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Maintaining hope in Christ for the weary soul. In the face of trials and tribulations, persevering in the faith can be a difficult task. For Puritan pastor--theologian William Gouge, this question was of critical importance for those he shepherded. His theology of assurance during the difficult seasons in life provided direction and help to weary souls. In Christ Is Yours, Eric Rivera explores Gouge's theology, revealing a man who cared deeply about the truths of Scripture and the spiritual lives of his community. His theology was focused on the promises of God found in Scripture while staying grounded in the realities of life. This message of perseverance and hope is just as necessary for Christ-followers today as it was then. Written for academics and pastors alike, Rivera brings this important theology to a modern audience.
Psalms in the Early Modern World is the first book to explore the use, interpretation, development, translation, and influence of the Psalms in the Atlantic world, 1400-1800. In the age of Reformation, when religious concerns drove political, social, cultural, economic, and scientific discourse, the Bible was the supreme document, and the Psalms were arguably its most important book.The Psalms played a central role in arbitrating the salient debates of the day, including but scarcely limited to the nature of power and the legitimacy of rule; the proper role and purpose of nations; the justification for holy war and the godliness of peace; and the relationship of individual and community to G...
Cultures of Care: Domestic Welfare, Discipline and the Church of Scotland, c. 1600–1689 explores voluntary networks of charity and their interaction with the Reformed Church of Scotland. Whereas most previous histories have assessed the growth of institutional charity, this book contends that the Reformed Church of Scotland was heavily reliant on informal, domestic modes of self-help throughout the seventeenth century. The existence and widespread acceptance of informal care dramatically changes our understanding of the impact of the Calvinist Reformation. Local ecclesiastical and secular leaders did not have a concerted policy to affect or ameliorate informal networks of care. Reformed authorities were members of these networks, as well as agents to police them, collapsing distinctions between informal and formal modes of Calvinist authority.
The essays in this volume give an account of how the agenda for theology and religious studies was set and reset throughout the twentieth century - by rapid and at times cataclysmic changes (wars, followed by social and academic upheavals in the 1960s), by new movements of thought, by a bounty of archaeological discoveries, and by unprecedented archival research. Further new trends of study and fresh approaches (existentialist, Marxian, postmodern) have in more recent years generated new quests and horizons for reflection and research. Theological enquiry in Great Britain was transformed in the late nineteenth century through the gradual acceptance of the methods and results of historical cr...
The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain explores the practice of sacramental confession in Spain between roughly 1500 and 1700. One of the most significant points of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy, confession lay at the heart of attempts to bring religious reformation to bear upon the lives of early modern Spaniards. Rigid episcopal legislation, royal decrees, and a barrage of prescriptive literature lead many scholars to construct the sacrament fundamentally as an instrument of social control foisted upon powerless laypeople. Drawing upon a wide range of early printed and archival materials, this book considers confession as both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon. Rather than relying solely upon prescriptive and didactic literature, it considers evidence that describes how the people of early modern Spain experienced confession, offering a rich portrayal of a critical and remarkably popular component of early modern religiosity.
This book explores the part played by music, especially group singing, in the Protestant reforms in Strasbourg. It considers both ecclesiastical and ’popular’ songs in the city, how both genres fitted into people’s lives during this time of strife and how the provision and dissemination of music affected the new ecclesiastical arrangement.
Heinrich Heshusius (1556-97) became a leading church superintendent and polemicist during the early age of Lutheran orthodoxy, and played a major role in the reform and administration of several German cities during the late Reformation. As well as offering an introduction to Heshusius's writings and ideas, this volume explores the wider world of late-sixteenth-century German Lutheranism in which he lived and worked. In particular, it looks at the important but inadequately understood network of Lutheran clergymen in North Germany centred around universities such as Rostock, Jena, Königsberg, and Helmstedt, and territories such as Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, in the years after the promulgat...
Catholicism, as it developed in colonial Mexico, helped to create a broad and remarkably inclusive community of Christian subjects, while it also divided that community into countless smaller flocks. Taking this contradiction as a starting point, Matthew D. O’Hara describes how religious thought and practice shaped Mexico’s popular politics. As he shows, religion facilitated the emergence of new social categories and modes of belonging in which individuals—initially subjects of the Spanish crown, but later citizens and other residents of republican Mexico—found both significant opportunities for improving their place in society and major constraints on their ways of thinking and beha...
This issue of Carmelite Studies presents new insights into the lives and writings of individuals who knew Teresa of Ávila in life and who, after her death in 1582, worked to propagate and defend her legacy, including the illustrious nuns Ana de San Bartolomé, Ana de Jesús, María de San José, and Ana de San Agustín, and her close male confidant and collaborator, Jerónimo Gracián de la Madre de Dios. A further focus of the essays is the reception of the Teresian heritage by individuals outside the order, as mediated by these early Discalced Carmelites and by Teresa's published writings. More Information The essays were originally presented at the 2004 symposium "The Heirs of St. Teresa...
On 13 June 1525, Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in a private ceremony officiated by city preacher Johann Bugenhagen. Whilst Luther was not the first former monk or Reformer to marry, his marriage immediately became one of the iconic episodes of the Protestant Reformation. From that point on, the marital status of clergy would be a pivotal dividing line between the Catholic and Protestant churches. Tackling the early stages of this divide, this book provides a fresh assessment of clerical marriage in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the debates were undecided and the intellectual and institutional situation remained fluid and changeable. It investigates t...