America Religions Religion

A History of Evangelism in North America guides listeners on a tour through circuit riders and tent meetings to campus evangelism and online ministries. Academic research combines with gospel faithfulness and love for the lost in this historical survey. Encountering these prominent evangelism movements will inspire innovation and courage in the call to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power. These are the central values of the American dream. But are they actually compatible with Jesus' command to love our neighbor as ourselves? In essays grouped around these four values, D. L. Mayfield asks us to pay attention to the ways they shape our own choices, and the ways those choices affect our neighbors. Where did these values come from? How have they failed those on the edges of our society? And how can we disentangle ourselves from our culture's headlong pursuit of these values and live faithful lives of service to God and our neighbors?

In this fascinating account, cultural historian Kathy Peiss reveals how book and document collecting became part of the new apparatus of intelligence and national security, military planning, and postwar reconstruction. Focusing on the ordinary Americans who carried out these missions, she shows how they made decisions on the ground to acquire sources that would be useful in the war zone as well as on the home front.

Alveda King, niece of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., shares 21 keys to help you unlock your spiritual potential. As your tour guide on this journey of discovery, she reveals how her famous family taught her that when you use your God-given gifts, you can impact the world. Sharing secrets to unlocking a divine family, divine salvation, divine forgiveness, and much more, King inspires you to unlock authority to use your spiritual gifts to their greatest potential. Learn how to live "in spirit and in truth" to discover what "to you it has been given" means for your life.

America is at a tipping point, and never has this been more apparent than right now. We are in danger of losing our spiritual and moral heritage, making many believe that we have fallen beyond the point of recovery. This book is here to say that yes, we have fallen. In fact fallen much further than we realize, but our country's best days are ahead - with the help of a radical, moral, and cultural revolution, beginning with the church. This book is a manual for the revolution.

Revolution? Oligarchy? Or homecoming? Americans are approaching a "zero hour" for the republic and its distinctive view of ordered freedom. America is caught between two revolutions and alternately suppresses and squanders freedom with a prodigal carelessness, with little understanding of the responsibilities that freedom requires. Os Guinness warns that if America abandons its distinctive ideals and ideas, we will have carved into the chronicles of history yet another example of the failure of a free society.

The traditional family was central to the American story. Only recently has it fallen into neglect. The American Way is the narrative of how this happened. Many history books emphasize American individualism and enterprise, but in The American Way, Allan C. Carlson shows that Americans saw the family as central to their national identity.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life.

In Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.

In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and by stealing their land. The Pilgrims' definition of liberty was, in practice, very narrow.

In Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy, historian Merina Smith explores the introduction of polygamy in Nauvoo, a development that unfolded amid scandal and resistance. Smith considers the ideological, historical, and even psychological elements of the process and captures the emotional and cultural detail of this exciting and volatile period in Mormon history.

The question of teaching evolution in the public schools is a continuing and frequently heated political issue in America. From Tennessee's Scopes Trial in 1925 to recent battles that have erupted in Louisiana, Kansas, Ohio, and countless other localities, the critics and supporters of evolution have fought nonstop over the role of science and religion in American public life. In American Genesis, Jeffrey P. Moran explores the ways in which the evolution debate has reverberated beyond the confines of state legislatures and courthouses.

In 1979 the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith withdrew Hans Kung's missio canonica. Pope Paul VI approved the censure saying, "We are obligated to declare that in his writings he fell short of integrity and the truth of the Catholic faith." Through a 1980 agreement with the Vatican, Kung is now permitted to teach, but only under secular auspices. In this acclaimed Modern Library Chronicle, Kung examines the Catholic Church through its many reformations, focusing on the people and events...

Like the ancient Israelites, the African American community has survived a 400-year collective trauma. What will it take for them to reach the promised land that King foresaw - to be truly free at last? In this classic historical and cultural study, Carl Ellis offers an in-depth assessment of the state of African American freedom and dignity. Stressing how important it is for African Americans to reflect on their roots, he traces the growth of Black consciousness from the days of slavery to the 1990s, noting especially the contributions of King and Malcolm X.

Is America still the greatest country on earth? How does God see it? In America's Coming Judgment, Thomas J. Hughes examines the United States in the light of scripture. What he finds is ominous. In the Bible, God made promises to nations as well as to people. He rewards godly behavior. But when a nation intentionally turns away from him, when it harms the vulnerable, and when it mocks his standards of right and wrong, he promises another kind of response - judgment. Has America gone too far? Is there still hope? In this riveting volume, Thomas J. Hughes explains the purposes of God's judgment, and how it applies to the United States.

In this provocative book, Mugambi Jouet describes why Americans are far more divided than other Westerners over basic issues, including wealth inequality, health care, climate change, evolution, gender roles, abortion, gay rights, sex, gun control, mass incarceration, the death penalty, torture, human rights, and war.

All Americans, liberal or conservative, religious or not, can agree that religious freedom, anchored in conscience rights, is foundational to the US democratic experiment. But what freedom of conscience means, what its scope and limits are, according to the Constitution - these are matters for heated debate.

On March, 13, 2013, 115 cardinals elected for the first time a pope from outside of Europe. Pope Francis, a native of Argentina, is not just the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere; he is also the first Jesuit to ever hold the Chair of Peter. Now, a leading expert on the papacy provides the ultimate introduction to this new pope, including biographical information and an absorbing collection of Jorge Mario Bergoglio's most persuasive words.

It is the winter of 1777. The Revolutionary War has raged on for more than two years. In Pennsylvania, the British troops are in dire need of resupply. Those supplies sit in the hold of Royal Navy ships, which stand ready to sail up the Delaware River and deliver them to the hungry redcoats. Just one thing stands in their way: Fort Mifflin.

As never before in American history, Christians are witnessing biblical values being replaced by laws that impose a godless, immoral, oppressive social agenda on their country. The overall disdain political and religious liberal activists have toward conservative values in general and authentic Christianity in particular has produced an ideological civil war that is raging out of control. But many people sense there’s something more sinister going on.