Reformers on Stage


Book Description

Examines the social and religious messages of plays presented across the Low Countries, showing how they promoted or opposed calls for reform, religious and otherwise and argues that dramatists reshaped reform ideas to accommodate their own concerns.




Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage


Book Description

Huston Diehl sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth reestablished Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and in many respects revolutionized English society. Drawing on the insights of symbolic anthropologists, Diehl explores the relationship between the suppression of late medieval religious cultures, with their rituals, symbols, plays, processions, and devotional practices, and the emergence of a popular theater under the Protestant monarchs Elizabeth and James. Questioning long-held assumptions that the reformed religion was inherently antitheatrical, she shows how the reformers invented new forms of theater, even as they condemned a Roman Catholic theatricality they associated with magic, sensuality, and duplicity. Using as her central texts the tragedies of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster, Diehl maintains that plays of the period reflexively explore their own power to dazzle, seduce, and deceive. Employing a reformed rhetoric that is both powerful and profoundly disturbing, they disrupt their own stunning spectacles. Out of this creative tension between theatricality and antitheatricality emerges a distinctly Protestant aesthetic.




Theatre and Reformation


Book Description

Argues that England's earliest Protestants were involved in drama as patrons, playwrights, performers and spectators.




What is Reformed Theology?


Book Description

What Do the Five Points of Calvinism Really Mean? Many have heard of Reformed theology, but may not be certain what it is. Some references to it have been positive, some negative. It appears to be important, and they'd like to know more about it. But they want a full, understandable explanation, not a simplistic one. What Is Reformed Theology? is an accessible introduction to beliefs that have been immensely influential in the evangelical church. In this insightful book, R. C. Sproul walks readers through the foundations of the Reformed doctrine and explains how the Reformed belief is centered on God, based on God's Word, and committed to faith in Jesus Christ. Sproul explains the five points of Reformed theology and makes plain the reality of God's amazing grace.




The Rich Man and Lazarus on the Reformation Stage


Book Description

"The Rich Man and Lazarus," one of Jesus' best known parables, has been the subject of discussion and interpretation from the Church Fathers to the present day. Ten plays written in German during the sixteenth century dramatize this parable. Despite the fact that the parable and these plays are concerned with wealth and poverty, damnation and salvation - ideas that are at the very center of the social turmoil and theological struggles of the Reformation - the plays are virtually unknown, in part because six of the ten have not been reprinted or edited since they appeared between 1550 and 1579.




Theatre and the English Public from Reformation to Revolution


Book Description

This book presents new and overarching perspectives on the relationship between theatre and public from the Henrician Reformation through the interregnum to the Restoration, combining vivid case studies with discussion of theatre's continued importance in shaping the early modern public. Considered from the vantage point of theatre, the early modern public becomes visible as an unruly agent of political change, a force that authorities both feared and appealed to, and one that proved ultimately beyond control. It was through theatrical strategies that rulers and their opposition addressed the early modern public, and in turn it was theatre's public potential that shaped the development of the stage during the revolutionary years of the seventeenth century. In this volume, Katrin Beushausen examines sources including irreverent satirical pamphlets, regal spectacles, anti-theatrical polemic and visions of state theatres, casting new light on the development of the early modern public and theatre.




Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern


Book Description

This study examines the sociocultural context of Bern's ten Reformation plays, authored by Niklaus Manuel and Hans von Rute, and argues that Protestant theater was instrumental in creating cultural community among an urban populace estranged from Catholic tradition.




Our Stage and Its Critics


Book Description




The Second Reformation


Book Description

Bill Beckham describes how Jesus used groups of different sizes and relationships (three, twelve, seventy, and one hundred and twenty at Pentecost) to fulfill his global purpose. Beckham demonstrates how we need to relearn Christ's same relational strategy to plant churches and win a lost world for Jesus Christ. Beckham shows how many churches today have allowed an Old Testament theology to dictate their ecclesiology. He then offers practical advice and clear direction to return to the original way to live Church as an expansion movement, like Jesus did. In this book Beckham shows how the Cell Church Movement is God's answer to take the church back to a place of fruitfulness and effectiveness.




An Islamic Reformation?


Book Description

Over the last two decades we have seen a vast number of books published in the West that treat Islamic fundamentalism as a rising threat to the western values of secularism and democracy. In the last decade scholars began proclaiming an existent or emerging "clash" between East and West, Islam and Christianity, or in the case of Benjamin R. Barber, "Jihad and "McWorld." More recently, some western scholars have offered another interpretation. Focusing on the work of contemporary Muslim intellectuals, these scholars have begun to argue that what we are witnessing, in Islamic contexts, is tantamount to a Reformation. An Islamic Reformation attempts to evaluate this claim through the work of emerging and top scholars in the fields of political science, philosophy, anthropology, religion, history and Middle Eastern studies. The overall goal of this volume is to question the impact of various reformist trends throughout the Middle East. Are we witnessing a growth in fundamentalism or the emergence of an Islamic Reformation? What does religious practice in this region reflect? What is the usefulness of approaching these questions through Christian/Islamic and West/East dichotomies? Unique in its focus and scope, An Islamic Reformation represents an emerging vanguard in the discussion of Islamic religious heritage and practice and its effect on world politics.