Download or read book The Search for Social Salvation written by Gary Scott Smith and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In their studies of social Christianity, scholars of American religion have devoted critical attention to a group of theologically liberal pastors, primarily in the Northeast. Gary Scott Smith attempts to paint a more complete picture of the movement. Smith's ambitious and thorough study amply demonstrates how social Christianity--which included blacks, women, Southerners, and Westerners--worked to solve industrial, political, and urban problems; reduce racial discrimination; increase the status of women; curb drunkenness and prostitution; strengthen the family; upgrade public schools; and raise the quality of public health. In his analysis of the available scholarship and case studies of individuals, organizations, and campaigns central to the movement, Smith makes a convincing case that social Christianity was the most widespread, long-lasting, and influential religious social reform movement in American history.

Download or read book The Battle for God written by Karen Armstrong and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-08-10 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late twentieth century, fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in the world, contesting the dominance of modern secular values and threatening peace and harmony around the globe. Yet it remains incomprehensible to a large number of people. In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong brilliantly and sympathetically shows us how and why fundamentalist groups came into existence and what they yearn to accomplish. We see the West in the sixteenth century beginning to create an entirely new kind of civilization, which brought in its wake change in every aspect of life -- often painful and violent, even if liberating. Armstrong argues that one of the things that changed most was religion. People could no longer think about or experience the divine in the same way; they had to develop new forms of faith to fit their new circumstances. Armstrong characterizes fundamentalism as one of these new ways of being religious that have emerged in every major faith tradition. Focusing on Protestant fundamentalism in the United States, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Muslim fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran, she examines the ways in which these movements, while not monolithic, have each sprung from a dread of modernity -- often in response to assault (sometimes unwitting, sometimes intentional) by the mainstream society. Armstrong sees fundamentalist groups as complex, innovative, and modern -- rather than as throwbacks to the past -- but contends that they have failed in religious terms. Maintaining that fundamentalism often exists in symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, each impelling the other on to greater excess, she suggests compassion as a way to defuse what is now an intensifying conflict. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Karen Armstrong's Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

Download or read book Self Rule written by Robert H. Wiebe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart One: The American Exception 1820s-1890s1. Democracy2. The Barbarians3. The People4. In or OutPart Two: Metamorphosis 1890s-1920s5. Sinking the Lower Class6. Raising Hierarchies7. Dissolving the PeoplePart Three: Modern Democracy 1920s-1990s8. The Individual9. The State10. Internal WarsConclusionNotesSpecial Debts and Further ReadingsIndex Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Download or read book Christian Thought in America written by Hannah Schell and published by Augsburg Fortress Publishers. This book was released on 2015 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a short, accessible overview of the history of Christian thought in America, from the Puritans and other colonials to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Each chapter concludes with a short bibliography of recent scholarship for further reading.

Download or read book Modern American Religion Volume 2 written by Martin E. Marty and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1997-06-21 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second volume of two tracing the history of 20th-century American religion, Martin E. Marty tells the story of how America has survived religious disturbances and culturally prospered from them.

Download or read book The Transformation of Theology 1830 1890 written by Charles D. Cashdollar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Cashdollar reinterprets nineteenth-century British and American Protestant thought by identifying positivism as the central intellectual issue of the era. Positivism meant, at first, the ideas of the French thinker Auguste Comte; later in the century, the term indicated a more general opposition to supernatural religion. Cashdollar shows that contemporary thinkers recognized positivism, at each of these stages, as the most fundamental of the proliferating challenges to religious belief. He further reveals how the encounter with positivism altered Protestant orthodoxy--in both subtle and radical ways. Positivists denied that humans could know anything other than physical phenomena. Declaring many orthodox beliefs archaic, they proposed a new, ethically based vision of service to humanity. After portraying the dissemination of these positions among British and American Protestants, the author explains how each of several groups reacted. A few theologians rejected positivism outright, but many more responded by recasting their own beliefs. The implications of this story of change extend to such topics as Darwinism, Biblical criticism, the rise of the social sciences, theological liberalism and the Social Gospel, the beginnings of fundamentalism, and the twentieth-century debate about "creationism" and science. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book Religion in the Modern American West written by Ferenc Morton Szasz and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Americans migrated west, they carried with them not only their hopes for better lives but their religious traditions as well. Yet the importance of religion in the forging of a western identity has seldom been examined. In this first historical overview of religion in the modern American West, Ferenc Szasz shows the important role that organized religion played in the shaping of the region from the late-nineteenth to late-twentieth century. He traces the major faiths over that time span, analyzes the distinctive response of western religious institutions to national events, and shows how western cities became homes to a variety of organized faiths that cast only faint shadows back east. While many historians have minimized the importance of religion for the region, Szasz maintains that it lies at the very heart of the western experience. From the 1890s to the 1920s, churches and synagogues created institutions such as schools and hospitals that shaped their local communities; during the Great Depression, the Latter-day Saints introduced their innovative social welfare system; and in later years, Pentecostal groups carried their traditions to the Pacific coast and Southern Baptists (among others) set out in earnest to evangelize the Far West. Beginning in the 1960s, the arrival of Asian faiths, the revitalization of evangelical Protestantism, the ferment of post-Vatican II Catholicism, the rediscovery of Native American spirituality, and the emergence of New Age sects combined to make western cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco among the most religiously pluralistic in the world. Examining the careers of key figures in western religion, from Rabbi William Friedman to Reverend Robert H. Schuller, Szasz balances specific and general trends to weave the story of religion into a wider social and cultural context. Religion in the Modern American West calls attention to an often overlooked facet of regional history and broadens our understanding of the American experience.

Download or read book Preaching Eugenics written by Christine Rosen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-04 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With our success in mapping the human genome, the possibility of altering our genetic futures has given rise to difficult ethical questions. Although opponents of genetic manipulation frequently raise the specter of eugenics, our contemporary debates about bioethics often take place in a historical vacuum. In fact, American religious leaders raised similarly challenging ethical questions in the first half of the twentieth century. Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics-a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists-those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity-became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American eugenics movement. In the early twentieth century, leaders of churches and synagogues were forced to defend their faiths on many fronts. They faced new challenges from scientists and intellectuals; they struggled to adapt to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization; and they were often internally divided by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists. Rosen draws on previously unexplored archival material from the records of the American Eugenics Society, religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day, and the personal papers of religious leaders such as Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. John M. Cooper, Rev. John A. Ryan, and biologists Charles Davenport and Ellsworth Huntington, to produce an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating. The story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era's newest "sciences," eugenics, sheds important new light on a time much like our own, when religion and science are engaged in critical and sometimes bitter dialogue.

Download or read book Legacy of Hate A Short History of Ethnic Religious and Racial Prejudice in America written by Philip Perlmutter and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-17 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all its foundation on the principles of religious freedom and human equality, American history contains numerous examples of bigotry and persecution of minorities. Now, author Philip Perlmutter lays out the history of prejudice in America in a brief, compact, and readable volume. Perlmutter begins with the arrival of white Europeans, moves through the eighteenth and industrially expanding nineteenth centuries; the explosion of immigration and its attendant problems in the twentieth century; and a fifth chapter explores how prejudice (racial, religious, and ethnic) has been institutionalized in the educational systems and laws. His final chapter covers the future of minority progress.

Download or read book Religion and American Culture written by George M. Marsden and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2018-09-06 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While Americans still profess to be one of the most religious people in the industrialized world, many aspects of American culture have long been secular and materialistic. That is just one of the many paradoxes, contradictions, and surprises in the relationship between Christianity and American culture. In this book George Marsden, a leading historian of American Christianity and award-winning author, tells the story of that relationship in a concise and thought-provoking way. Surveying the history of religion and American culture from the days of the earliest European settlers right up through the elections of 2016, Marsden offers the kind of historically and religiously informed scholarship that has made him one of the nation’s most respected and decorated historians. Students in the classroom and history readers of all ages will benefit from engaging with the story Marsden tells.

Download or read book Critical Issues in American Religious History written by Robert R. Mathisen and published by Baylor University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 821 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Americans as a religious people experience both tension and indecision as they wrestle with a variety of critical issues every day. American society continually struggles with its religious past. The primary and secondary materials included in this volume track religious America's efforts to articulate its identity and destiny and implement its religious creeds and ideals in an ever-changing society.

Download or read book The American Religious Debate Over Birth Control 1907 1937 written by Kathleen A. Tobin and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-07-06 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing debates on the morality of artificial birth control sparked a heated public debate in the early twentieth century in an already religiously fragmented United States. Many denominations took part in the deliberations both publicly and privately. In examining the ideas about contraception and birth control at that time, this book considers the cultural environment, religion and its connection to the roots of birth control, the questioning of religious doctrine, the Protestants' view of birth control, the Lambeth conferences of 1930, the influence of conservatives, and the influence of Catholics. Also discussed is the historical context of fundamentalists versus modernists, neo-Malthusianism, eugenics, immigration, the movement for legalization organized by Margaret Sanger, and how the Catholic Church came to lead religious resistance to artificial birth control.

Download or read book The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism written by Stephen P. Weldon and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Significantly, the book shows why special attention to American liberal religiosity remains critical to a clear understanding of the scientific spirit in American culture.

Download or read book Relations of Rescue The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West 1874 1939 written by Peggy Pascoe Associate Professor of History University of Utah and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990-03-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of late nineteeth-century moral reform, Peggy Pascoe examines four specific cases--a home for Chinese prostitutes in San Francisco, California; a home for polygamous Mormon women in Salt Lake City, Utah; a home for unmarried mothers in Denver, Colorado; and a program for American Indians on the Omaha Reservation in Nebraska--to tell the story of the women who established missionary rescue homes for women in the American West. Focusing on two sets of relationships--those between women reformers and their male opponents, and those between women reformers and the various groups of women they sought to shelter--Pascoe traces the gender relations that framed the reformers' search for female moral authority, analyzes the interaction between women reformers and the women who entered the rescue homes, and raises provocative questions about historians' understanding of the dynamics of social feminism, social control, and intercultural relations.

Download or read book God s Province written by Clark Banack and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2016-06-01 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Compared to the United States, it is assumed that religion has not been a significant factor in Canada’s political development. In God’s Province, Clark Banack challenges this assumption, showing that, in Alberta, religious motivation has played a vital role in shaping its political trajectory. For Henry Wise Wood, president of the United Farmers of Alberta from 1916 until 1931, William "Bible Bill" Aberhart, founder of the Alberta Social Credit Party and premier from 1935 until 1943, Aberhart’s protégé Ernest Manning, Alberta’s longest serving premier (1943–1968), and Manning’s son Preston, founder of the Alberta-based federal Reform Party of Canada, religion was central to their thinking about human agency, the purpose of politics, the role of the state, the nature of the economy, and the proper duties of citizens. Drawing on substantial archival research and in-depth interviews, God’s Province highlights the strong link that exists between the religiously inspired political thought and action of these formative leaders, the US evangelical Protestant tradition from which they drew, and the emergence of an individualistic, populist, and anti-statist sentiment in Alberta that is largely unfamiliar to the rest of Canada. Covering nearly a century of Alberta’s history, Banack offers an illuminating reconsideration of the political thought of these leaders, the goals of the movements they led, and the roots of Alberta’s distinctiveness within Canada. A fusion of religious history, intellectual history, and political thought, God’s Province exposes the ways in which individual politicians have shaped one province’s political culture.

Download or read book A Baptist Democracy written by Lee Canipe and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first decades of the 20th century were days of robust optimism in the United States. These were the confident years of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressive reform and high purpose. This period also marked the high tide of what author Lee Canipe calls "Baptist democracy": the moral overlap between Baptist theology and American democracy that continues to shape the way Baptists in the United States understand and articulate their faith. In this book, Canipe traces the rise of Baptist democracy as reflected in the work of three prominent leaders who made their most significant contributions to Baptist life between 1900 and 1925: Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918), E. Y. Mullins (1860-1928), and George W. Truett (1867-1944). Celebrating the harmony between the principles of their church and the ideals of their state, these three Baptists eloquently articulated what, by the turn of the 20th century, had become an article of faith for many of their fellow Baptists.

Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era written by Catherine Cocks and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-03-13 with total page 697 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Progressive Era, the period in the United States between 1898 and 1917, was a time of great social, political, and industrial change. Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, an event that signaled the emergence of the United States as a great power, the country soon was involved in its first overseas guerrilla war, in the Philippines. Vast changes in communications and transportation, immigration and migration patterns, social mores, gender roles, family structure, class structure, work patterns, business methods, education, intellectual life, religion, the professions, technology, science, medicine, and much else were transforming the scope and feel of people's lives and relationships. In many ways what happened in this era set the agenda for the rest of the 20th century. The Historical Dictionary of the Progressive Era is the most comprehensive and coherent reference work on the Progressive Era. Through its chronology, introductory essay, bibliography, appendixes, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the key events, people, organizations, and ideas of the period, this resource is a lively, complete, and accessible overview of this significant era.