English Religious

The world is filled with counterfeits. And the church is not immune, as false ideas and doctrines can infect believers and congregations. So when it comes to spiritual teachers, messages, and movements, how can we tell fact from fiction? The answers are found in 2 Peter, 2 & 3 John, and Jude, where the apostles provide practical insights for discerning truth.

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to study this second-hand religious life.

In the 16th century, corruption, debauchery, and the general perversion of ethics were running rampant within the Roman Catholic Church. The public began to grow leery of the crooked church, and soon, they could no longer bite their tongues. Among the church's most vocal opponents was Martin Luther, whose publication of the 95 Theses gave rise to the Protestant movement. This reformed brand of Christianity gradually spread throughout Europe, planting flags across the continent.

Religious freedom is a bitterly contested issue that spills over into political, public, and online spheres. It's an issue that's becoming ever more heated, and neither of the global political polarities is interested in protecting it. While the political left is openly hostile toward traditional religion, the political right seeks to weaponize it. How can we ensure that "religious freedom" is truly about freedom of one's religion rather than serving an ethno-nationalist agenda?

Africa may have given rise to the first human beings, and Egypt probably gave rise to the first great civilizations, which continue to fascinate modern societies across the globe nearly 5,000 years later. From the Library and Lighthouse of Alexandria to the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Ancient Egyptians produced several wonders of the world, revolutionized architecture and construction, created some of the world’s first systems of mathematics and medicine, and established language and art that spread across the known world.

COR Values is a true and evocative story that captures the intricate dynamics of faith, family, and personal convictions. At the heart of this narrative is a pastor, deeply rooted in his beliefs of sin and salvation, who faces a profound dilemma when his wife's sister decides to marry someone he considers a sinner. This situation challenges the very core of his teachings, which advocate for separation from sinners to maintain spiritual purity.

Moses Ben Maimon, frequently called Maimonides, was a medieval philosopher who revolutionized thinking about ethics, reason, and the Jewish Torah through his emphasis on reason and evidence. His works were broadly accepted by the Sephardi Jewish community and spread across the medieval world. St. Thomas Aquinas is known as one of the most important medieval philosophers and in many respects a harbinger of the Renaissance that began to flourish across Europe in the centuries that followed his life.

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.

Caught between family demands, social groups, and ostracized as a member of the religious “Holy Rollers,” the author of American Robot: A Cultural Chameleon Rising Above Race & Religious Traumas balances on precarious razor edges of sacred edicts, genetic mental illnesses, and toxic social stress. Parental physical abuse and rigid mental programming add to repeated cult behavior–modification strategies.

Thoughtful observers agree that the planetary crisis we now face - climate change; species extinction; the destruction of entire ecosystems; the urgent need for a more just economic-political order - is pushing human civilization to a radical turning point: change or perish. But precisely how to change remains an open question.

IS IT FAITH OR RELIGION? Targeting the mature Christian in easy to understand language, the book explores the difference between faith alone in Christ alone, and those elements of church religion that have been hoisted onto the backs of believers. One travesty after another has been committed in the name of the religious church throughout 2000 years of its history. Many of what we think of today as essential parts of the Christian Church are not scriptural at all, and worse, may have pagan origins.

> Down in the Chapel tells the story of one week at Graterford Prison. One part prison procedural, one part philosophical investigation, Down in the Chapel explores the many uses prisoners make of their religions and weighs the circumstances that make these uses possible. Gritty and visceral, meditative and searching, it is an essential study of American religion in the age of mass incarceration.

This book caters to a wide audience interested in exploring their faith or seeking answers about the afterlife. Whether you're a devout believer or a skeptic, What the Hell is Hell? invites you on a journey of discovery and reflection.

This intriguing collection of essays presents reflections upon the birth, proliferation, enduring appeal, and future of UFO mythology. Highly respected authors and researchers, representing the varied and sometimes competing perspectives of ufology and the sociology of religion, provide a fascinating and instructive voyage into the exotic social worlds of UFOs, abductees, and contactees.

Love Tenderly is a collection of personal stories shared by religious women who identify as lesbian or queer, and who have come to embrace their sexual orientation as an integral part of their identity and vocation to religious life. Each story is a journey of love and an embrace of truth and wholeness.

Just as the documentary Eyes on the Prize captured the rich drama of the civil rights movement, Sacred Liberty brings to life the remarkable story of how America became one of the few nations in world history that has religious freedom, diversity, and high levels of piety at the same time. Finally, Sacred Liberty provides a road map for how, in the face of modern threats to religious freedom, this great achievement can be preserved.

While Washington offers only the politics of blame and fear, Jim Wallis, the man who changed the conversation about faith and politics, has traveled the country and found a nation hungry for a politics of solutions and hope. He shows us that a revival is happening, as people of faith and moral conviction seek common ground for change.

Are we on the brink of sacrificing science and history on the altar of fundamentalist ideology? Navigating the chasm between unyielding faith and empirical science, this memoir reveals a deeply personal struggle with Young Earth Creationism and religious fundamentalism. Indoctrinated at age six into a fundamentalist sect, the author is confronted with the undeniable evidence of science while simultaneously being torn by his church's warnings of eternal damnation for simply acknowledging reality.

The role of organized religion in our society is undergoing monumental changes. Church attendance is decreasing at unprecedented rates. At the same time, there is an increase in the number of people who identify as “spiritual but not religious.” Clearly, the need for religion remains as strong as ever, yet more and more, people are seeking spirituality elsewhere. Why? What accounts for these trends? Can organized religion still play a valuable role in today’s world?

Inspired in seminary by American Muslimahs who wear the hijab for feminist reasons, Lauren Shields took off what she calls the Beauty Suit - the "done" hair, the tasteful and carefully applied makeup, the tight clothes and foot-binding shoes - for nine months. She'd really only wanted to do an experiment. Instead, her life - especially her views on what constitutes "liberation" - changed forever. Rooted in feminist theory and religious history, and guided by a snappy personal narrative, The Beauty Suit unpacks modern American womanhood: a landscape where the female body is still so often the battleground for male ideals and where we struggle with our rights as human beings to define and exercise our freedom.