SUBJECT INDEX:

RELIGION:

Christianity

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
Matthew Avery Sutton
Aimee Semple McPherson was the most flamboyant and controversial minister in the United States between the world wars, building a successful megachurch, a mass media empire, and eventually a political career to resurrect what she believed was America's Christian heritage. Sutton's definitive study reveals the woman as a trail-blazing pioneer, her life marking the beginning of Pentecostalism's advance to the mainstream of American culture.
Hardcover 2007
An Ecstasy of Folly
Laura Salah Nasrallah
Who is a true prophet? Who has real access to divine realms of knowledge? Early Christian communities accused each other's prophets of madness and of making false claims to divine knowledge. This book argues that early Christians did not seek to answer questions about true prophecy or to define madness and rationality, but rather used this discourse in order to control knowledge, to establish their own authority, and to define Christian identity.
Paperback 2004
The Betrayal of Faith
Emma Anderson
Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with traditional Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates key struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the seventeenth-century Atlantic, even as it has a startling relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.
Hardcover 2007
Beyond Essence
Lori K. Pearson
This book demonstrates the intimate connection between Troeltsch's philosophical writings on the essence of Christianity and his historical investigations of Christianity's past. Pearson argues that as a result of his historical work, Troeltsch moved beyond the category of essence and sought new ways of theorizing Christian identity in the context of modernity's pluralistic yet fragmented society.
Paperback 2008
Boston Priests, 1848-1910
Donna Merwick
Merwick rejects the usual assumption that Boston Catholicism is, definitively, Irish Catholicism. In her penetrating study of three distinct generations of Boston priests in the late nineteenth century, the author shows that Irish Catholicism met with steady opposition. Her account of the struggle of Boston clerics and intellectuals to relate their faith to their experiences in the changing city provides a new interpretation of Boston Catholic culture.
Hardcover 1973
Christian Art
Rowena Loverance
What makes works of art Christian? And what, as such, distinguishes them from other works? These are the questions at the center of this book, which is at once a sumptuously illustrated survey of Christian art across space and time and a probing study of what "Christian art" really means, how it functions, where it arises, and whom it serves.
Hardcover 2007
Christianity and Ecology
Dieter T. Hessel, Editor
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Editor
What can Christianity as a tradition contribute to the struggle to secure the future well-being of the earth community? This collaborative volume, the third in the series on religions of the world and the environment, explores problematic themes that contribute to ecological neglect or abuse and offer constructive insight into and responsive imperatives for ecologically just and socially responsible living.
Paperback 2000 / Hardcover 2000
Christianity in China
Suzanne Wilson Barnett, Editor
John King Fairbank, Editor
These studies examine writings by Protestant missionaries in China from 1819 to 1890. Nine historians contribute to a composite picture of the missionary pioneers, the literature they produced, the changes they sustained through immersion in Chinese culture, and their efforts to interpret that culture for their constituencies at home.
Hardcover 1985
Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750-1874
William J. Callahan
Nowhere in Europe has the Roman Catholic Church exerted a more mystical hold on the life of a nation than it has in Spain. Yet this hold has not been unchanging or unchallenged. This contribution to European historical literature provides a clear and dispassionate account of successive ecclesiastical-secular conflicts and controversies, and deftly summarizes the diverse ideological and intellectual currents of the times.
Hardcover 1984
Colleges in Controversey
John W. Padberg
Padberg has written the first full-length study of these colleges, from their revival in 1815 to their suppression in 1880. Drawing almost exclusively on archival material not previously utilized, Father Padberg places his study against the background of anti-clericalism, revolution, the Second Empire, and the first decade of the Third Republic.
Hardcover 1969
Commentaries, Volume 1, Books I-II
Pius II
Edited by Margaret Meserve
Edited by Marcello Simonetta
Pius II (1405-1464) began life as Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in a small town near Siena, and became a famous Latin poet and diplomat. Originally an opponent of the papacy, he eventually reconciled himself with the Roman church and became a priest, then a cardinal. Finally he was elected Pope Pius II (1458) and dedicated his pontificate to organizing a pan-European crusade against the Ottoman Empire. Pius's Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated and corrected version of the 1937 translation.
Hardcover 2004
Commentaries, Volume 2, Books III-IV
Pius II
Edited by Margaret Meserve
Edited by Marcello Simonetta
The Renaissance popes were among the most enlightened and generous patrons of arts and letters in the Europe of their day. The diaries of Pius II give us an intimate glimpse of the life and thought of one of the greatest of the Renaissance popes. Commentaries, the only autobiography ever written by a pope, was composed in elegant humanistic Latin modeled on Caesar and Cicero. This edition contains a fresh Latin text based on the last manuscript written in Pius's lifetime and an updated translation.
Hardcover 2007
Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan
Nam-lin Hur
During the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) every household was expected to be affiliated with a Buddhist temple, and every citizen had to be given a Buddhist funeral. These customs gave rise to the danka system of funerary patronage, which became a public institution when the shogunate adopted it as an effective means of controlling the populace. In this study, Hur follows the historical development of the danka system and details the social forces, political concerns, and religious beliefs that drove this "economy of death."
Hardcover 2007
Demons and the Making of the Monk
David Brakke
In this finely written study of demonology and Christian spirituality in fourth- and fifth-century Egypt, David Brakke examines how the conception of the monk as a holy and virtuous being was shaped by the combative encounter with demons. Drawing on biographies of exceptional monks, collections of monastic sayings and stories, letters from ascetic teachers to their disciples, sermons, and community rules, Brakke crafts a compelling picture of the embattled religious celibate.
Hardcover 2006
Deus Destroyed
George Elison
Paperback 1988
Diplomacy and Dogmatism
De Lamar Jensen
Showing how Continental diplomacy was dominated by religious zeal in the late sixteenth century, and how the fanaticism of the French religious wars formed a prelude to a reaction toward political absolutism, Jensen draws on a fund of untapped manuscript and printed sources, including Mendoza's coded letters, some of which he was the first to decipher.
Hardcover 1964
Divided by Faith
Benjamin J. Kaplan
Can people coexist in peace when their basic beliefs are irreconcilable? Kaplan responds by taking us back to early modern Europe, when the issue of religious toleration was no less pressing than it is today. Divided by Faith is both history from the bottom up and a much-needed challenge to our belief in the triumph of reason over faith. This compelling story reveals that toleration has taken many guises in the past and suggests that it may well do the same in the future.
Hardcover 2007
Documentary Sources for the History of the Rus' Metropolitanate
Andrei Pliguzov
This work is the first collection of source materials on Orthodox Church history published in the United States, and the first to specialize in the medieval doctrine of the Rus' Metropolitanate. The publication presents over 250 documents in chronological order, including many formerly unknown to scholars.
Hardcover
English Chantries
Alan Kreider
The chantries of medieval England were founded in the belief that intercessory masses could shorten the period spent by souls in purgatory. Kreider writes about chantries' social, religious, and numerical importance; the significance of purgatory in their founding; and the theological and economic changes of the 1530s and 1540s that caused the government to jettison traditional practices concerning prayers for the deceased.
Hardcover 1979
Episcopal Power and Florentine Society, 1000-1320
George Dameron
This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance.
Hardcover 1991
Faith on the Margins
Charles H. Parker
In the wake of the 1572 revolt against Spain, the new Dutch Republic outlawed Catholic worship and secularized all church property. Calvinism prevailed as the public faith, yet Catholicism experienced a resurgence in the first half of the seventeenth century, with membership rivaling that of the Calvinist church. In a wide-ranging analysis of a marginalized yet vibrant religious minority, Parker examines this remarkable revival.
Hardcover 2008
The Faithful
James M. O'Toole
Shaken by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, and challenged from within by social and theological division, Catholics in America are at a crossroads. O’Toole tells the story of this ancient church from the perspective of ordinary Americans, the lay believers who have kept their faith despite persecution from without and clergy abuse from within.
Hardcover 2008
The Fire Spreads
Randall J. Stephens
Pentecostalism came to the South following the post-Civil War holiness revival, a northern-born crusade that emphasized sinlessness and religious empowerment. With the growth of southern Pentecostal denominations and the rise of new, affluent congregants, the movement slipped cautiously into the evangelical mainstream. By the 1980s the once-apolitical faith looked entirely different: while many still watched and waited for spectacular signs of the end, a growing number did so as active political conservatives.
Hardcover 2008
Flesh Made Word
Aviad Kleinberg
Translated by Jane Marie Todd
In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful—the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints.Kleinberg argues that the saints’ stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment. By telling and retelling the story of virtue and salvation, by expanding the religious imagination of the West, they were shaping and reshaping Christianity itself.
Hardcover 2008
Four Cultures of the West
John W. O'Malley
The workings of Western intelligence in our day--whether in politics or the arts, in the humanities or the church--are as troubling as they are mysterious, leading to the questions: Where are we going? What in the world were we thinking? By exploring the history of four "cultures" so deeply embedded in Western history that we rarely see their instrumental role in politics, religion, education, and the arts, this timely book provides a broad framework for addressing these questions in a fresh way.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2006
Green Sisters
Sarah McFarland Taylor
Green sisters are environmentally active Catholic nuns working to heal the earth as they cultivate new forms of religious culture. Inviting us into their world, Taylor offers a firsthand understanding of the experiences of women whose lives bring together orthodoxy and activism, and whose lifestyle provides a compelling view of sustainable living.
Hardcover 2007
Greetings in the Lord
AnneMarie Luijendijk
This is the first book-length study on Christians in the ancient Egyptian city of Oxyrhynchus, the site where some of the most important and oldest fragments of early Christian books were unearthed. Bringing the people in these dry papyrus letters and documents back to life, the book reveals how diverse Christians lived in this city of diverse situations.
Paperback 2008
Hearing Things
Leigh Eric Schmidt
"Faith cometh by hearing"--so said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear tuned to God's voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about "hearing things"--an intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
Heaven Below
Grant Wacker
Grant Wacker gives an in-depth account of the religious practices of American pentecostal churches. He examines various aspects of pentecostal culture, including rituals, speaking in tongues, the authority of the Bible, the central role of Jesus in everyday life, the gifts of prophecy and healing, ideas about personal appearance, women's roles, and race relations.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
A History of Private Life, Volume I, From Pagan Rome to Byzantium
Series edited by Phillippe Ariès
Series edited by Georges Duby
Paul Veyne, Volume editor
Arthur Goldhammer, Translator
First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world.
Hardcover 1987 / Paperback 1992
History of Vardan and the Armenian War
Elishe
Translated with commentary by Robert W. Thomson
Elishē's History of Vardan and the Armenian War expresses in more general terms his attitude as a Christian Armenian to the problems of cultural survival and patriotism in a hostile environment. His history profoundly influenced Armenian writers from classical times to the present; its hero, Vardan, remains the ideal figure of a patriot even in Soviet Armenia.
Hardcover 1982
Holding Bishops Accountable
Timothy D. Lytton
The prevalence of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic clergy and its shocking cover-up by church officials have obscured the largely untold story of the tort system’s remarkable success in bringing the scandal to light. The lessons of clergy sexual abuse litigation give us reason to reconsider the case for tort reform and to look more closely at how tort litigation can enhance the performance of public and private policymaking institutions.
Hardcover 2008
Homosexuality and Civilization
Louis Crompton
How have major civilizations of the last two millennia treated people who were attracted to their own sex? In a narrative tour de force, Louis Crompton chronicles the lives and achievements of homosexual men and women alongside a darker history of persecution, as he compares the Christian West with the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, Arab Spain, imperial China, and pre-Meiji Japan.
Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2006
The Huguenots in America
Jon Butler
In this first modern history of the Huguenots' New World experience, Jon Butler traces the Huguenot diaspora across late seventeenth-century Europe, explores the causes and character of their American emigration, and reveals the Huguenots' secular and religious assimilation in three remarkably different societies--Boston, New York, and South Carolina.
Hardcover 1984 / Paperback
Imagining the Sacred Past
Samantha Kahn Herrick
Investigating the role of religious tradition in the legitimation of power and the establishment of identity, Herrick illuminates the often murky early history of the duchy of Normandy. Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes, shedding light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.
Hardcover 2007
Inside the Vatican
Thomas Reese
Drawing on more than a hundred interviews with Vatican officials, this book affords a firsthand look at the people, the politics, and the organization behind the institution. Throughout, revealing and colorful anecdotes from church history and the present day bring the unique culture of the Vatican to life.
Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
Inventing Superstition
Dale B. Martin
Martin provides the first detailed genealogy of the idea of superstition, its history over eight centuries, from classical Greece to the Christianized Roman Empire of the fourth century C.E. With illuminating reference to the writings of philosophers, historians, and medical teachers he demonstrates that the concept of superstition was invented by Greek intellectuals to condemn popular religious practices and beliefs, especially the belief that gods or other superhuman beings would harm people or cause disease. Tracing the social, political, and cultural influences that informed classical thinking about piety and superstition, nature and the divine, Inventing Superstition exposes the manipulation of the label of superstition in arguments between Greek and Roman intellectuals on the one hand and Christians on the other, and the purposeful alteration of the idea by Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian apologists in late antiquity.
Hardcover 2004 / Paperback 2007
Jesus among Her Children
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre
This book explores how scholarly constructions of Christian origins participate in contemporary efforts to confirm or challenge particular understandings of the essence of Christianity. Johnson-DeBaufre offers alternative readings to key Q texts, readings that place an interest in the community that shaped Jesus at the center of inquiry.
Paperback 2006
Journey to the East
Liam Matthew Brockey
It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China.
Hardcover 2007 / Paperback 2008
Late Antiquity
Peter Brown
Paperback 1998
The Le Mans Forgeries
Walter A. Goffart
The episcopal biographies, saints' lives, charters, and poems known collectively as the "Le Mans forgeries" are an intricate puzzle that has occupied critics of medieval sources ever since the seventeenth century. On the basis of extensive manuscript study, Goffart disentangles the order of composition and authoritatively pronounces on the authenticity of the eighty-four Le Mans charters. Most of all, he insists that the forgeries are an essay on church property and its law.
Hardcover 1966
Leaves from Paradise
Edited by Jeffrey F. Hamburger
A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist. The richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ’s “beloved disciple” in 14th-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism.
Paperback 2008
Lord Bishop
Standish Meacham
Hardcover 1970
The Maze and the Warrior
Craig Wright
Craig Wright explores the complex symbolism of the labyrinth in architecture, religious thought, music, and dance from the Middle Ages to the present.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2004
Migration Miracle
Jacqueline Maria Hagan
Migration Miracle humanizes the immigration controversy by exploring the harsh realities of the migrants’ desperate journeys. Drawing on over 300 interviews with men, women, and children, Hagan focuses on an unexplored dimension of the migration undertaking—the role of religion and faith in surviving the journey.
Hardcover 2008
Muscular Christianity
Clifford Putney
In this fascinating study, Putney details how Protestant leaders promoted competitive sports and physical education to create an ideal of Christian manliness.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
The Muslim Jesus
Tarif Khalidi, Ed. and Trans.
This work presents in English translation the largest collection ever assembled of the sayings and stories of Jesus in Arabic Islamic literature. The 300 sayings and stories, arranged in chronological order, show us how the image of this Jesus evolved throughout a millennium of Islamic history.
Hardcover 2001 / Paperback 2003
Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres, 1572-1576
Robert Kingdon
Kingdon writes about the reactions to the massacres that were published at the time, showing how the relatively new medium of print was used by the Protestants to shape reaction to the catastrophe an early example of the printing press as an agent of social and political change. The book contributes to an understanding of the history of printed propaganda and the role of myths in historical events, and illuminates important aspects of international diplomacy and political thought during the period of the later Reformation.
Hardcover 1988
The Newman Brothers
William Robbins
The mid-nineteenth century was a period of extraordinary intellectual excitement and tension and nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in the divergent careers of Cardinal Newman and his brother Francis. Both were men of considerable mental powers and high moral purpose. They shared a devotion to the search for religious truth and spiritual values, yet their intellectual development drove them further and further apart until they came to represent the two opposing philosophical positions of their age. Professor Robbins' study of the brothers reveals in a new and striking way the master currents of the period which carried these symbolical figures in such different directions.
Hardcover 1966
On Religious Liberty
James Calvin Davis
Banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for his refusal to conform to Puritan religious and social standards, Roger Williams established a haven in Rhode Island for those persecuted in the name of the religious establishment. Davis gathers together important selections from Williams's public and private writings on religious liberty, illustrating how this renegade Puritan radically reinterpreted Christian moral theology and the events of his day in a powerful argument for freedom of conscience and the separation of church and state.
Paperback 2008 / Hardcover 2008
On Zion's Mount
Jared Farmer
On Zion’s Mount shows how, paradoxically, the Mormons created their homeland at the expense of the local Indians—and how they expressed their sense of belonging by investing Mt. Timpanogos with “Indian” meaning.
Hardcover 2008
On the Donation of Constantine
Lorenzo Valla
Translated by G. W. Bowersock
Valla (1407–1457) was the leading theorist of the Renaissance humanist movement. In On the Donation of Constantine he uses new philological methods to attack the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy’s claims to temporal rule, in a brilliant analysis that is often seen as marking the beginning of modern textual criticism. This volume provides a new translation with introduction and notes by Bowersock.
Paperback 2008
Orthodoxy and Nationality
Keith Hitchins
The Rumanian experience has significance beyond the boundaries of Transylvania. Hitchins elucidates its connection to the complex process of national development that all the peoples of the Habsburg monarchy were undergoing, and suggests its relevance to contemporary Austrian policy toward national aspirations in general.
Hardcover 1977
The Path to Christian Democracy
Noel Cary
Challenging those who seek continuity in German history primarily in terms of its long march toward Nazism, this book searches for the indigenous origins of postwar German democracy. By exploring the links between earlier abortive Catholic initiatives and the range of competing postwar visions of the new party system, this book moves Catholic Germany from the periphery to the heart of the issue of continuity in modern German history.
Hardcover 1996
The Peculiar Life of Sundays
Stephen Miller
From Augustine to Caesarius, through the Reformation and the Puritan flight from England, down through the ages to contemporary debates about Sunday worship, Miller explores the fascinating history of the Sabbath.
Hardcover 2008
The Pope, His Banker, and Venice
Felix Gilbert
This study is a story of how several men worked, intrigued, and made business deals against the backdrop of an Italy invaded by continental countries and England. As a dramatic account that brings together diplomacy, war, business, and politics, this book is unique. It juxtaposes differing institutional structures and the various political ways among Italy's city states; it also brings into sharp focus the new men of the Renaissance.
Hardcover 1980 / Paperback 1991
The Puritan Moment
William Hunt
Paperback
The Puritan Ordeal
Andrew Delbanco
More than an ecclesiastical or political history, this book is a vivid description of the earliest American immigrant experience. It depicts the dramatic tale of the seventeenth-century newcomers to our shores as they were drawn and pushed to make their way in an unsettled and unsettling world.
Hardcover 1989 / Paperback 1991
Rebecca's Revival
Jon F. Sensbach
This is the remarkable story of a Caribbean woman--a slave turned evangelist--who helped inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebecca Protten left an enduring influence on African-American religion and society.
Hardcover 2005 / Paperback 2006
Red-Hot and Righteous
Diane Winston
In this study of American religion, urban life, and commercial culture, Diane Winston shows how a (self-styled "red-hot") militant Protestant mission established a beachhead in the modern city. When The Salvation Army, a British evangelical movement, landed in New York in 1880, local citizens called its eye-catching advertisements "vulgar" and dubbed its brass bands, female preachers, and overheated services "sensationalist." Yet a little more than a century later, this ragtag missionary movement had evolved into the nation's largest charitable fund-raiser. Winston illustrates how the Army borrowed the forms and idioms of popular entertainments, commercial emporiums, and master marketers to deliver its message.
Hardcover 1999 / Paperback 2000
The Reformation of the Keys
Ronald K. Rittgers
Unlike other Protestants, Lutherans chose not to abolish private confession but to change it to suit their theological convictions and social needs. In a fascinating examination of this new religious practice, Ronald Rittgers traces the development of Lutheran private confession, demonstrating how it consistently balanced competing concerns for spiritual freedom and moral discipline. The reformation of private confession was part of a much larger reformation of the power of the keys that had profound implications for the use of religious authority in sixteenth-century Germany.
Hardcover 2004
The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne
A. N. Galpern
This study in religious anthropology explores the social history of popular belief. In addition to the historical geography and quantitative material that are hallmarks of the French tradition, the author studies the rich artistic evidence that still graces the provincial churches. He charts the paths of antipathy that converged in civil war, and concludes with a discussion of the late-sixteenth-century atmosphere of revivalism, which mimicked the earlier spiritual climate.
Hardcover 1976
Religious Enthusiasm in the New World
David S. Lovejoy
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America, established society branded as "enthusiasts" those unconventional but religiously devout extremists who stepped across orthodox lines and claimed an intimate, emotional relationship with God. This book is a study of the enthusiasts who migrated to the American colonies as well as those who emerged there. It provides essential historical perspective to the current interest in popular religion.
Hardcover 1985
Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church
Andrea Sterk
Although an ascetic ideal of leadership had both classical and biblical roots, it found particularly fertile soil in the monastic fervor of the fourth through sixth centuries. Church officials were increasingly recruited from monastic communities, and the monk-bishop became the dominant model of ecclesiastical leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire and Byzantium. Focusing on four foundational figures--Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom--Sterk explores the social, political, intellectual, and theological grounding for this development.
Hardcover 2004
Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity
George W. E. Nickelsburg
In this groundbreaking publication, originally published in 1972, George Nickelsburg places ideas in their historical circumstances as he probes biblical and postbiblical texts and challenges widely accepted scholarship. This book provides a window into aspects of the ancient apocalyptic worldview whose dynamics and functions are often misunderstood.
Paperback 2007
Rewiewing Liberty
Joan S. Bennett
Hardcover 1988
Righteous Discontent
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups.
Paperback / Hardcover
Rus’ Restored
Translated with commentary by David Frick
Meletij Smotryc’kyj
A prominent religious figure and polemicist, Meletij Smotryc'kyj was caught up in the struggle between Orthodox and Uniate beliefs. His polemics served as the cornerstone of the Orthodox response to the Polish-Lithuanian Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He later argued for a new unity between the eastern and western Churches. The works collected in this volume, written over a period of twenty years, offer unique insight into the elite of early modern Rus' and their place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Hardcover 2006
Sayings Traditions in the Apocryphon of James
Ron Cameron
The discovery and publication of the Apocryphon of James has significantly expanded the spectrum of early Christian literature about Jesus. Cameron provides a form-critical analysis which aims to clarify the ways in which the sayings of Jesus were used and transformed in early Christian communities. By recognizing the importance of this particular document, scholars will no longer be able to regard the synoptic gospels of the New Testament as unique or sufficient for understanding the trajectory of the Jesus tradition.
Paperback 2005
The Secret Revelation of John
Karen L. King
Karen L. King offers an illuminating reading of this ancient text, said to be Christ's revelation to his disciple John. In her analysis, the Revelation becomes a comprehensible religious vision--and a window on the religious culture of the Roman Empire. A translation of the complete Secret Revelation of John is included.
Hardcover 2006 / Paperback 2008
Singing the Gospel
Christopher Boyd Brown
This book offers a new appraisal of the Reformation and its popular appeal, based on the place of German hymns in the sixteenth-century press and in the lives of early Lutherans. The Bohemian mining town of Joachimsthal--where pastors, musicians, and laity forged an enduring and influential union of Lutheranism, music, and culture--is at the center of the story.
Hardcover 2005
Sisters in Arms
Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Sisters in Arms is the first definitive history of Catholic nuns in the Western world. Unfolding century by century, this epic drama encompasses every period from the dawn of Christianity to the present.
Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1998
Tradition and Composition in the Epistula Apostolorum
Julian V. Hills
In the first major study in English of the Epistle of the Apostles (Epistula Apostolorum), Julian V. Hills probes its remarkable witness to the traditions that circulated in Jesus' name in the second century. Hills tackles the document's literary framework, collecting and assessing signals to its composition. In detailed analyses of passages, Hills shows how older traditions were reshaped and interpreted according to the distinctive communal situation and theological vision of the author. This expanded edition of the out-of-print original, published in 1990, includes a new preface and bibliography.
Paperback
Trent and All That
John W. O'Malley
John O'Malley works out a remarkable guide to the intellectual and historical developments behind the concepts of Catholic reform, the Counter Reformation, and, in his felicitous term, Early Modern Catholicism. The result is the single best overview of scholarship on Catholicism in early modern Europe, delivered in a pithy, entertaining style.
Hardcover 2000 / Paperback 2002
The Virgin and the Bride
Kate Cooper
During the last centuries of the Roman Empire, the prevailing ideal of feminine virtue was radically transformed: the pure but fertile heroines of Greek and Roman romance were replaced by a Christian heroine who ardently refused the marriage bed. How this new concept and figure of purity is connected with--indeed, how it abetted--social and religious change is the subject of Kate Cooper's lively book.
Hardcover 1996 / Paperback 1999
What Happened at Vatican II
John W. O'Malley
During four years in session, Vatican Council II held television audiences rapt with its elegant, magnificently choreographed public ceremonies, while its debates generated front-page news on a near-weekly basis. This book captures the drama of the council, depicting the colorful characters involved and their clashes with one another.
Hardcover 2008
What Is Gnosticism?
Karen L. King
A distinctive Christian heresy? A competitor of burgeoning Christianity? A pre-Christian folk religion traceable to "Oriental syncretism"? How do we account for the disparate ideas, writings, and practices that have been placed under the Gnostic rubric? King's book is both a thorough and innovative introduction to the twentieth-century study of Gnosticism and a revealing exploration of the concept of heresy as a tool in forming religious identity.
Hardcover 2003 / Paperback 2005
Women and Faith
Lucetta Scaraffia, Editor
Gabriella Zarri, Editor
Keith Botsford, Translator
Feminist thought has wrestled with the question of whether religion has been principally responsible for the oppression of women or instead has provided access to culture, public life, and--sometimes--power. This study of Italian women and Catholicism from the fourth through the twentieth century reflects this conflict and the tension between the masculine character of divinity in the Catholic Church and the potential for equality in the gospels and early writings ("neither male nor female, but one in Jesus").
Hardcover 1999