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The 1920s marked one of the greatest cultural shifts in American life, and the risque flapper became the icon of the period. But there was a counter image of the feminine; the decade was also the golden age for girl evangelists who defended traditional morals and traditional Christian beliefs and attitudes.
Sam Haselby offers a new and persuasive account of the role of religion in the formation of American nationality, showing how a contest within Protestantism reshaped American political culture and led to the creation of an enduring religious nationalism. Following U.S. independence, the new republic faced vital challenges, including a vast and unique continental colonization project undertaken without, in the centuries-old European senses of the terms, either "a church" or "a state." Amid this crisis, two distinct Protestant movements arose: a popular and rambunctious frontier revivalism; and a nationalist, corporate missionary movement dominated by Northeastern elites. The former heralded t...
The term "Manifest Destiny" has traditionally been linked to U.S. westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the desire to spread republican government, and racialist theories like Anglo-Saxonism. Yet few people realize the degree to which "Manifest Destiny" and American republicanism relied on a deeply anti-Catholic civil-religious discourse. John C. Pinheiro traces the rise to prominence of this discourse, beginning in the 1820s and culminating in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848. Pinheiro begins with social reformer and Protestant evangelist Lyman Beecher, who was largely responsible for synthesizing seemingly unrelated strands of religious, patriotic, expansionist, and political ...
In 1997, Terryl Givens's The Viper on the Hearth was praised as a new classic in Mormon studies. In the wake of Mormon-inspired and -created artistic, literary, and political activity - today's "Mormon moment" - Givens presents a revised and updated edition of his book to address the continuing presence and reception of the Mormon image in contemporary culture. "The Viper on the Hearth by Terryl L. Givens is a remarkably lucid and useful study of the patterns of American prejudices against the Mormon people. It provides also a valuable paradigm for the study of all religious 'heresy'." - Harold Bloom "A well-researched and insightful book...He illuminates the phenomena of religious heresy an...
Focusing on the slaveholding border state of Missouri, Houses Divided shows that congregational and local denominational schisms, which arose initially over the moral question of African-American bondage, played a central role in sectionalism, Civil War, and Reconstruction.
A Divinity for All Persuasions uncovers the prevailing religious sensibility at the center of early America's most popular form of print: the almanac. Employing a wealth of archival material, T.J. Tomlin reveals the pan-Protestant sensibility distributed through the almanacs' pages between 1730 and 1820, finding that almanacs played an unparalleled role in reinforcing British North America's "shared religious culture."
Revising dominant accounts of Puritanism and challenging the literary history of sentimentalism, Sympathetic Puritans argues that a Calvinist theology of sympathy shaped the politics, religion, rhetoric, and literature of early New England. Scholars have often understood and presented sentimentalism as a direct challenge to stern and stoic Puritan forebears; the standard history traces a cult of sensibility back to moral sense philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment, not Puritan New England. Abram C. Van Engen has unearthed pervasive evidence of sympathy in a large archive of Puritan sermons, treatises, tracts, poems, journals, histories, and captivity narratives. He demonstrates how two t...
Scripting Pentecost explores and develops an analysis of worship and liturgy in Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions. Organized into three main sections, history, theology, and contemporary practice, the first section quarries the historical trajectories of classic Pentecostalism, the Charismatic movement, Third-Wave, and Oneness Pentecostalism. Particular attention is given to the liturgical approaches of some of the earliest leaders, including William J. Seymour, Alexander Boddy, and Aimee Semple McPherson. The second section, constructive theology, offers theological approaches to liturgical studies from Pentecostal and Charismatic perspectives. In this section the Pentecostal and Charismatic tradition is advanced and extended by an interaction with ecumenical sources. The third section, case studies in contemporary worship theology and practice, examines the actual performance of liturgy through selected global case studies chosen to reflect a diversity of ecclesial practice in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania.
In this cultural and intellectual history, David Burns contends that the influence of biblical criticism in America was more widespread than has been thought. Burns proves this point by uncovering the hidden history of the radical historical Jesus, a construct created and sustained by freethinkers, feminists, socialists, and anarchists during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The result of this exploration is a new narrative revealing that Cyrenus Ward, Caroline Bartlett, George Herron, Bouck White, and other radical religionists had an impact on the history of religion in America rivaling that of recognized religious intellectuals such as Shailer Mathews, Charles Briggs, Francis Peabody, ...
Philip L. Barlow offers an in-depth analysis of the approaches taken to the Bible by major Mormon leaders, from its beginnings to the present. He shows that Mormon attitudes toward the Bible comprise an extraordinary mix of conservative, liberal, and radical ingredients: an almost fundamentalist adherence to the King James Version co-exists with belief in the possibility of new revelation and surprising ideas about the limits of human language. Barlow's exploration takes important steps toward unraveling the mystery of this quintessential American religious phenomenon. This updated edition of Mormons and the Bible includes an extended bibliography and a new preface, casting Joseph Smith's mission into a new frame and treating evolutions in Mormonism's biblical usage in recent decades.