In this volume Ann Lee Bressler offers the first cultural history of American Universalism and its central teaching -- the idea that an all-good and all-powerful God saves all souls. Although Universalists have commonly been lumped together with Unitarians as "liberal religionists," in its origins their movement was, in fact, quite different from that of the better-known religious liberals.
Unlike Unitarians such as the renowned William Ellery Channing, who stressed the obligation of the individual under divine moral sanctions, most early American Universalists looked to the omnipotent...

This book examines the career of Rufus Anderson, the central figure in the formation and implementation of missionary ideology in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Corresponding Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions from 1832 to 1866, Anderson effectively set the terms of debate on missionary policy on both sides of the Atlantic and indeed long after his death. In telling his story, Harris also speaks to basic questions in nineteenth-century American history and in the relationship between American culture and the cultures of what later came to be...

How did the constitutional framers envision the role of religion in American public life? Did they think that the government had the right to advance or support religion and religious activities? Or did they believe that the two realms should remain forever separate? Throughout American history, scholars, Supreme Court justices, and members of the American public have debated these questions. The debate continues to have significance in the present day, especially in regard to public schools, government aid to sectarian education, and the use of public property for religious symbols.
In...

Is it possible for conservative Protestant groups to survive in secular institutional settings? Here, Bramadat offers an ethnographic study of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) at McMaster University, a group that espouses fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible, women's roles, the age of the earth, alcohol consumption, and sexual ethics. In examining this group, Bramadat demonstrates how this tiny minority thrives within the overwhelmingly secular context of the University.

This book is a study of seven autobiographies by women who defied the domestic ideology of nineteenth-century America by serving as itinerant preachers. Literally and culturally homeless, all of them used their autobiographies to construct, from an array of materials, plausible identities as women and Christians in an age that found them hard to understand.

Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers invited all people to identify God's image in the victims of war, slavery, and addiction. Identifying the Image of God traces the theme of identification--and its liberal Christian roots--through the literature of social reform, focusing on sentimental novels, temperance tales, and slave narratives, and invites contemporary activists to revive the "politics of identification."

Born in Connecticut, Lemuel Haynes was first an indentured servant, then a soldier in the Continental Army, and, in 1785, an ordained congregational minister. Haynes's writings constitute the fullest record of a black man's religion, social thought, and opposition to slavery in the late-18th and early-19th century. Drawing on both published and rare unpublished sources, John Saillant here offers the first comprehensive study of Haynes and his thought.

Denominationalism--that ''free market'' mode of organizing religious life which, some say, manages to combine traditional religious claims with a free society in a peculiarly American way--is the subject of the previously unpublished papers in this collection. No institution, the editors argue, is as crucial for the understanding of American religious life, yet so much in need of reassessment as the denomination. In a wide-ranging collection of articles, a distinguished set of commentators on American religion examine the denomination's past and present roles, its definable nature, and its...