The Gospel Working Up offers a history of three generations of Baptist and Methodist clergymen in nineteenth-century Virginia, and through them of the congregations and communities in which they lived and worked. Schweiger examines the religious experience both before and after the Civil War, showing how Southern Protestantism became an instrument of spiritual, moral, material, and cultural progress.

Black Zion explores the myriad ways in which African American religions have encountered Jewish traditions, beliefs, and spaces. The collection's unifying argument is that religion is the missing piece of the cultural jigsaw puzzle, that much of the recent turmoil in black-Jewish relations would be better understood, if not alleviated, if the religious roots of those relations were illuminated. Toward that end, the contributors look a number of provocative topics, including the concept of the Chosen People, the typological identification of blacks with Jews, the actual identification...

This book provides a fresh, in-depth examination of the Revival of 1857-58, a widespread religious awakening most famous for urban prayer meetings in major metropolitan centers across the United States. Often mentioned in religious history texts and articles but overshadowed by scholarly attention to the first and second "Great Awakenings," the revival has lacked a critical, book-length analysis. This study will help to fill this gap and to place the event within the context of Protestant revival traditions in America.

The Revival of 1857-58 was a multifaceted religious movement that Long...

American women played in important part in Protestant foreign missionary work from its early days at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This work allowed them to disseminate the Prostestant religious principles in which they believed, and by enabling them to acquire professional competence as teachers, to break into public life and create new opportunities for themselves and other women. No institution was more closely associated with women missionaries than Mount Holyoke College. In this book, Amanda Porterfield examines Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon and the missionary women she...

Although the importance of Congregationalism in early Massachusetts has engaged historians' attention for generations, this study is the first to approach the Puritan experience in Congregational church government from the perspective of both the pew and the pulpit.

For the past decade, author James F. Cooper, Jr. has immersed himself in local manuscript church records. These previously untapped documents provide a fascinating glimpse of lay-clerical relations in colonial Massachusetts, and reveal that ordinary churchgoers shaped the development of Congregational practices as...

This book looks at the role of Methodism in the Revolutionary and early national South. When the Methodists first arrived in the South, Lyerly argues, they were critics of the social order. By advocating values traditionally deemed "feminine," treating white women and African Americans with considerable equality, and preaching against wealth and slavery, Methodism challenged Southern secular mores. For this reason, Methodism evoked sustained opposition, especially from elite white men. Lyerly analyzes the public denunciations, domestic assaults on Methodist women and children, and mob...

This book tells how a group of Protestant theologians forged a theology of international engagement for America in the 1930s and 40s, and how in doing so they informed the public rationale for the United States' participation in World War II and stimulated American leadership in establishing both secular and international organizations for the promotion of world order. This remarkable group included Henry P. Van Dusen, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Bennett, Francis P. Miller, Georgia Harkness, and Samual McCrea Cavert. Warren show how, in creating a coherent, theologically-derived position and...

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evangelicals often took their place among prominent practicing scientists, and their perspectives exerted a considerable impact on the development of modern western science. Over the last century, however, evangelical scientists have become less visible, even as the focus of evangelical engagement has shifted to political and cultural spheres.

Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective offers the first wide-ranging survey of the history of the encounter between evangelical Protestantism and science. Comprising papers by leading...

This book offers a broad-based study of Jonathan Edwards as a religious thinker. Much attention has been given to Edwards in relation to his Puritan and Calvinist forebears. McClymond, however, examines Edwards in relation to his eighteenth-century intellectual context. In each of six chapters, he contextualizes and interprets some text or issue in Edwards within the emergent post-Lockean, post-Newtonian culture of the English-speaking world of the 1700s. Among the topics considered are spiritual perception, metaphysics, contemplation, ethics and morality, and apologetics.

This book offers a comprehensive examination of Methodist practice, tracing its evolution from the earliest days up to the present. Using liturgical texts as well as written accounts in popular and private sources, Karen Westerfield Tucker investigates the various rites and seasons of worship in Methodism and examines them in relation to American society.