Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.

In 1900 many assumed the twentieth century would be a Christian century because Western -Christian empires- ruled most of the world. What happened instead is that Christianity in the West declined dramatically, the empires collapsed, and Christianity's center moved to Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific. How did this happen so quickly? Respected scholar and teacher Scott Sunquist surveys the most recent century of Christian history, highlighting epochal changes in global Christianity. He also suggests lessons we can learn from this remarkable global Christian reversal. Ideal for an...

In the beginning of American history, the Word was in Spanish, Latin, and native languages like Nahuatal. But while Spanish and Catholic Christianity reached the New World in 1492, it was only with settlements in the seventeenth century that English-language Bibles and Protestant Christendom arrived. The Puritans brought with them intense devotion to Scripture, as well as their ideal of Christendom -- a civilization characterized by a thorough intermingling of the Bible with everything else. That ideal began this country's journey from the Puritan's City on a Hill to the Bible-quoting country...