how to be an authentic human being. When we are young we think we know how to live. The bruises and battles of life condition us to eventually realize that we are not yet wise. We look at the young as did Plato and shake our heads. Somehow in the midst of growing up and maturing we begin to develop an inner wisdom unless we throw away the lessons we learn along the way. It is a perilous journey. In a sense, every one of us is on a Hero's Journey seeking to find ourselves, our origins, and our purpose.

This is a collection of summaries, diary entries and letters from the famed British explorer, Gertrude Bell who later went on to become an adviser to Winston Churchill and founded the Baghdad Archeology Museum. The focus of the book is on her contribution to the photographic and archeological record she made of a region of forgotten Christians, called Tur Abdin in present day Turkey, who had preserved the language of Jesus and a Semitic form of Christianity under the veil of Islam.

Why should Christians care about the United Nation's Goals on poverty and hunger? Does not God want us to prosper? Will not the poor, the sick, the homeless just drag us down? Are we our brother's keeper? The author gives us compelling reasons why we must care, not because we are a Christian, Buddhist, or Moslem, but because we are human beings and we are inter-connected to the plight of every other human being.