Outline : Learning how to live in today's new social and cultural environment will require examination, trial and error, and adaptation over time. But there are ways to live with integrity and follow Christ today, even in a negative world. Since a peak in church attendance in the mid-20th century, Christianity has been on a trajectory of decline in the United States. Once positive toward Christ…
Outline : The hour is critical. The American republic is suffering its gravest crisis since the Civil War. Conflicts, hostility, and incivility now threaten to tear the country apart. Competing visions have led to a dangerous moment of cultural self-destruction. This is no longer politics as usual, but an era of political warfare where our enemies are not foreign adversaries, but our fellow cit…
Outline : In these stormy times, voices from all fronts call for change. But what kind of revolution brings true freedom to both society and the human soul? Cultural observer Os Guinness explores the nature of revolutionary faith, contrasting between secular revolutions such as the French Revolution and the faith-led revolution of ancient Israel. He argues that the story of Exodus is the highes…
Outline: This book is the most comprehensive survey of early American Christian theology ever written and a major contribution to American intellectual history. It encompasses scores of American theological traditions, schools of thought, and thinkers active from 1636 to 1865 and considers the social and institutional settings for religious thought during this period.
Outline: Unshakable Truth in an unsteady world. In an age that is increasingly conflicted about evangelical identity and theological truth, Christians need a foundation for navigating the shifting culture. Although forgotten by some, twentieth-century theologian Carl F. H. Henry stands as one of the most influential leaders of modern evangelicalism. In this collection of essays written by leadi…
Outline: In this prize-winning book Nathan O. Hatch offers a provocative reassessment of religion and culture in the early days of the American republic, arguing that during this period American Christianity was democratized and common people became powerful actors on the religious scene. Hatch examines live distinct traditions or mass movements that emerged early in the nineteenth century - th…
Outline: Many American Christians today are not sure what spiritual maturity is or how to get there. Thomas Bergler has written this accessible guide to help both individuals and whole faith communities to grow spiritually. Bergler claims that spiritual maturity - which he defines as basic competence in the Christian life - is not only desirable but attainable, and he identifies its character f…
Outline : Cotton Mather (1663-1728) was America's most famous pastor and scholar at the beginning of the eighteenth century. People today generally associate him with the infamous Salem witch trials, but in this new biography Rick Kennedy tells a bigger story: Mather, he says, was the very first American evangelical.
The knowledge base which has been the foundation of Catholic education in the passt and underlies Catholic educational practice today merits the attention of scholars and interested parties, both within and outside of the Catholic educational community. This comprehensive compendium of research focues on key aspects of Catholic education in the United States. The volume includes reviews of rese…
Over the last 25 years, there has been much talk of the presumed "decline" in religious participation in America. In addition, from the 1960s on, surveys that mark the "influence" of religion in American life have shown a mixed response. Many suggest that religion is losing influence in the culture as a whole; others indicate that while organized religion may be experiencing challenges, spiritu…
A religious primer serves as an argument for why religion should become a mandatory subject in American public schools, contending that most Americans are not able to identify basic tenets of their faith and that key political challenges can be better met with faith-based resolutions.
A chronicle of the evangelical life, witten by a born-again Christian and former "60 Minutes" producer, seeks to bridge the gaps between believers and non-believers.
George W. Bush has invited more analysis and controversy over the impact of religion on his presidency than perhaps any chief executive of the modern era. Opinion on Bush's religiosity is intensely divisive, with conservative evangelicals seeing him as a man of deep faith and principles and at the same time many progressives seeing the president as almost dangerously fanatical. This volume is a…
A landmark publication in the social sciences, Linda Lindsey’s Gender is the most comprehensive textbook to explore gender sociologically, as a critical and fundamental dimension of a person’s identity, interactions, development, and role and status in society.
This book aspires to answer a relatively simple question: How did we get from John F. Kennedy’s eloquent speech at the Rice Hotel in Houston on September 12, 1960, in which he urged voters effectively to bracket a candidate’s faith out of their considerations when they entered the voting booth, to George W. Bush’s declaration on the eve of the 2000 Iowa precinct caucuses that Jesus was hi…
"Wonderful grist for academicians and practitioners alike. This book of thoughtful essays by world-class authors advances the field of religion and foreign policy on a number of important fronts, "-Douglas M. Johnson, President, International Center for Religion & Diplomacy
Many Americans may believe that religion in the schools is a controversial subject only in the United States. But around the worls, the subject has gained widespread notoriety, media coverage, and attention from governing bodies, school administrations, and individuals. In Religion in Schools, R. Murray Thomas use case examples from 12 countries, covering all regions of the world and all the ma…
Examines the lives of atheists, agnostics, secularists, and the spiritually undecided in the twenty-first century; and discusses how secular lives can be positive without ties to a religion.
By championing the ideals of independence, evangelism, and conservatism, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has grown into the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The Convention's mass democratic form of church government, its influential annual meetings, and its sheer size have made it a barometer for Southern political and cultural shift. Its most recent shift has been starboar…
As I have explained in the “personal introduction” to the first chapter, this book is the outgrowth of my lifelong study in the history of biblical interpretation, as amplified more recently by my consideration of the analogy between this history and the history of constitutional interpretation...
The aim of this series is to inform both professional philosophers and a larger readership (of social and natural scientists, methodologists, mathematicians, students, teachers, publishers, etc.) about what is going on, who's who, and who does what in contemporary philosophy and logic. PROFILES is designed to present the research activity and the results of already outstanding personalities and…
The mass media and religious groups in America regularly argue about news bias, sex and violence on television, movie censorship, advertiser boycotts, broadcast and film content rating systems, government regulation of the media, the role of mass evangelism in a democracy, and many other issues. In the United States the major disputes between religion and the media usually have involved Christi…
Outline: This collection brings together sixteen previously unpublished essays about the history, organization, challenges, responses, outstanding thinkers, and future prospects of the Muslim community in the United States and Canada. Both Muslims and non-Muslims are represented among the contributors, who include such leading Islamic scholars as John Esposito, Frederick Denny, Jane Smith, and …
Outline: 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 thougt 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 fac…
Outline: "Unnoticed by most Westerners," Daniel Pipes wrote in 1995, referring to militant Islam, "war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States." Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based on Middle East Forum, was one of very few Americans to understand the significance of what to many appeared to be no more than isolated cases of violence. Long before September 11, 2001, …
Outline: For a generation, Barbara MacHaffie's fascinating Her Story : Women in Christian Tradition has enabled readers to enter into and recover the oft-ignored or submerged stories of women in the Christian tradition, from biblical times to now. MacHaffie's brief history is now fully updated and revised here and combined with her lively anthology of primary readings to offer unparalled access…
Outline: Islam is now an American phenomenon. Once considered primarily an Arab lifestyle and an alien faith, it has moved into a position of such size and strength that, according to one estimate, it will be the second largest religious community in the United States by the twenty-first century. This groundbreaking sociological study presents the experiences and problems of today's immigrant M…
Outline : The first major study of the movement leaders of neo-evangelicalism, Awakening the Evangelical Mind draws upon untapped resources to tell the story of how evangelicalism developed as an intellectual movement in the middle of the twentieth century. In Awakening the Evangelical Mind, Owen Strachan provides an accessible historical survey of "neo-evangelicalism," tracing the rise of a mo…
Outline: Eliza Davis-George, the daughter of slaves, grew up in racially segregated Texas, where she took to heart the stories she'd heard as a child in Sunday school. Empowered by her faith, this remarkable woman broke through barriers of sex, color, and status as she set out to bring the truth and hope of the Gospel to the people of western Africa. In the jungles of Liberia, "Mother Eliza," a…
Outline: The church in America has been willingly taken captive. The captors are American culture and ideals: consumerism, pragmatism, self-sufficiency, individualism, positive thinking, personal prosperity, and nationalism. These are antithetical to the gospel, but we have neverthelss made them part and parcel with it. We are well on our way to a Christless Christianity. The result? The f…
Outline: This landmark book about America's "habits of the heart" - Tocqueville's expression for the mix of traits essential to our national character - explores the traditions Americans use to make sense of themselves and their society, and it presents one of today's major moral dilemmas: the conflict between our fierce individualism and our urgent need for community and commitment to one anot…
Overview: Moving from a sweeping overview of history to blow-by-blow accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, the author describes how the art of diplomacy has created the world in which we live, and how America's approach to foreign affairs has always differed vastly from that of other nations. Brilliant, controversial, and profoundly incisive, this book stands as the culmination of a…
Outline: - How do I resolve workplace conflicts sparked by differences of belief? - How much profit can I conscientiously seek? - Can I justify using prayer to try to beat the competition? - Should I bring up the issue of faith with my co-workers, or should I keep my beliefs to myself? It often seems difficult - if not possible - to reconcile matters of faith and business. At times it ma…
Outline: For too long, the advancement of democracy has been misunderstood as requiring the abandoment or privatization of Christianity and other religions. Religion, however, is not an isolable function that humans can marginalize or emphasize at will. The faiths, including the secular faiths, by which people live direct their lives and not only their modes of worship. Working within an Americ…
Outline: In this book, the author has provided a masterly account of this transition and what it signified for the meaning of Christian theology itself. In the decades preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, American theologians mastered the conceptual languages of republican political thought and commonsense moral reasoning. Because religious thinkers learned to speak these languages so well,…
Overview: "American Christians are going to have to come to terms with the brute fact that we live in a secular culture, one in which our beliefs make increasingly little sense. We speak a language that the world more and more either cannot hear or finds offensive to its ears." From the inside, American churches are hollowed out by the departure of young people and by an insipid pseude-Christ…
Overview: Jonathan Edwards (1703 - 1758) is widely regarded as one of the major thinkers in the Christian tradition and an important and influential figure in American theology. This book is a collection of specially commissioned essays that track his intellectual legacies from the work of his immediate disciples who formed the New Divinity movement in colonial New England, to his impact upon …