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From the 1620s to the present, Americans have displayed a keen interest in life after death. The sermons and books of seventeenth‐century Puritans, eighteenth‐century theologian Jonathan Edwards, nineteenth‐century revivalist Dwight L. Moody, twentieth‐century evangelist Billy Graham, the recent novels of Mitch Albom and Alice Sebold, and hundreds of other accounts have provided competing conceptions of heaven and of how people can get there. While evangelicals have analyzed these topics the most, mainline Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, spiritualists, New Agers, and numerous others have also offered portraits of heaven and discussed its entrance requirements. Understanding American views of heaven (and hell) requires examining works of art, music, sociology, psychology, folklore, liturgies, sermons, poetry, fiction, near‐death experiences, diaries, letters, devotional books, and systematic theologies. Artists, musicians, social scientists, philosophers, theologians, pastors, evangelists, and novelists have all portrayed the nature of heaven, depicted its marvels, debated the prerequisites for admission, or analyzed Americans' beliefs about the afterlife. The way most Americans picture heaven and salvation is based in part upon their specific religious traditions—Protestant, Catholic, Mormon, Jewish, or Muslim. However, it is also usually closely connected to the features of life people have valued most in the different eras in which they have lived. Americans have generally seen heaven as the most ideal and desirable place they can imagine. While their interpretation of sacred scripture strongly shapes many people's understanding of heaven, their desires and personal life experiences have also significantly influenced their conception of paradise.

For the first twelve hundred years of Christianity, women were ordained into various roles in the church. References to the ordination of women exist in papal, episcopal, and theological documents of the time, and the rites for these ordinations have survived. Yet, many scholars hold that women, particularly in the Western church, were never ordained. A survey of the literature discussing the ordination of women in Western Christianity reveals that most of these scholars use a definition of ordination to determine whether earlier references to the ordination of women were “real” ordinations that would have been unknown in the early Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, ordination was the process and the ceremony by which one moved to any new ministry (ordo) in the community. By this definition, women were ordained into several ministries. Four central ministries of episcopa (women bishop), presbytera (women priest), deaconess and abbess are discussed in detail in order to demonstrate particularly the liturgical roles women performed in the early Middle Ages. A radical change in the definition of ordination during the 11th and 12th centuries not only removed women from the ordained ministry, but also attempted to eradicate any memory of women's ordination in the past. The debate that accompanied this change has left its mark in the literature of the time. However, the triumph of a new definition of ordination as the bestowal of power, particularly the power to confect the Eucharist, so thoroughly dominated western thought and practice by the thirteenth century that the early definition of ordination was almost completely erased.

In urban areas of England during the early nineteenth century, the work of a number of Christian ministers was strongly influenced by the shades of Calvinism they espoused. This book discusses the work of high Calvinists in Manchester, the ‘shock city’ of the age, and London, then the largest city in the world. Six substantial case studies examine the response of ministers and their churches to socio‐economic change. The work of two Christian ministers who upheld evangelical Calvinism, rather than high Calvinism, is explored in order to provide instructive contrasts. Breadth of denominational coverage is maintained––the book features studies of one Anglican, two Strict Baptist, one Presbyterian, and two Independent ministers and their churches. On the basis of manuscripts, printed sources, sermons, and local and denominational press, the study reveals a series of religious subcultures that were remarkably vibrant and active. The popular caricature of high Calvinism is challenged and evidence is presented to show that high Calvinists played a vigorous and successful part in the response of early nineteenth‐century churches to the process of urbanization. Particular attention is given to activity in the realm of evangelism, social concern, education, politics, and responses to poverty. High Calvinism, in the native English tradition, remained a live option in the early nineteenth century.

Hugh of St. Victor (c.1096–1141) left a large and influential corpus of works on all aspects of theology, as well as the liberal arts broadly defined. This book introduces Hugh within his community in twelfth-century Paris and summarizes his major works according to his own threefold conception. First comes the pedagogical foundation (Didascalicon), including the historical sense of sacred scripture, then the (allegorical) framework of scriptural doctrine (especially creation and restoration in De sacramentis), and finally the tropological or spiritual finale of personal appropriation of the biblical message (the ark treatises and the Soliloquy). Hugh’s encyclopedic interests include grammar and geometry, philosophy and all of theology, history and eschatology, Job and Mary, the sacraments broadly and narrowly defined, spirituality, and the Dionysian Celestial Hierarchy. How he held all this together in his thought and corpus is a challenge to modern (and postmodern) readers.

This book traces the development of a theology of nonviolence in the popular literature of antebellum social reform movements. Between 1820 and 1860, American social reformers pioneered a “politics of identification” that was deeply rooted in liberal Christian theology. Activists like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, along with sentimental authors like Catharine Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe, drew on the doctrine of the imago dei, or image of God, to argue that God is present both in the victims of violence and in those who use nonviolent means to overcome oppression. This posed a sharp alternative to the providential theology of Reformed orthodoxy, which was more inclined to see God's hand in wars and other violent events. Proponents of the new theology can be characterized as “radical Christian liberals.” They linked their liberal faith in human nature to the Christian doctrine of the imago dei, yet were willing to contemplate the overthrow of all social institutions, even ostensibly liberal or Christian ones, that blocked the free expression of the imago dei.

Catholics have struggled to reconcile two sets of values, those as Americans and those as Catholics, for more than 200 years, and in this book, Jay Dolan explores how Catholics have met these challenges as New World followers of an Old World faith. He argues that the ideals of democracy – and American culture in general – have deeply shaped Catholicism in the U.S.A., even as far back as 1789, when the nation's first bishop was elected by the clergy (and the pope accepted their choice). Dolan follows the tension between American democratic values and the Catholic doctrine, from the conservative reaction after the fall of Napoleon, to the modernist movement of the late nineteenth century, to the impact of the Second Vatican Council. He explores several issues: grassroots devotional life; the struggle against successive waves of nativism, from nineteenth‐century “Know Nothings” to the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s; the impact – and often collision – of different immigrant groups and their traditions; and the disputed issue of gender. He shows throughout that influences have flowed in both directions; belief and church traditions have shaped the Catholic sense of citizenship, community, and public advocacy. The tensions remain in contemporary America, as signs are seen of both a resurgent traditionalism in the church in response to the liberalizing trend launched by John XXIII, and a resistance to the conservatism of John Paul II.

This book is a study of the movies made about Jesus, from the earliest silent films through to Mel Gibson's 2004 The Passion of the Christ. Its main argument is that these movies fit into the “biopic” (biographical film) genre and they tell the story of Jesus according to the standard biopic template. The Jesus biopics exhibit three principal characteristics. First, they make a claim to historicity or historical authenticity. Second, and at the same time, they undermine that claim in ways that are both subtle and overt. Third, they use the Jesus story as a lens through which to view and to work out contemporary concerns, such as sexuality, ethnic identity, theology, and the relationship between religion and politics. The approach is thematic, and the chapters are organized by character, including the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and God), Jesus' friends and associates (Mary Magdalene and Judas) and his enemies (Pharisees, Caiaphas, and Pilate). Despite the title, the book addresses films made both in the United States and elsewhere. The point is not to overlook the profound differences among the various national cinemas which have produced Jesus movies, but to argue that all bear the imprint of the Hollywood biopic, whether in imitation of its conventions or in conscious resistance to them.

In the twelfth century, Joachim of Fiore (c. 1132–1202) developed a powerful and original theology of history. In the twentieth century, particularly after World War Two, much interest was focused on the influence of his ideas, with the result that large and sometimes exaggerated claims were made for his impact on nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. The first version of this book sought to distinguish between the precise, documented evidence of Joachim's modern influence and the vaguer assertions which had appeared in histories of ideas. A surprising, and until now virtually unchronicled, story emerged. French romantic visionaries, English literary writers, fin de siècle figures dabbling in the occult, a Czech poet involved in resurgent nationalism — all, to a greater or lesser degree, had taken this medieval abbot as a prophet of the ‘new religion of humanity’ which they had sought. The ‘Eternal Evangel’ (the radical form of Joachim's doctrine) was evidently a symbol of the ‘new spirit’ of the future for such figures as Michelet, Quinet, Leroux, Sand, Mazzini, Renan, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Pater, Huysmans, W. B. Yeats, and Vrchlicky. In this process, of course, the genuine thought of the medieval biblical exegete was largely lost, but the myth became a powerful inspiration. This radically revised study has been augmented with further prophetic voices and symbols from the past. This book not only confirms the deep structures of visions of the future, but demonstrates and questions the persistence of Joachimist themes in the twentieth-century fin de siècle.