Providing a new, women-centered view of mainline Protestantism in the 20th century, Good and Mad explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of liberal Protestant churchwomen who campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women's ordination, all while working within the confines of the church that denied them equality. Challenging the idea that change is only ever made by the loud, historian Margaret Bendroth interweaves vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger within a larger narrative that highlights the debts second-wave feminism owes to their efforts, even though these women would never have called themselves feminists. This lively historical account explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches, but why the change was so long in coming. Through its complex examination of the intersections of faith, gender, and anger at injustice, Good and Mad will be invaluable to anyone interested in the history of gender and religion in America.

We often dismiss history as dull or irrelevant, but our modern disengagement from the past puts us fundamentally out of step with the long witness of the Christian tradition. Yet, says Margaret Bendroth, the past tense is essential to our language of faith, and without it our conversation is limited and thin. This accessible, beautifully written book presents a new argument for honoring the past. The Christian tradition gives us the powerful image of a vast communion of saints, all of God's people, both living and dead, in vital conversation with each other. This kind of connection with our ancestors in the faith, Bendroth maintains, will not happen by wishing or by accident. She argues that remembering must become a regular spiritual practice, part of the rhythm of our daily lives as we recognize our world to be, in many ways, a gift from others who have gone before.

Andover Newton Theological School is the oldest graduate theological institution in the United States. Margaret Lamberts Bendroth here offers a compelling account of this historic institution and its two original sources. Andover Seminary, a Congregational school established in 1807, opened in 1808 and served as a model for American theological education. Newton Theological Institution, a Baptist school, was founded in 1825. The book offers entirely new material on the development of Andover Newton after those two original schools united in 1931. As part of Andover Newton's storied 200-year history, Bendroth explores the unquestionable intellectual contributions of the faculty, including Moses Stuart, Alvah Hovey, Gabriel Fackre, Max Stackhouse, Phyllis Trible, and many others. She also examines the many paths intersecting with the school's story, from American education in general to the development of Protestant thought, to the complex histories of race and gender in American society.

Congregationalists, the oldest group of American Protestants, are the heirs of New England's first founders. While they were key characters in the story of early American history, from Plymouth Rock and the founding of Harvard and Yale to the Revolutionary War, their luster and numbers have faded. But Margaret Bendroth's critical history of Congregationalism over the past two centuries reveals how the denomination is essential for understanding mainline Protestantism in the making. Bendroth chronicles how the New England Puritans, known for their moral and doctrinal rigor, came to be the antecedents of the United Church of Christ, one of the most liberal of all Protestant denominations today. The demands of competition in the American religious marketplace spurred Congregationalists, Bendroth argues, to face their distinctive history. By engaging deeply with their denomination's storied past, they recast their modern identity. The soul-searching took diverse forms - from letter writing to eloquent sermonizing to Pilgrim-celebrating Thanksgiving pageants - as Congregationalists renegotiated old obligations to their seventeenth-century spiritual ancestors. The result was a modern piety that stood a respectful but ironic distance from the past and made a crucial contribution to the American ethos of religious tolerance.

Since the early twentieth century, women's aspirations have taken a variety of forms in Protestant churches, shaped by such forces as feminism, secularization, social activism, and the professionalization of religious work. Giving voice to a broad range of Protestant women, this landmark volume launches a stimulating investigation into the story of women and religion in the twentieth century. These smart, vigorous essays run the gamut of historical contexts to probe the meaning and impact of social change on women in the church. Contributors consider the emergence of Latina Pentecostal clergy in the United States and the success of the Women's Missionary Union of the Southern Baptist Convention in remaining independent of male-dominated denominational structures. They discuss James Dobson's Focus on the Family, a program closely associated with conservative, fundamentalist values, and ponder its enormous appeal to women and girls. Among other topics, the authors discuss Chinese immigrant women who embraced the relative freedom offered by Protestant religion, turn-of-the-century African American women who assumed religious authority through their historical writing, and the struggles of women faith healers in defining their role amid medical and evangelical professionalism. They also pursue links between a "feminine" preference for nonconfrontational, egalitarian settings and the nature of women's successes and setbacks in their churches. Women and Twentieth-Century Protestantism demonstrates the variety of women's experience and the breadth of their influence as missionaries, thinkers, activists, theologians, and reformers. This important volume also illustrates the persistence of the "stained-glass ceiling" in constraining women's ordination as well as the increasing disenchantment of many within the church.