Building a Protestant Left


Book Description

He follows the twists and turns of this story from Niebuhr's Christian realist positions of the 1940s, through Protestant participation in the complex social movements of the 1950s and 1960s, to the emergence of various liberation theologies - African American, feminist, Latin American, and others - that used C&C as a central arena of debate in the 1970s and 1980s.




The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left


Book Description

For decades now, Americans have believed that their country is deeply divided by “culture wars” waged between religious conservatives and secular liberals. In most instances, Protestant conservatives have been cast as the instigators of such warfare, while religious liberals have been largely ignored. In this book, L. Benjamin Rolsky examines the ways in which American liberalism has helped shape cultural conflict since the 1970s through the story of how television writer and producer Norman Lear galvanized the religious left into action. The creator of comedies such as All in the Family and Maude, Lear was spurred to found the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in response to the rise of the religious right. Rolsky offers engaged readings of Lear’s iconic sitcoms and published writings, considering them as an expression of what he calls the spiritual politics of the religious left. He shows how prime-time television became a focus of political dispute and demonstrates how Lear’s emergence as an interfaith activist catalyzed ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who were determined to push back against conservatism’s ascent. Rolsky concludes that Lear’s political involvement exemplified religious liberals’ commitment to engaging politics on explicitly moral grounds in defense of what they saw as the public interest. An interdisciplinary analysis of the definitive cultural clashes of our fractious times, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left foregrounds the foundational roles played by popular culture, television, and media in America’s religious history.




Protestant Empire


Book Description

The imperial expansion of Europe across the globe was one of the most significant events to shape the modern world. Among the many effects of this cataclysmic movement of people and institutions was the intermixture of cultures in the colonies that Europeans created. Protestant Empire is the first comprehensive survey of the dramatic clash of peoples and beliefs that emerged in the diverse religious world of the British Atlantic, including England, Scotland, Ireland, parts of North and South America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Beginning with the role religion played in the lives of believers in West Africa, eastern North America, and western Europe around 1500, Carla Gardina Pestana shows how the Protestant Reformation helped to fuel colonial expansion as bitter rivalries prompted a fierce competition for souls. The English—who were latecomers to the contest for colonies in the Atlantic—joined the competition well armed with a newly formulated and heartfelt anti-Catholicism. Despite officially promoting religious homogeneity, the English found it impossible to prevent the conflicts in their homeland from infecting their new colonies. Diversity came early and grew inexorably, as English, Scottish, and Irish Catholics and Protestants confronted one another as well as Native Americans, West Africans, and an increasing variety of other Europeans. Pestana tells an original and compelling story of their interactions as they clung to their old faiths, learned of unfamiliar religions, and forged new ones. In an account that ranges widely through the Atlantic basin and across centuries, this book reveals the creation of a complicated, contested, and closely intertwined world of believers of many traditions.




No Man Left Behind


Book Description

David Murrow's book, Why Men Hate Going to Church, has heightened awareness of an epidemic--Patrick Morley offers the solution. No Man Left Behind is the blueprint for growing a thriving men's ministry that has the power to rebuild the church as we know it, pulling men off the couch and into active involvement as part of the body of Christ.




The Right of the Protestant Left


Book Description

While serving as an introduction to ecumenical liberal Protestantism and the social gospel over the course of the twentieth-century this book also highlights certain totalitarian as well as more fundamental conservative tendencies within those movements.




Making Christian History


Book Description

Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision. Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.




When God Spoke Greek


Book Description

Most readers do not know about the Bible used almost universally by early Christians, or about how that Bible was birthed, how it grew to prominence, and how it differs from the one used as the basis for most modern translations. Although it was one of the most important events in the history of our civilization, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the third century BCE is an event almost unknown outside of academia. Timothy Michael Law offers the first book to make this topic accessible to a wider audience. Retrospectively, we can hardly imagine the history of Christian thought, and the history of Christianity itself, without the Old Testament. When the Emperor Constantine adopted the Christian faith, his fusion of the Church and the State ensured that the Christian worldview (which by this time had absorbed Jewish ideals that had come to them through the Greek translation) would leave an imprint on subsequent history. This book narrates in a fresh and exciting way the story of the Septuagint, the Greek Scriptures of the ancient Jewish Diaspora that became the first Christian Old Testament.




The Christian Left


Book Description

The church has been invaded. The Christian Left unveils how liberal thought has entered America's sanctuaries, exchanging the Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the trinity of diversity, acceptance, and social justice. This in-depth look at church history, world politics, and pop culture masterfully exposes the rise and agenda of the Christian Left. Readers will learn how to: Identify and refute the lies of the Christian Left Uncover the meaning of love as Jesus defined it Navigate controversial subjects such as abortion, gender identity, and the doctrine of hell Gain confidence in upholding biblical values Come face-to-face with the person of Jesus, who is neither left nor right but the embodiment of truth and grace Be equipped with a strong understanding of issues facing the church today and empowered to elevate God's truth, justice, and wisdom.




An Anxious Age


Book Description

We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.




William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England


Book Description

William Perkins and the Making of Protestant England presents a new interpretation of the theology and historical significance of William Perkins (1558-1602), a prominent Cambridge scholar and teacher during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Though often described as a Puritan, W. B. Pattersonargues that Perkins was in fact a prominent and effective apologist for the established church whose contributions to English religious thought had an immense influence on an English Protestant culture that endured well into modern times. The English Reformation is shown to be a part of theEuropean-wide Reformation, and Perkins himself a leading Reformed theologian.In A Reformed Catholike (1597), Perkins distinguished the theology upheld in the English Church from that of the Roman Catholic Church, while at the same time showing the considerable extent to which the two churches shared common concerns. His books dealt extensively with the nature of salvationand the need to follow a moral way of life. Perkins wrote pioneering works on conscience and "practical divinity". In The Arte of Prophecying (1607), he provided preachers with a guidebook to the study of the Bible and their oral presentation of its teachings. He dealt boldly and in down-to-earthterms with the need to achieve social justice in an era of severe economic distress. Perkins is shown to have been instrumental to the making of a Protestant England, and to have contributed significantly to the development of the religious culture not only of Britain but also of a broad range ofcountries on the Continent.