America Religions Religion

Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing itself a place in the national community, profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, you’ll find a story that sticks with you in this compendium of the best of Leslie Rule’s ghost explorations and interviews. With the most-spine tingling stories from the author’s previous four books, Coast to Coast Ghosts, When the Ghost Screams, Ghosts Among Us, and Ghost in the Mirror, along with new and updated accounts and theories, Rule brings her original voice to this omnibus of chilling, fascinating tales.

View of the Hebrews; or the Tribes of Israel in America is an 1823 book by Ethan Smith, a Congregationalist minister, who argued that Native Americans were descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The lost 10 tribes were believed to have disappeared after being taken captive by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE. Smith's speculation was inspired by the apocryphal book II Esdras 13:41, which claims that the ten tribes settled in a far country, "where never mankind dwelt."

One day in 1917, while cooking dinner at home in Manhattan, Margaret Reilly felt a sharp pain over her heart and claimed to see a crucifix emerging in blood on her skin. Four years later Reilly entered the convent ofthe Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, New York, where, known as SisterMary of the Crown of Thorns, she spent most of her life gravely ill andpossibly exhibiting Christ's wounds.

An obsessive genealogist and descendent of one of the most prominent Jewish families since the American Revolution, Blanche Moses firmly believed her maternal ancestors were Sephardic grandees. Yet she found herself at a dead end when it came to her grandmother's maternal line. Using family heirlooms to unlock the mystery of Moses's ancestors, Once We Were Slaves overturns the reclusive heiress's assumptions about her family history to reveal that her grandmother and great-uncle, Sarah and Isaac Brandon, actually began their lives as poor Christian slaves in Barbados.

An intimate account of the American Revolution as seen through the eyes of a Quaker pacifist couple living in Philadelphia. Spanning a half-century before, during, and after the war, this gripping narrative illuminates the Revolution’s darker side as patriots vilified, threatened, and in some cases killed pacifist Quakers as alleged enemies of the revolutionary cause. Amid chaos and danger, the Drinkers tried as best they could to keep their family and faith intact. A master storyteller takes his listeners on a moving journey they will never forget.

This comprehensive survey of Catholic history in what became the United States spans nearly 500 years, from the arrival of the first Spanish missionaries to the present. Distinguished historian Leslie Tentler explores lay religious practice and the impact of clergy on Catholic life and culture as she seeks to answer the question, What did it mean to be a "good Catholic" at particular times and in particular places?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, Dr. Stella Immanuel started treating her patients with hydroxychloroquine and saw surprising success. Let America Live, Dr. Immanuel shares her story - from unassuming Houston physician to one of the left's favorite punching bags. A minister as well as a physician, Dr. Immanuel also exposes the dark spiritual agenda she believes is behind the medical community's opposition to hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and the vaccination push.

John Fea offers a thoroughly researched, evenhanded primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title's question from a historical perspective, helping listeners see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. This updated edition reports on the many issues that have arisen in recent years concerning religion's place in American society.

The proclaimed hope of America rings most hollow for Native peoples, people of color, the rural poor, and other communities pressed to the margins. Author Jonathan Walton exposes the cultural myths and misconceptions about America's identity. Focusing on its manipulation of Scripture and the person of Jesus, he redirects us to the true promises found in the gospel. Walton identifies how American ideology and way of life has become a false religion and reveals that orienting our lives around American nationalism is idolatry.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and - fixed deeply in the collective consciousness - hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world.

In the winter of 1692 something terrible and frightening began in Salem Village. It started with several villagers having strange fits, screaming, and unnaturally contorting themselves and ended with almost 200 people in jail and at least 25 dead. Witchcraft accusations - claims that some inhabitants had forsaken God to become servants of the Devil - spread from Salem Village across Massachusetts, ensnaring innocent people from all strata of society under a burden of assumed guilt. One of the most significant and unlikely accusations was against 71-year-old grandmother Rebecca Nurse.

As America begins to come to terms with the costs of White privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring White people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people's history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.

You've heard about the courageous young investigators who covertly videotaped officials of ACORN advocating illegal activities. Now, get ready for an undercover exposé even more daring: a six-month penetration of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations that resulted in the collection of thousands of pages of smoking-gun documents from this terror-supporting front group for the dangerous, moblike Muslim Brotherhood.

In this groundbreaking new book, acclaimed researcher and author George Barna identifies, describes, and analyzes seven major "faith tribes" in America - documenting who they are, what they believe, how they vote, and what they are passionate about. Barna provides helpful insight into how these groups influence our economy, politics, and values - and what their potential is to change America.

In this graphic, thought-provoking book, Ed Griffin-Nolan depicts the experiences of Witness for Peace (WFP), a group of Americans who bore witness to the war in Nicaragua - an event that resulted in the killing and wounding of many innocent Central American civilians. Griffin-Nolan explains how WFP participants spent weeks in the war zones in order to understand the impact of U.S. policy on simple people living, as one member of the group phrased it, "at the end of a gun barrel."

This magisterial work (winner of the National Jewish Book Award and other honors) chronicles the 350-year history of the Jewish religion in America. Tracing American Judaism from its origins in the colonial era through the present day, Jonathan Sarna explores the ways in which Judaism adapted in this new context. How did American culture - predominantly Protestant and overwhelmingly capitalist - affect Jewish religion and culture?

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.

For fifty years “Detroit” has been shorthand for all that's wrong with urban America: crime, corruption, decay, racial tension, struggling businesses, failing schools, a declining tax base, and more. Since 1950 Detroit has lost two-thirds of its population, falling from fifth place in the U.S. (just behind Los Angeles) to twenty-fourth (just behind Nashville). Between 2000 and 2017 alone, its population fell 28%, a steeper drop than any other major American city.

The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped. Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions - institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology.