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This book challenges American Presbyterians to remember their calling as Christians. The author believes that Presbyterians are summoned to a character of life that will awaken and address the religious questions of today with powerful and persuasive Christian perspectives and answers. By recognizing again the message of the good news of the gospel and by speaking directly to our world, the authors tell how American Presbyterians can recover their identity as Reformed Christians and continue to make a creative contribution to the witness of the church in the world. Through its examination of American Presbyterianism, the Presbyterian Presence series illuminates patterns of change in mainstream Protestantism and American religious and cultural life in the twentieth century.
On Palm Sunday 1964, at the Second Presbyterian Church in Memphis, a group of black and white students began a "kneel-in" to protest the church's policy of segregation, a protest that would continue in one form or another for more than a year and eventually force the church to open its doors to black worshippers. In The Last Segregated Hour, Stephen Haynes tells the story of this dramatic yet little studied tactic which was the strategy of choice for bringing attention to segregationist policies in Southern churches. "Kneel-ins" involved surprise visits to targeted churches, usually during Easter season, and often resulted in physical standoffs with resistant church people. The spectacle of ...
“You must be from the North,” was a common, derogatory reaction to the activities of white women throughout the South, well-meaning wives and mothers who joined together to improve schools or local sanitation but found their efforts decried as more troublesome civil rights agitation. You Must Be from the North: Southern White Women in the Memphis Civil Rights Movement focuses on a generation of white women in Memphis, Tennessee, born between the two World Wars and typically omitted from the history of the civil rights movement. The women for the most part did not jeopardize their lives by participating alongside black activists in sit-ins and freedom rides. Instead, they began their jour...
Originally published in 1987, this new, expanded edition further argues that the civil rights movement and its opposition, with their conflicting images and hopes for America, foreshadowed the ongoing "culture wars" of recent days."--BOOK JACKET.
A sophisticated inquiry into tourism's social and economic power across the South. In the early 19th century, planter families from South Carolina, Georgia, and eastern North Carolina left their low-country estates during the summer to relocate their households to vacation homes in the mountains of western North Carolina. Those unable to afford the expense of a second home relaxed at the hotels that emerged to meet their needs. This early tourist activity set the stage for tourism to become the region's New South industry. After 1865, the development of railroads and the bugeoning consumer culture led to the expansion of tourism across the whole region. Richard Starnes argues that western No...
In Methodists and the Crucible of Race, 1930-1975, Peter C. Murray contributes to the history of American Christianity and the Civil Rights movement by examining a national institution the Methodist Church (after 1968 the United Methodist Church) and how it dealt with the racial conflict centered in the South. Murray begins his study by tracing American Methodism from its beginnings to the secession of many African Americans from the church and the establishment of separate northern and southern denominations in the nineteenth century. He then details the reconciliation and compromise of many of these segments in 1939 that led to the unification of the church. This compromise created the rac...
This volume considers three issues in the Presbyterian Church that have proved to be perplexing to the witness of faith: outreach, ecumenism, and pluralism. The first four essays illustrate that troubling questions about the church's witness arose in this century and divided Presbyterian opinion in the midst of American social problems. Thus, verbal and physical outreach became competing priorities. The final five essays examine racial/ethnic Presbyterian experiences. Examples of the interlocking and sometimes interfering interplay of outreach, ecumenism, and pluralism in the quest for distinctive Presbyterian discipleship are discussed. Through its examination of American Presbyterianism, thePresbyterian Presenceseries illuminates patterns of change in mainstream Protestantism and American religious and cultural life in the twentieth century.
Politics and Religion in the White South examines the powerful ways in which religious considerations have shaped American political discourse. Since the inception of the Republic, politics have remained a subject of lively discussion and debate. Although based on secular ideals, American government and politics have often been peppered with Christian influences. Especially in the mostly Protestant South, religion and politics have been nearly inextricable. This collection of thirteen essays from prominent historians and political scientists, including Mark K. Bauman, Charles S. Bullock III, Natalie M. Davis, Andrew M. Manis, Mark J. Rozell, and Clyde Wilcox, explores the intersection of religion, politics, race relations, and Southern culture from post–Civil War America to the present, when the religious right has begun to exercise a profound influence on the course of American politics.
On May 17, 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, the United States Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. When the court failed to specify a clear deadline for implementation of the ruling, southern segregationists seized the opportunity to launch a campaign of massive resistance against the federal government. What were the tactics, the ideology, the strategies, of segregationists? This collection of original essays reveals how the political center in the South collapsed during the 1950s as opposition to the Supreme Court decision intensified. It tracks the ingenious, legal, and often extralegal, means by which white southerners rebelled against the ruling: how white men fell back on masculine pride by ostensibly protecting their wives and daughters from the black menace, how ideals of motherhood were enlisted in the struggle for white purity, and how the words of the Bible were invoked to legitimize white supremacy. Together these essays demonstrate that segregationist ideology, far from a simple assertion of supremacist doctrine, was advanced in ways far more imaginative and nuanced than has previously been assumed.
Can people actually touch the reality that Paul talks about in his letter to the Ephesians, a reality where Christ has "broken down the dividing wall"? The experience of Oakhurst Presbyterian Church says "Yes!" Oakhurst Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia has been nationally recognized as a model of a successful multicultural church. Here, in O Lord, Hold Our Hands, pastors Nibs Stroupe and Caroline Leach share their story--with all of its peaks and valleys--and, in doing so, provide a guide to multicultural ministry that any church can use to build or enhance its own ministry.