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In the years after 1815, a few visionary entrepreneurs decided the time was right to launch true mass media in America. They believed it was possible through new technology, national organization, and the grace of God to place the same printed message into the hands of every man, woman, and child in America. Though these entrepreneurs were savvy businessmen, their publishing enterprises were not commercial businesses. They were nonprofit religious organizations, including the American Bible Society, American Tract Society, and American Sunday School Union. Faith in Reading tells the story of the noncommercial origins of mass media in America. The theme is how religious publishers learned to work against the flow of ordinary commerce. Religious publishing societies believed that reading was too important to be left to the “market revolution”; they sought to foil the market through the “visible hand” of organization. Though religious publishers worked against the market, they employed modern printing technologies and business methods, and were remarkably successful, churning out millions of Bibles, tracts, religious books, and periodicals. At the same time, they tried to teach people to read those books in the most traditional way. Their aim was to use new mass media to encourage old reading habits. This book examines both publishers and readers. It is about how religious publishing societies imagined their readers. It is also about reader response — how ordinary readers received and read religious books and tracts in early 19th century America.

Protestantism abandoned Christendom by way of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights, and Catholicism did the same in the Declaration of Religious Liberty of the Second Vatican Council. Because scholars have misinterpreted and manipulated the historical background of the meaning of the Free Exercise of Religion and Establishment of Religion, they have led legislators and judges back into the problem of Church and State that prevailed in Christendom, and that the Amendment solved. As a result, the Supreme Court's interpretation of the First Amendment has reached a point of deep confusion and crisis. Whereas the Amendment was intended to specify government's lack of jurisdiction in religion, modern interpretations of it have conferred upon government power to define the meaning of the Free Exercise of Religion, religious neutrality, and what aids or hinders religion. The way out of the present confusion lies in confining government to what is secular and forbidding it to make religious assessments and decisions. Examining the decisions of the Supreme Court, this work demonstrates that by reconnecting with the history of the First Amendment and approaching it as a limitation on the power of government, rather than as a grant to government to protect religious liberty, the courts can escape the crisis and confusion they are presently experiencing. Religious liberty is a natural right. Within the meaning of the First Amendment, the Free Exercise of Religion means freedom from government jurisdiction in religion, not a government guarantee to allow individuals to exercise the religion of their choice.

This book recounts the history of Farmerfield, an African Christian community on South Africa’s troubled Eastern Cape frontier, forged in the secular world of war, violence, and colonial dispossession and subjected to grand evangelical aspirations and social engineering. Farmerfield’s heterogeneous mix of former slaves and displaced Africans found themselves at the cusp of contentious debates about how best to address the social, cultural, economic, and political dislocation colonialism had wrought on African societies. Farmerfield was at once a space, a place, and an idea that Africans, Methodist missionaries, whites, and colonial authorities competed to mold according to their own visions of governance, evangelicalism, and economic development. Farmerfield’s successive cohort of residents from 1838 to 2008 shaped the meaning and content of a civilized, Christianized lifestyle, deploying a range of tactics from negotiation and dissimulation, to deference and defiance. In the process, they vernacularized Christianity, endured the ravages of colonialism and apartheid, used their historical connections to the Methodist Church and South Africa’s land reform legislation to regain land and resurrected the Farmerfield experiment amid new debates about the meaning of post-apartheid land access and citizenship. Farmerfield’s propitious rise, protracted, frustrating decline and fledgling reincarnation reflect epochal chapters in South Africa’s colonial, apartheid, and post-apartheid history as Africans attempted to define the terms of their cultural autonomy, faith, and economic independence.

Among the issues that have divided Eastern and Western Christians throughout the centuries, few have had as long and interesting a history as the question of the filioque—i.e., whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father “and the Son” as the West came to profess, or from the Father alone, as the East has traditionally maintained. For over a millennium Christendom’s greatest minds have addressed and debated the question (sometimes in rather polemical terms), all in the belief that the theological issues at stake were central to an orthodox understanding of the trinitarian God. The history of the filioque is also one of the most interesting stories in all of Christendom, filled with characters and events that would make even the best dramatists envious, and thus a story worth telling. The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy is the first complete English language history of the filioque written in over a century. Beginning with the biblical material and ending with recent agreements on the place and meaning of the filioque, this book traces the history of the doctrine and the controversy that has surrounded it. There are chapters on the Greek and Latin fathers, the ninth century debates, the late medieval era, the Councils of Lyons and Ferrara-Florence, and the post Florentine period, with a separate chapter dedicated to the twentieth and twenty-first century theologians and dialogues that have come closer than ever to solving this thorny, and of yet, unresolved, ecumenical problem.

The 19th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church was held in the city of Trent from 1545 to 1563. Its main object was the definitive determination of the doctrines of the Church in answer to the Protestant heresies. A second object was the execution of a thorough reform of the inner life of the Church by removing numerous abuses that had developed. The result was an all-embracing system of theology, ethics, Christian behavior, religious practice, liturgy, organization, and Roman centralization. The second Vatican Council was convened by Pope John XXIII between 1962 and 1965. It marked a fundamental shift towards the modern Church, and many of the rules and practices established in the 16th century at Trent collapsed and were replaced. Among these were rigorous seminary training for priests, the practice of frequent confessions, fostering of Marian devotion, emphasis on the indissolubility of marriage, restrictions on lay ministry, and many others. In this book, a team of Catholic scholars offers a close examination of the full nature and scope of these changes. Each contributor offers an impartial investigation of a particular issue. Included are chapters on such topics as scripture and tradition, priestly formation, women, popular devotion, canon law, church music, marriage, and the universal catechism.

Surveying the social, geographical, and political context of late 19th and early 20th century Boston, Bendroth offers a new perspective on the rise of American fundamentalism. Her approach emphasizes the importance of local events in dividing Protestant liberals from conservative evangelicals, particularly the energizing force of anti-Catholicism in the 1880s and 1890s. Her analysis emphasizes the interaction of leaders and laypeople, with particular attention to the role of women in generating a militant response to perceived Catholic encroachment. Bendroth also looks at urban fundamentalism within its church context, providing demographic and institutional background on the growth of two very different downtown churches. The first, Tremont Temple, was a revivalist Baptist preaching center that steered clear of militant fundamentalism. The second, Park Street Congregational, aimed at preserving Protestant orthodoxy and, in the 1930s and 1940s, became the nucleus of a conservative evangelical movement that eventually encompassed all of New England. Bendroth tracks the gradual disengagement of conservative Protestants from their urban environment by comparing the strategies of three major city-wide revivals, beginning with J. Wilbur Chapman and Billy Sunday in the World War I era, and ending with Billy Graham’s crusade in 1950. Her book depicts fundamentalists not as militant anti-modernists, but as ordinary people struggling to find a consistent rallying point in a city that was both too liberal to accommodate their beliefs and too conservative to contain their entrepreneurial zeal for change.

Since the 18th-century Enlightenment, the United States and Western Europe's paths to modernity have diverged sharply with respect to religion. In short, Americans have maintained much friendlier ties with traditional forms of religion than their European counterparts. What explains this transatlantic religious divide? While the divide has received considerable commentary from journalists and sociologists in recent decades, this is the first major work of cultural and intellectual history devoted to the subject. Accessing the topic though 19th- and early 20th-century European commentary on the United States, the book argues that an ‘Atlantic gap’ in religious matters has deep and complex historical roots, and enduringly informs some strands of European disapprobation of the United States. While exploring in the first chapters ‘Old World’ disquiet toward and criticism of the young republic's religious freedoms and dynamics, the book pivots in the final chapters and focuses on more constructive assessments of the United States. Acknowledging the importance of Alexis de Tocqueville for the topic, the book argues that voluminous references to him have had a tendency to overshadow other noteworthy European voices. Two underappreciated figures are, then, profiled: the Protestant Swiss–German church historian Philip Schaff, and the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Scholars, journalists, policy makers, and educated citizens on both sides of the Atlantic, the book concludes, ignore religious factors at their peril when considering American-European relations and the history of European attitudes toward the United States.

This book offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. The book chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, it looks at recent scientific findings about religion's biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to age-old traditions about belief and healing.