Fundamentalists in the City is a story of religious controversy and division, set within turn of the century and early twentieth-century Boston. It offers a new perspective on the rise of fundamentalism, emphasizing the role of local events, both sacred and secular, in deepening the divide between liberal and conservative Protestants. The first part of the narrative, beginning with the arrest of three clergymen for preaching on the Boston Common in 1885, shows the importance of anti-Catholicism as a catalyst for change. The second part of the book deals with separation, told through the events of three city-wide revivals, each demonstrating a stage of conservative Protestant detachment from their urban origins.

Family life since World War II has undergone dramatic changes. Cultural shifts emphasizing personal needs and fulfillment have transformed traditional understandings of marriage and divorce, gender equality, and sexual behavior, resulting in a marked increase in single-parent homes, dual-income couples, and divorced and blended families. In this book, contributors who represent diverse religious traditions in North America show how their respective traditions have responded to changes in the family in the last half century. Exploring the broad range of responses in their traditions - from conservative to progressive - they reflect on the roles that theology, scripture, and the social sciences have had in this transformation. Further, they take a realistic look at the influence of mainstream religion and its role in future discussions of family life. This exploration offers readers fresh and broad ranges of ways to evaluate their own religious traditions when dealing with issues related to the future of the family. Religious traditions discussed are Southern Baptist, Mormon, Mennonite, Roman Catholic, African Methodist Episcopal, Methodist, Jewish, Presbyterian, United Church of Canada, Episcopal, and ecumenical and interdenominational.

This fascinating book depicts the long-running battle within the fundamentalist movement over the roles of men and women both within the church and outside it. Drawing on interviews as well as on written sources, Margaret Lamberts Bendroth surveys the complicated interplay between fundamentalist theology, which is dominated by the search for order and hierarchical gender roles that have women subservient to men, and fundamentalist practice, which often depends on women in important ways to further the movement's institutional growth. Bendroth begins by describing the earliest days of the fundamentalist movement, when there was a general acceptance of women in ministry roles as teachers, missionaries, and even occasional preachers. She then traces fundamentalism's growing identification with masculine concerns after World War I and its battle with the forces of modernity (such as the rebellious flappers of the twenties). Bendroth explains that in the years before World War II women were able once again to make substantial contributions to the movement, but that during the cultural turn toward domesticity in the 1950s, fundamentalist leaders urged women to retreat to their "ordained" roles as submissive helpmates and encouraged men to fill the teaching and organizational positions the women vacated. Bendroth brings this conflict up to the present, examining the fundamentalist and evangelical rejection of contemporary feminism and investigating how our cultural norms of equality affect these movements' teaching on gender roles.