Download or read book Faith in the Halls of Power written by D. Michael Lindsay and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-10-29 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evangelicals, once at the periphery of American life, now wield power in the White House and on Wall Street, at Harvard and in Hollywood. How have they reached the pinnacles of power in such a short time? And what does this mean for evangelicals--and for America? Drawing on personal interviews with an astonishing array of prominent Americans--including two former Presidents, dozens of political and government leaders, more than 100 top business executives, plus Hollywood moguls, intellectuals, athletes, and other powerful figures--D. Michael Lindsay shows first-hand how they are bringing their vision of moral leadership into the public square. This riveting volume tells us who the real evangelical power brokers are, how they rose to prominence, and what they're doing with their clout. Lindsay reveals that evangelicals are now at home in the executive suite and on the studio lot, and from those lofty perches they have used their influence, money, and ideas to build up the evangelical movement and introduce it to wider American society. They are leaders of powerful institutions and their goals are ambitious--to bring Christian principles to bear on virtually every aspect of American life. Along the way, the book is packed with fascinating stories and striking insights. Lindsay shows how evangelicals became a force in American foreign policy, how Fortune 500 companies are becoming faith-friendly, and how the new generation of the faithful is led by "cosmopolitan evangelicals." These are well-educated men and women who read both The New York Times and Christianity Today, and who are wary of the evangelical masses' penchant for polarizing rhetoric, apocalyptic pot-boilers, and bad Christian rock. Perhaps most startling is the importance of personal relationships between leaders--a quiet conversation after Bible study can have more impact than thousands of people marching in the streets. Faith in the Halls of Power takes us inside the rarified world of the evangelical elite--beyond the hysterical panic and chest-thumping pride--to give us the real story behind the evangelical ascendancy in America. "This important work should be required reading for anyone who wants to opine publicly on what American evangelicals are really up to." --Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) "For people wanting an understanding of how evangelicals have acquired so much power, money, and influence in the past 30 years, this is the ultimate insider's book." --Sojourners Magazine "Anybody who wants to understand the nexus between God and power in modern America should start here." --The Economist "Fascinating." --John Schmalzbauer, Wall Street Journal

Download or read book Hinge Moments written by D. Michael Lindsay and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In life we get opportunities to make decisions that will either change our lives for the better or pose problems for years to come. Exploring these "hinge moments," Gordon College president Michael Lindsay shares faith-based stories of success and failure from his ten-year study of other leaders, providing both practical and spiritual insights for making the most of each stage of life.

Download or read book View From the Top written by D. Michael Lindsay and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn leadership from the best—proven insights from the power elite in business, government, and beyond View from the Top brings readers inside the corridors of power and relates the personal stories and powerful findings from the Platinum Study, a groundbreaking study of 550 elite American CEOs, senior government leaders, and nonprofit executives based on ten years of research. The largest study of its kind, the Platinum Study delves into the domains of the elite with stories that illustrate both the use and misuse of power across the landscape of prominent American institutions such as AT&T, Harvard University, UnderArmour, JP Morgan Chase, Bain & Company, and the White House. The book explores not only how leaders wield power, but it also provides readers with insight into applying the strategies of the successful in their own lives. In the United States, only a few thousand individuals make the decisions that influence the lives of over 300 million people. Whether in the government, business, higher education, or the arts, these individuals direct policy and set the terms of national debates, yet remain virtually unknown. View from the Top explores the real lives of the elite and the social worlds they inhabit, revealing lessons about influence at the top, and the seven principles that shape those in power. The results of the Platinum Study include unexpected truths such as: Being born into wealth is a poor predictor of leadership success One program can set you on the path to leadership It doesn't matter what college you attend A leader's best work never sees the light of day Time-crushed executives are better situated than most to manage their family lives Crisis is the quickest way for a leader to shape an institution Working longer does not mean working better The book examines the different paths to power and describes the essence of leadership and the fundamental traits that distinguish a leader from the pack. For anyone seeking sharpen their leadership skills and impact the world around them, View from the Top: An Inside Look at How People in Power See and Shape the World provides the roadmap to taking charge and inspiring change.

Download or read book The Younger Evangelicals written by Robert E. Webber and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2002-10-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert E. Webber has led worship workshops in every major city in the United States and Canada. Through his conversations and contacts with a network of emerging church leaders he calls the "younger evangelicals," Webber sees how this new generation and their style of leadership is bringing change and renewal to the evangelical church. These leaders, who include those young in spirit as well as young in age, have important insights to offer all generations faced with "doing church" in a rapidly changing postmodern culture. The Younger Evangelicals explores the characteristics of these emerging leaders and provides an outlet for their stories. Beginning with a brief overview of twentieth-century evangelicalism, Webber examines what is different about the twenty-first century younger evangelicals' way of thinking about faith and practicing church. He allows them-Ph.D.s and laypeople-to speak in their own words on issues such as communication, theology, apologetics, pastoral leadership, evangelism, worship, and spiritual formation. Thought provoking, energizing, and timely, The Younger Evangelicals is a landmark book for pastors and church leaders, culture watchers, ministry students, and worship leaders who want to prepare for and respond to the new evangelical awakening brought on by our changing cultural context.

Download or read book Educating All God s Children written by Nicole Baker Fulgham and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children living in poverty have the same God-given potential as children in wealthier communities, but on average they achieve at significantly lower levels. Kids who both live in poverty and read below grade level by third grade are three times as likely not to graduate from high school as students who have never been poor. By the time children in low-income communities are in fourth grade, they're already three grade levels behind their peers in wealthier communities. More than half won't graduate from high school--and many that do graduate only perform at an eighth-grade level. Only one in ten will go on to graduate from college. These students have severely diminished opportunities for personal prosperity and professional success. It is clear that America's public schools do not provide a high quality public education for the sixteen million children growing up in poverty. Education expert Nicole Baker Fulgham explores what Christians can--and should--do to champion urgently needed reform and help improve our public schools. The book provides concrete action steps for working to ensure that all of God's children get the quality public education they deserve. It also features personal narratives from the author and other Christian public school teachers that demonstrate how the achievement gap in public education can be solved.

Download or read book American Gospel written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2007-03-20 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham reveals how the Founding Fathers viewed faith—and how they ultimately created a nation in which belief in God is a matter of choice. At a time when our country seems divided by extremism, American Gospel draws on the past to offer a new perspective. Meacham re-creates the fascinating history of a nation grappling with religion and politics–from John Winthrop’s “city on a hill” sermon to Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence; from the Revolution to the Civil War; from a proposed nineteenth-century Christian Amendment to the Constitution to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s call for civil rights; from George Washington to Ronald Reagan. Debates about religion and politics are often more divisive than illuminating. Secularists point to a “wall of separation between church and state,” while many conservatives act as though the Founding Fathers were apostles in knee britches. As Meacham shows in this brisk narrative, neither extreme has it right. At the heart of the American experiment lies the God of what Benjamin Franklin called “public religion,” a God who invests all human beings with inalienable rights while protecting private religion from government interference. It is a great American balancing act, and it has served us well. Meacham has written and spoken extensively about religion and politics, and he brings historical authority and a sense of hope to the issue. American Gospel makes it compellingly clear that the nation’s best chance of summoning what Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” lies in recovering the spirit and sense of the Founding. In looking back, we may find the light to lead us forward. Praise for American Gospel “In his American Gospel, Jon Meacham provides a refreshingly clear, balanced, and wise historical portrait of religion and American politics at exactly the moment when such fairness and understanding are much needed. Anyone who doubts the relevance of history to our own time has only to read this exceptional book.”—David McCullough, author of 1776 “Jon Meacham has given us an insightful and eloquent account of the spiritual foundation of the early days of the American republic. It is especially instructive reading at a time when the nation is at once engaged in and deeply divided on the question of religion and its place in public life.”—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

Download or read book Why Business Matters to God written by Jeff Van Duzer and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the nature and meaning of doing business and finds it calls for much more than most think. Seattle Pacific School of Business Dean Jeff Van Duzer presents a robust Christian approach that integrates biblical studies with the disciplines of business and displays a vision of business that contributes to the very purposes of God.

Download or read book Surveying the Religious Landscape written by George Gallup and published by Morehouse Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These surveys will appeal to those who track religion professionally, but they will also be of interest to clergy, church members, and others interested in the spiritual landscape of today. A wide variety of beliefs and practices are surveyed including: belief in God, attendance at church or synagogue, religious beliefs of today's teenagers, views about the interaction between politics and religion, life after death, questions of ethics, and others. Surveys address the differences in beliefs among those of various faith perspectives, races, age groups, genders, and those in varying geographic locations.

Download or read book Evangelicals and Israel written by Stephen Spector and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most observers explain evangelical Christians' bedrock support for Israel as stemming from the apocalyptic belief that the Jews must return to the Holy Land as a precondition for the second coming of Christ. But the real reasons, argues Stephen Spector, are far more complicated. In Evangelicals and Israel, Spector delves deeply into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, web sites, publications, news reports, survey research, worship services, and interfaith conferences, to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelical support for Israel.Israel is God's prophetic clock for many evangelicals - irrefutable proof that prophecy is true and coming to pass in our lifetime. But Spector goes beyond end-times theology to find a complex set of motivations behind Israel-evangelical relations. These include the promise of God's blessing for those who bless the Jews; gratitude to Jews for establishing the foundations of Christianity; remorse for the Church's past anti-Semitism; fear that God will judge the nations based on how they treated the Jewish people; and reliance on Israel as the West's firewall against Islamist terrorism. Spector explores many Christian Zionists' hostility toward Islam, but also uncovers an unexpected pragmatism and flexiblility concerning Israel's possession of the entire Holy Land.For evangelicals, politics frequently mixes with faith. Yet Spector argues that evangelical beliefs - though often portrayed as unifying and rigid - are in reality various and even contradictory. Spector uses George W. Bush's beliefs about the Bible as a sounding board for these issues and explores the evangelical influence on his Middle East policies. Evangelicals and Israel corrects much of the speculation about Bush's personal faith and about evangelicalism's impact on American-Middle East relations, and provides the fullest and most nuanced account to date of the motives and theology behind Christian Zionism.

Download or read book Creation of the Sacred written by Walter Burkert and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-01-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacrifice is essential to all religions. Could there be a natural, even biological, reason? Why are sacrifice and numerous other religious rituals and concepts shared by so many different cultures? In this extraordinary book, one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient religions explores the possibility of natural religion.

Download or read book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind written by Mark A. Noll and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Christianity Today Book of the Year Award (1995) “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” So begins this award-winning intellectual history and critique of the evangelical movement by one of evangelicalism’s most respected historians. Unsparing in his indictment, Mark Noll asks why the largest single group of religious Americans—who enjoy increasing wealth, status, and political influence—have contributed so little to rigorous intellectual scholarship. While nourishing believers in the simple truths of the gospel, why have so many evangelicals failed to sustain a serious intellectual life and abandoned the universities, the arts, and other realms of “high” culture? Over twenty-five years since its original publication, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind has turned out to be prescient and perennially relevant. In a new preface, Noll lays out his ongoing personal frustrations with this situation, and in a new afterword he assesses the state of the scandal—showing how white evangelicals’ embrace of Trumpism, their deepening distrust of science, and their frequent forays into conspiratorial thinking have coexisted with surprisingly robust scholarship from many with strong evangelical connections.

Download or read book Researching Power Elites and Leadership written by Christopher Williams and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-05-18 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting new text consolidates the hows and whys of researching powerful people. Written by a leading authority in the field, this book introduces the reader to a significant area of methodology, and provides a research-based contribution to elite and leadership studies. It offers a truly international perspective that will appeal to those studying and engaging with powerful people in a variety of contexts. Useful features include: - A variety of case studies and examples linked to over 1000 sources and resources - Extensive use of figures throughout the text to illustrate key points - Templates and models for planning and presentations The book promotes a practical future-oriented approach to support and inspire academic, professional and civil society researchers at all levels. It introduces new research frameworks and facilitates critical techniques through Critical Process Analysis. This is a must-have resource and an excellent new addition to the field of elite and leadership studies.

Download or read book Jesus and Justice written by Peter Goodwin Heltzel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-21 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely book investigates the increasing visibility and influence of evangelical Christians in recent American politics with a focus on racial justice. Peter Goodwin Heltzel considers four evangelical social movements: Focus on the Family, the National Association of Evangelicals, Christian Community Development Association, and Sojourners. The political motives and actions of evangelical groups are founded upon their conceptions of Jesus Christ, Heltzel contends. He traces the roots of contemporary evangelical politics to the prophetic black Christianity tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the socially engaged evangelical tradition of Carl F. H. Henry. Heltzel shows that the basic tenets of King's and Henry's theologies have led their evangelical heirs toward a prophetic evangelicalism in a shade of blue green--blue symbolizing the tragedy of black suffering in the Americas, and green symbolizing the hope of a prophetic evangelical engagement with poverty, AIDS, and the environment. This fresh theological understanding of evangelical political groups shines new light on the ways evangelicals shape and are shaped by broader American culture.

Download or read book American Apocalypse written by Matthew Avery Sutton and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2015 The first comprehensive history of modern American evangelicalism to appear in a generation, American Apocalypse shows how a group of radical Protestants, anticipating the end of the world, paradoxically transformed it. “The history Sutton assembles is rich, and the connections are startling.” —New Yorker “American Apocalypse relentlessly and impressively shows how evangelicals have interpreted almost every domestic or international crisis in relation to Christ’s return and his judgment upon the wicked...Sutton sees one of the most troubling aspects of evangelical influence in the spread of the apocalyptic outlook among Republican politicians with the rise of the Religious Right...American Apocalypse clearly shows just how popular evangelical apocalypticism has been and, during the Cold War, how the combination of odd belief and political power could produce a sleepless night or two.” —D. G. Hart, Wall Street Journal “American Apocalypse is the best history of American evangelicalism I’ve read in some time...If you want to understand why compromise has become a dirty word in the GOP today and how cultural politics is splitting the nation apart, American Apocalypse is an excellent place to start.” —Stephen Prothero, Bookforum

Download or read book The Family written by Jeff Sharlet and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-05-20 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A journalist's penetrating look at the untold story of christian fundamentalism's most elite organization, a self-described invisible network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful They are the Family—fundamentalism's avant-garde, waging spiritual war in the halls of American power and around the globe. They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls. The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't." Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?" Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

Download or read book To Think Christianly written by Charles E. Cotherman and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive history, Charles Cotherman traces the stories of notable study centers and networks, as well as their influence on twentieth-century Christianity. Beginning with the innovations of L'Abri and Regent College, Cotherman sheds new light on these defining places in evangelicalism's life of the mind.

Download or read book Power Politics and the Fragmentation of Evangelicalism written by Kenneth J. Collins and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 2012-08-02 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kenneth J. Collins traces the establishment of the evangelical enterprise in American culture and its influences on the political and social values of the American landscape throughout the twentieth century, as well as its fragmentation into competing ideological camps.