"For too long, the study of religious life in Late Antiquity has relied on the premise that Jews, pagans, and Christians were largely discrete groups divided by clear markers of belief, ritual, and social practice. More recently, however, a growing body of scholarship is revealing the degree to which identities in the late Roman world were fluid, blurred by ethnic, social, and gender differences. Christianness, for example, was only one of a plurality...

Since the Revolutionary War, Mainline Christianity has been made up of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism--the Congregational Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Disciples of Christ. These denominations have been the dominant cultural representatives since the nineteenth century of how and where the majority of American...

"One cannot understand Latin America without understanding the history of the Catholic Church in the region. Catholicism has been predominant in Latin America and it has played a definitive role in its development. It helped to spur the conquest of the New World with its emphasis on missions to the indigenous peoples, controlled many aspects of the colonial economy, and played key roles in the struggles for Independence. The History of the Catholic...

This is cultural history of mainline Protestantism and American cities--most notably, New York City--focuses on wealthy, urban Episcopalians and the influential ways they used their money. Peter W. Williams argues that such Episcopalians, many of them the country's most successful industrialists and financiers, left a deep and lasting mark on American urban culture. Their sense of public responsibility derived from a sacramental theology that gave...

Americans love God. We stamp God on our money, our bumper stickers, and our bodies. With a church on nearly every street, it's hard to deny our country's deep connection with the divine. Whip-smart and provocative, Turner explores the United States' vast influence on God, told through an amazing true history of faith, politics, and evangelical pyrotechnics. From Puritans to Pentecostals, from progressives to mega-pastors, Turner examines how American...

Go behind the scenes of China's spiritual revival An amazing true adventure that will inspire and challenge you When the Chinese government opened the country to foreigners in early 1978, Dennis Balcombe jumped at the chance to visit. After basing his ministry out of Hong Kong for nearly ten years, he was eager to finally proclaim the gospel in the country he had come to serve. In less than a year, he was meeting house church leaders and supplying...

The history of South Carolina Presbyterians between 1925 and 1985 covers a period of great development achieved through many difficulties in church and society. We tell the story not only of the churches belonging to the PCUS, sometimes called "southern Presbyterians," but also African-American churches and institutions in South Carolina established after the Civil War by PCUSA missionaries from the North. For all Presbyterians, events between the...

A fascinating work by the Reverend William Hull arguing against the tenets of Calvinism, a reformation of theological thinking that came out of the confessional and ecclesiastical debates of the 16th century.

An expert study of church planting in the most secular part of contemporary Europe In this book, Stefan Paas offers thoughtful analysis of reasons and motives for missionary church planting in Europe, and he explores successful and unsuccessful strategies in that post-Christian secularized context. Drawing in part on his own involvement with planting two churches in the Netherlands, Paas explores confessional motives, growth motives, and innovation...

For years, historians have argued that Catholicism in the United States stood decisively apart from papal politics in European society. The Church in America, historians insist, forged an "American Catholicism," a national faith responsive to domestic concerns, disengaged from the disruptive ideological conflicts of the Old World. Drawing on previously unexamined documents from Italian state collections and newly opened Vatican archives, Peter D'Agostino...