American Religion

Combining personal storytelling with biblical reflection, Cuban American writer Kat Armas tells the story of unnamed and overlooked theologians - mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters - whose sacred wisdom teaches us something unique about spirituality and God.

A noted biblical scholar explores how the claim of divine choice has been used from ancient times to the present to justify territorial expansion and prejudice. The Bible describes many individuals and groups as specially chosen by God. But does God choose at all? Michael Coogan explains the...

The audiobook The Last Incarnation is filled with stories and reflections about Rama - Dr. Frederick Lenz. There are over 100 stories written by people who had direct personal contact with Rama for periods of time ranging from a few months to many years. Together these stories create a collection of powerful spiritual experiences retelling an ancient story: the search for God and Truth in human experience.

Uncover the ways the Christian church has changed in recent years—from the decline of the mainline denominations to the mega-churchification of American culture—and a hopeful reimagining of what the church might look like going forward. The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented...

Since men and women in battle not only face the prospect of their own deaths but also must fashion a moral rationale for killing, the battlefield is often a place of tremendous religious transformation. Do men and women at war revert to the faith of their youth or do they gravitate to the spirituality around them? Do they lose all faith in the face of horror, or do they piece together an informal faith that simply gets them through the fight?

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

A multi-volume anthology of the writings and sermons written and presented by Dr. Strem during his many years in pastoral ministry, these volumes present the breadth of Christian theology in a personal and informal manner that serves to address the application of Christian faith in daily life. Written during a time when there is a great need for discipleship in the community of Christian faith, Dr. Strem addresses that need by organizing the material in a manner that may be used both as a reference text on theological subjects and for instruction in Christian living.

You've probably heard of St. Raphael Hawaweeny, St. Alexander Hotovitsky, liturgical translator Isabel Hapgood, and other righteous men and women who made their mark on the early development of Orthodoxy in America. But what about the notorious itinerant Bulgarian Monk? Or Fr. Raphael Morgan, the first black Orthodox priest in America? Or Vera Johnston, who served the Orthodox Church without renouncing her Theosophist roots?

One of our foremost historians of religion here chronicles the arrival of Christianity in the New World, tracing the turning points in the development of the immigrant church that have led to today's distinctly American faith. Taking a unique approach to this fascinating subject, Noll focuses on what was new about organized Christian religion on the American continent by comparison with European Christianity.

Peter Macdonald Blachly takes us on an amazing adventure, documenting the 17 years he spent in a spiritual cult, while providing candid insights into the circumstances and conditions that made him vulnerable to manipulation by a charismatic sociopath. His understanding of psychology and human weaknesses, and the lessons he draws from his own experiences are universal, making his memoir highly relevant today. The book provides a riveting account of Blachly’s introduction to yoga, his arranged marriage, and a thrilling and entertaining view of India during the 1970s and 1980s.

Groundbreaking research based on a national database of over 200,000 churches shows that the overall United States population is growing faster than the church. The director of the American Church Research Project, Dave Olson, has worked to analyze church attendance, showing that it is virtually...

The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them.

New England's history is marked with witch executions, curses, and an untold number of cemeteries hiding mysteries beneath their stones. In this sometimes harsh landscape, the truth is often stranger than fiction. Examine the footprints burned into the ledge of Devil's Foot Rock in Rhode Island. Spend a night at the Kennebunk Inn in Maine, where the mischievous specter of Silas Perkins still resides.

During the mid-seventeenth century, Anglo-American Protestants described Native American ceremonies as savage devilry, Islamic teaching as violent chicanery, and Catholicism as repugnant superstition. By the mid-eighteenth century, they would describe amicable debates between evangelical missionaries and Algonquian religious leaders about the moral appeal of Christianity, recount learned conversations between English merchants and Muslim scholars, and tell of encounters with hospitable and sincere priests in Catholic Canada and Europe. What explains this poignant shift?

For five hundred years, Latina/o culture and identity have been shaped by their challenges to the religious, socio-economic, and political status quo, whether in opposition to Spanish colonialism, Latin American dictatorships, US imperialism in Central America, the oppression of farmworkers, or the current exploitation of undocumented immigrants. Christianity has played a significant role in that movement at every stage. Robert Chao Romero, the son of a Mexican father and a Chinese immigrant mother, explores the history and theology of what he terms the "Brown Church."

The book reveals the universal and cosmic love of the Red Road. The Red Road is the philosophy/worldview/religion of the native Indian tribes/pueblos of North and South America. This worldview promotes integration with Mother Earth and the cosmos to achieve harmony within eternally evolving existence. Using the Chicano as an example, the book explores the human lifetime as a cosmic being with eternal cycles of reincarnation and integration. This cosmic journey is examined from the perspective of the Red Road.

The belief that Native Americans might belong to the fabled “lost tribes of Israel” - Israelites driven from their homeland around 740 BCE - took hold among Anglo-Americans and Indigenous peoples in the United States during its first half century. In Lost Tribes Found, Matthew W. Dougherty explores what this idea can tell us about religious nationalism in early America.

Liberalism puts its trust in civil discourse and rational argument. Today, its opponents enthusiastically flout these norms, making a show of defying so-called political correctness. In the Trump era and beyond, right-wing figures delight in sheer offensiveness. What is at stake in breaking the rules of civility to "own the libs"?

Learning from Black voices means listening to more than snippets. It means attending to Black stories. Reading Black Books helps Christians hear and learn from enduring Black voices and stories as captured in classic African American literature.

Far from carrying out its biblical mandate to be a terror to evildoers, civil government in America has increasingly become a terror to its law-abiding citizens. R. J. Rushdoony’s essays seem even more timely today as we are witnessing a staggering display of state intrusion into every area of life. This is the outcome of humanistic thinking. It is the end result of political salvation as both left and right continue to practice the belief that we can somehow get better - or less - government by way of politics.