English Church History

From the first to the 21st century, here's all the Catholic history anyone can (or needs to) remember, with loads of laughs along the way.

Who were the Puritans? For most, the first few things that might come to mind are Pilgrims, turkeys, and the Mayflower. Yes, the Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth back in 1620 were indeed subscribers to Puritan ideals, but the story of the Puritans runs much deeper than that. The Puritans were a direct result of the backlash created by England’s pseudo-Reformation in the 1500s.

In The Nature of the Religious Right, Neall W. Pogue examines how white conservative evangelical Christians became a political force known for hostility toward environmental legislation. Before the 1990s, this group used ideas of nature to help construct the religious right movement while developing theologically based, eco-friendly philosophies that can be described as Christian environmental stewardship. On the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day in 1990, members of this conservative evangelical community tried to turn their eco-friendly philosophies into action.

Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power.

The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy. In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal.

In This Earthly Frame, David Sehat describes the making of American secularism through its most prominent proponents and most significant detractors. He shows how its foundations were laid in the US Constitution and how it fully emerged only in the 20th century.

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.

During the last three decades of the 20th century, evangelical leaders and conservative politicians developed a political agenda that thrust "family values" onto the nation's consciousness. The family values agenda created a bond between evangelicalism and political conservatism. Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right chronicles how the family values agenda became so powerful in American political life and why it appealed to conservative evangelical Christians.

God's Country is the first book to tell the complete story of Christian Zionism in American political and religious thought - from the Puritans to 9/11. It identifies three sources of American Christian support for a Jewish state: 1. Covenant, or the idea of an ongoing relationship between God and the Jewish people, 2. Prophecy, or biblical predictions of return to the Promised Land, and 3. Cultural affinity, based on shared values and similar institutions.

From one of the leading historians of Christianity comes this sweeping reassessment of religious freedom, from the church fathers to John Locke. In the ancient world, Christian apologists wrote in defense of their right to practice their faith in the cities of the Roman Empire. They argued that religious faith is an inward disposition of the mind and heart and cannot be coerced by external force, laying a foundation on which later generations would build.

Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims.

From colonial times into the 20th century, our laws and court cases ignored atheism, assuming that all good Americans were religious. Only in the 20th century, with the passage of laws allowing for conscientious objection to war, did nonbelief enter debates about religious liberty. Still, today every one of the 20 states has God written into its constitution. God is everywhere in American public life. R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick explore both God's omnipresence and the dramatic rise in nonbelievers that has led to an "atheist awakening" intent on holding the country to its secular principles.

In Inventing a Christian America, Green, a leading historian of religion and politics, explores the historical record that is purported to support the popular belief in America's religious founding and status as a Christian nation.

The idea of the United States as a Christian nation is a powerful, seductive, and potentially destructive theme in American life, culture, and politics. Many fundamentalist and evangelical leaders routinely promote this notion, and millions of Americans simply assume the Christian character of the United States.

Early Christians were called "heretics" and "atheists" when they denied the gods of Rome, in particular the divinity of the emperor and the statism he embodied in his personality cult. These Christians knew that Jesus Christ, not the state, was their Lord and that this faith required a different kind of relationship to the state than the state demanded. Because Jesus Christ was their acknowledged sovereign, they consciously denied such esteem to all other claimants. Today, the church must take a similar stand before the modern state.

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This fascinating history, based on meticulous research into the correspondence and documentation of the Founding Fathers, from the crafting of the Declaration of Independence to the signing of the peace treaty with Britain, sheds light on how the Judeo-Christian worldview motivated the Founding Fathers, influenced national independence, inspired our foundational documents, and established the American nation.

The Vatican is a landlocked independent city state and enclave in Rome, Italy. The Vatican City State, also called the Vatican, acquired independence from Italy in the year 1929 with the Lateran Treaty, and it is a different terrain under the Holy See's "full ownership, special rule, and sovereign authority and jurisdiction", which makes sure the city state's temporal, diplomatic, and spiritual independence. This is one of the world’s most unique states/countries, something that is definitely worth understanding.

April 13, 2006. A Jerusalem Post headline reads: "Jericho man murdered over home sale." The 42 year-old father of eight was kidnapped, shot seven times, thrown into his car, and set on fire, because he had sold his Jerusalem apartment to Jews. Radical Islam has long desired to seize Jerusalem and make it off limits to Christian and Jewish believers. In this revealing book, Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, reminds us that the war on terror is also a war on faith.

John L. Esposito is one of America's leading authorities on Islam. Now, in this brilliant portrait of Islam today - and tomorrow - he draws on a lifetime of thought and research to sweep away the negative stereotypes and provide an accurate, richly nuanced, and revelatory account of the fastest-growing religion in the world. Here Esposito explores the major questions and issues that face Islam in the 21st century and how that will deeply affect global politics.