American Religion

Although Christian believers agreed with one another that the Bible was authoritative and that it should be interpreted through commonsense principles, there was rampant disagreement about what Scripture taught about slavery. Furthermore, most Americans continued to believe that God ruled over the affairs of people and nations, but they were radically divided in their interpretations of what God was doing in and through the war.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which was unavailable for more than 10 years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering.

In Jezebel Unhinged Tamura Lomax traces the use of the jezebel trope in the Black church and in Black popular culture, showing how it is pivotal to reinforcing men's cultural and institutional power to discipline and define Black girlhood and womanhood. Drawing on writing by medieval thinkers and travelers, Enlightenment theories of race, the commodification of women's bodies under slavery, and the work of Tyler Perry and Bishop T. D. Jakes, Lomax shows how Black women are written into religious and cultural history as sites of sexual deviation.

In Fear No Pharaoh, journalist and historian Richard Kreitner sets this question at the heart of the Civil War era. Using original sources, he tells the intertwined stories of six American Jews who helped to shape a tumultuous time, including Judah Benjamin, the brilliant, secretive lawyer who became Jefferson Davis's trusted confidante; Morris Raphall, a Swedish-born rabbi who defended slavery as biblically justified; and Raphall's rival rabbis—the celebrated Isaac Mayer Wise, who urged Jews to stay out of the slavery controversy, and David Einhorn.

Conjure, hoodoo, rootwork - these are all names for Southern American folk magic. Conjure first emerged in the days of slavery and plantations and is widely considered among the most potent forms of magic. Its popularity continues to increase, both in the United States and worldwide. This audiobook is a guide to using conjure to achieve love, success, safety, prosperity, and spiritual fulfillment. Author Starr Casas, a hereditary master of the art, introduces listeners to the history and philosophy of conjure and provides practical information for using it.

The half century following the American Revolution witnessed the transformation of American Christianity. The passion for equality, says Hatch, brought about a crisis or religious authority in popular culture, introduced new and popular forms of theology, witnessed the rise of minority religious movements, reshaped preaching, singing, and publishing, and became a scriptural foundation for 19th century American individualism.

Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050.

In this provocative tell-all, David Gushee gives an insider's look at the frictions and schisms of evangelical Christianity, based on his experiences that began with becoming a born-again Southern Baptist in 1978 to being kicked out of evangelicalism in 2014 for his stance on LGBT inclusion in the church. But Gushee's religious pilgrimage proves even broader than that, as he leads his listener through his childhood experiences in Roman Catholicism, his difficult days at the liberal Union Seminary in New York, his encounters with the Christian Right, and more. In telling his story, Gushee speaks to the cultural divisions of a generation.

Early Christianity was subversive and dangerous - dangerous for Christians, and a threat to the keepers of the old order. Most of all Christianity was countercultural. But what about contemporary American Christianity? Is it the countercultural way of Jesus or merely a religious endorsement of Americanism? In his provocative audiobook, Postcards From Babylon, Brian Zahnd challenges the listener to see and embrace a daring Jesus-centered Christianity that can again turn the world upside down.

Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.

Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr's masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue.

First Nations peoples and Native Americans in North America have long believed in the power of spirit animals or totems. They believed that these animals had lessons to teach and healing or inspirational powers. Wayne Arthurson delves into the world of spirit animals and shows the meanings of these animals to Native peoples and how nature has made its mark on their world.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by the English poet William Blake consists of a series of texts written in the style of biblical prophecy but expressing Blake's own beliefs. Composed between 1790 and 1793, the book makes reference to Milton and Swedenborg, and adopts a device from Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost: a visit to hell. Blake expresses a deliberately depolarized and unified vision of the cosmos in which the material world and physical desire are both part of the divine order.

The New American Standard Bible is one of the most accurate translations of the Scriptures, and the Gospel of John is one of the most fundamental books in the New Testament scriptures.

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the US.

American Brujeria is about the fascinating blend of American and Mexican folk magic currently used by those living in the US but whose roots are steeped in Mexican culture. This type of Mexican American folk magic, which the author calls “American brujeria”, features its own unique saints and spirits as well as familiar ones, such as the infamous Santa Muerte.

We all love a mystery - but what about a mystery that has no solution? Delve into the shadowy world of unsolved disappearances and people who have vanished without a trace, never to be seen again. Such strange and chilling tales run the gamut of the terrifying and the bizarre and include crime victims, lost explorers, ships vanished at sea, outdoor disappearances, and supernatural mysteries that defy all explanation.

An Indian American immigrant who grew up in white Southern culture, Prasanta Verma names and sheds light on the realities of ethnic loneliness. She unpacks the exhausting effects of cultural isolation, the dynamics of marginalization, and the weight of being other. In the midst of disconnection and erasure, she points to the longing to belong, the need to share our stories, and the hope of finding safe friendships and community. Our places of exile can become places where we find belonging—to ourselves, to others, and to God.

Dreamwalkers are those rare few who are led by the spirit, have shed the yoke of desire, and have discarded the need for material gain and all evidence of negative thought. Freed from personal goals, they travel the path of knowledge and go where the spirit of truth leads them. Brian Many Heart—a student of Chippewa shaman No-Eyes—teaches Mary Summer Rain the magic and power of the Dreamwalker. In this third volume of the No-Eyes tetralogy, Summer Rain and Many Heart explore the realms of the spirit under the close scrutiny of No-Eyes.