American Religion

The mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II is not only a tale of injustice; it is a moving story of faith. In this pathbreaking account, Duncan Ryuken Williams reveals how, even as they were stripped of their homes and imprisoned in camps, Japanese American Buddhists launched one of the most inspiring defenses of religious freedom in our nation's history, insisting that they could be both Buddhist and American.

Christianity takes an astonishing variety of forms in America, from churches that cherish traditional modes of worship to evangelical churches and fellowships, Pentecostal churches, social-action churches, megachurches, and apocalyptic churches - congregations ministering to believers of diverse ethnicities, social classes, and sexual orientations. Nor is this diversity a recent phenomenon, despite many Americans' nostalgia for an undeviating “faith of our fathers” in the days of yore.

The dark-eyed woman in the long, black gown was first seen in the 1970s, standing near a fireplace. She was sad and translucent, present and absent at once. Strange things began to happen in the Santa Fe hotel where she was seen. Gas fireplaces turned off and on without anyone touching a switch. Glasses flew off shelves. And in one second-floor suite with a canopy bed and arched windows looking out to the mountains, guests reported alarming events.

For the first time in more than twenty-five years, Greg Sarris—whose novels are esteemed alongside those of Louise Erdrich and Stephen Graham Jones—presents a book about his own life. In Becoming Story he asks: What does it mean to be truly connected to the place you call home—to walk where innumerable generations of your ancestors have walked?

In the midst of our hectic, overscheduled lives, caring for the soul is imperative. Now, more than ever, we need to pause - intentionally - and encounter the Divine. Soul care director Barbara Peacock illustrates a journey of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. She reflects on how these disciplines are woven into the African American culture and lived out in the rich heritage of its faith community.

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.

Among the unsettling social shifts in the wake of 9/11 was the global attention paid to Islam. Here in the United States, we became divided, often sadly along partisan lines, between those who believed every Muslim was a potential threat and those who believed no Muslim could do wrong. For conservative Wisconsin native and former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, these radical times meant facing a new reality as a devout Muslim and a patriot - a certain betrayal within his faith.

The Japanese army's brutal occupation of the city of Nanking during the 1937 Sino-Japanese War is known, for good reason, as the rape of Nanking. As they slaughtered an estimated 300,000 people, the invading soldiers raped more than 20,000 women - some estimates run as high as 80,000. Hua-ling Hu presents here the amazing untold story of the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, whose unswerving defiance of the Japanese protected 10,000 Chinese women and children.

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.

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance. Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is white; her adopted child, Shiv, who is black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her...

Each year across the United States, there are mysterious and unexplainable firsthand encounters by average people. These encounters beg the question, do monsters exist? From east to west across the US, professionals are actively researching these encounters to prove once and for all that these creatures do exist. American Cryptids takes you on a journey across the country, visiting each state along the way.

The New American Standard Bible is one of the most accurate translations of the scriptures. Let professional voice artist Dale McConachie, narrator of over 100 audiobooks, take you on a journey through the Old Testament, where you will discover the relationship between God and the nation of Israel. The Pentateuch deals with the creation of Israel and God establishing a covenant relationship with Israel. The historical books record Israel’s history, its victories and successes, and its defeats and failures.

Historian Kevin Schmiesing takes you to more than two-dozen sites and events that symbolize and embody America's rich and sometimes tumultuous Catholic past, including the Santa Fe Trail, Gettysburg, and the Bourbon Trail. You'll also meet both famous and infamous Catholics—including Augustus Tolton, Dr. Samuel Mudd, and Frances Cabrini—who impacted our nation's history.

At the age of 33, Erik Reece's father, a Baptist minister, took his own life, leaving Erik in the care of his grandmother and his grandfather - also a fundamentalist Baptist preacher and a pillar of his rural Virginia community. While Erik grew up with a conflicted relationship with Christianity, he unexpectedly found comfort in the Jefferson Bible. Inspired, he undertook what would become a spiritual and literary quest to identify an "American gospel" coursing through the work of both great and forgotten American geniuses, from William Byrd to Walt Whitman to Lynn Margulis.

The NASB 2020 is an update of the NASB 1995 that further improves accuracy where possible, modernizes language, and improves understandability. These refinements maintain faithful accuracy to the original texts and provide a clear understanding of God’s Word to those who prefer more modern English standards. The long-established translation standard for the NASB remains the same as it always has been, that is to accurately translate the inspired Word of God from the Hebrew and Aramaic texts into modern English that is clearly understandable today.

For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism.

The writing of history is always in terms of a framework, a philosophical and ultimately religious conceptual structure in the mind of the historian. To the orthodox Christian, the shabby incarnations of the reigning historiographies are both absurd and offensive. A Christian historiography and a Christian revisionism are thus for him moral imperatives. These essays are studies in Christian revisionism. There purpose is to call attention those aspects of American history that are currently neglected.

The African American Guide to the Bible makes the case for the relevance of the Bible from the perspective of people of color. It presents a comprehensive biblical view of topics of interest to African Americans and clarifies racial issues for White people.

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutiny—scrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. i>Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives.

Hebrews? Africans? Or Does It Matter? Revised Edition delves into the intricate intersection of history, culture, and spirituality specifically concerning the descendants of the formerly enslaved people in America but also throughout the diaspora. This people’s history can never be told truthfully without being labeled “controversial.” The listener will understand why this powerful history is also referred to as “The World’s Best Kept Secret.”