Browse

Few other cultural issues alarm conservative Protestant families and communities more than the seemingly ubiquitous threat of pornography. Thanks to widespread access to the internet, conservative Protestants now face a reality in which every Christian man, woman, and child with a smartphone can access limitless pornography in his or her bathroom, at work, or at a friend’s sleepover. Once confident of their victory over pornography in society at large, conservative Protestants now fear that “porn addiction” is consuming even the most faithful. How are conservative Protestants adjusting to this new reality? And what are its consequences in their lives? Drawing on over 130 interviews, as well as numerous national surveys, Addicted to Lust shows that, compared to other Americans, pornography shapes the lives of conservative Protestants in ways that are uniquely damaging to their mental health, spiritual lives, and intimate relationships. Samuel Perry demonstrates how certain pervasive beliefs within the conservative Protestant subculture unwittingly create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement, sometimes to the point of depression or withdrawal from faith altogether. Conservative Protestant women who use pornography feel a “double shame,” both for sinning sexually and for sinning “like a man,” while conflicts over pornography in marriages are escalated with patterns of lying, hiding, blowing up, or threats of divorce. Addicted to Lust shines new light on one of the most talked-about problems facing conservative Christians.

In 2006, the contemporary American Pentecostal movement celebrated its 100th birthday. Over that time, its African American sector has been markedly influential, not only vis-à-vis other branches of Pentecostalism but also throughout the Christian church. Black Christians have been integrally involved in every aspect of the Pentecostal movement since its inception and have made significant contributions to its founding as well as the evolution of Pentecostal/charismatic styles of worship, preaching, music, engagement of social issues, and theology. Yet despite its being one of the fastest growing segments of the Black Church, Afro-Pentecostalism has not received the kind of critical attention it deserves. This book examines different facets of the movement, including its early history, issues of gender, relations with other black denominations, intersections with popular culture, and missionary activities, as well as the movement's distinctive theology. The chapters reflect on the state of the movement, chart its trajectories, discuss pertinent issues, and anticipate future developments.

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This is because the anti‐Judaism of the Christian Church prepared the way for the holocaust. This rethink includes looking at theological responses to the holocaust and examining which, if any, are adequate. It also means looking at issues of suffering and forgiveness in both Judaism and Christianity. On examination, the approach of the two religions is not as far apart as is sometimes suggested. The basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians should not set out to convert Jews. Jesus is, traditionally, a highly divisive figure for the two religions but modern scholarship, including Jewish scholarship, has revealed some common ground. In addition to the common ground here, there is a shared hope and a common task though contentious questions still remain on questions such as Israel and Jerusalem. The church has a particular responsibility to ensure that its teaching and preaching is not implicitly anti‐Judaic.

This book demonstrates how Christian leaders and AIDS activists in the United States have posited HIV/AIDS as a religious and moral epidemic and asks how this understanding has informed cultural and political debates about prevention, healthcare, and sex education all over the world. Drawing upon archival research, oral histories, and textual analysis, this book maps the moral language regarding sexuality–and especially homosexuality–through which evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholic leaders, and gay and lesbian AIDS activists made sense of and responded to the epidemic. Moving beyond the politics of the culture wars and the focus on the Christian Right, After the Wrath of God tracks how mainstream religious understandings of sexual morality and AIDS have shaped national and global public health discourse about prevention and care. It also situates the AIDS crisis alongside competing moral concerns, such as those surrounding abortion, drug use, and race, in delineating American religious responses to the epidemic. This history illustrates in turn how the AIDS epidemic has transformed American Christianity by allowing religious leaders and organizations a new way in which to articulate their understandings of sexuality, health, and social activism and to advance new boundaries for national moral citizenship.

Many contemporary discussions of religion take an absolute, intractable approach to belief and nonbelief that privileges faith and dogmatism while treating doubt as a threat to religious values. As this book demonstrates, however, there is another way: a faith (or nonfaith) that embraces doubt and its potential for exploring both the depths and heights of spiritual reflection and speculation. Through three distinct discussions of faith, doubt, and hope, the book explores what it means to live creatively and responsibly in the everyday world as limited, imaginative, and questioning creatures. It begins with a perceptive survey of diverse faith experiences in Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, and Protestant Christianity and then narrows the focus to Protestant Christianity and Hinduism to explore how the great thinkers of those faiths have embraced doubt in the service of spiritual transcendence. Defending the rich tapestry of faith and doubt against polarization, the book reveals a spiritual middle way, an approach native to traditions in which faith and doubt are interwoven in constructive and dynamic ways.

Against Harmony traces the history of progressive and radical experiments in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice from the mid-Meiji period through the early Shōwa period (1885–1935), when historical events coalesced to eliminate all such experiments. It is a work of both intellectual history and of critical, comparative thought. Perhaps the two best representations of progressive Buddhism during this period were the New Buddhist Fellowship (1899–1915) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (1931–1936). Both were nonsectarian, lay movements comprising young men with education in classical Buddhist texts as well as Western literature, philosophy, and religion. Their work effectively collapses commonly held distinctions between religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and economics. Unlike many others of their day, these “New Buddhists” did not regard the novel forces of modernization as problematic and disruptive, but rather, as an opportunity to explore and expand the possibilities of the dharma. Moreover, these and similar Buddhist and Buddhist-inspired movements experimented with novel, alternative forms of modernity, rooted in variations on what might be called “dharmic materialism.” In short, they did not simply inherit or mimic the dominant Western model(s). For this reason, their work remains of relevance in the early twenty-first century.

Explores the history and doctrines of Traditionalism, a movement established by Ren” Gu”non in the 1920s, and later developed further by Julius Evola (in politics), Frithjof Schuon (in religion), and Mircea Eliade (in academia). Traditionalism sees modernity as terminal decline from traditional metaphysical truth, and attempts to remedy this at both a personal and societal level. All responses depend on the recovery of lost tradition, notably of the “perennial philosophy.” Personal responses are generally religious, and Sufism (mystical Islam) was the most important of these, followed by Freemasonry. Societal responses range from Eliade’s scholarly investigation of archaic religion to Evola’s ultra fascism, by 2000 a major stream in far-right thought. The book examines the origins of Traditionalism in the Renaissance, and then traces the development of the groups and movements that resulted, as well as modification in doctrine. The final chapter looks at Traditionalism’s possible influence in the future, and asks why so many intellectuals found this anti-modernist movement so attractive.

In Agents of God, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin describes his year and a half spent in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area. At first, these four schools could not seem more different, yet they are linked by much: these are all schools with conservative thoughts on gender and sexuality, with a hostility to the theory of evolution, and with a deep suspicion of secularism. And they are all also hopeful that America will be a place where their children can excel, even as they also fear the nation’s many temptations might lead their children astray. Guhin shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the outside world, both in school and online. Within these boundaries, these communities have developed “external authorities” like Science, Scripture, and Prayer, each of which is felt and experienced as a real power with the ability to make commands and coerce action. For example, people can describe Science itself as showing something or the Bible itself as making a command. By offloading coercion to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to religious studies, sociology, and education.

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle—a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of these evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.

Noble Drew Ali, leader of the Moorish Science Temple of America movement in the early twentieth-century, taught that "citizenship is salvation." This book examines the legacy of Ali's thoughts on citizenship, law, and race in the MSTA and two other Aliite religions, the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah and the Nuwaubian Yamassee movement. In all three African American religious movements, members insist on an identity other than "negro, black, or colored" as a way of insisting upon full citizenship as a status. Thinkers within these religions also reiterate Ali's claims about citizenship as a process, a work of "sacred duty" wherein, through activity ranging from voting to pro se legal performance, citizens contribute to the perfection of the world. Such claims not only respond to American racism in creative ways, they also advance an understanding of "law" as an eternal, metaphysical reality, divine, aligned with justice and truth. The work of citizenship, then, is aimed at aligning the unjust and oppressive legal system of the state with that of True Law.

In the early 1990s, a grassroots coalition of churches in Baltimore, Maryland helped launch what would become a national movement. Joining forces with labor and low-wage worker organizations, they passed the first municipal living wage ordinance. Since then, over one hundred and forty-four municipalities and counties as well as numerous universities and local businesses in the United States have enacted such ordinances. Although religious persons and organizations have been important both in the origins of the living wage movement and in its continuing success, they are often ignored or under analyzed. Drawing on participant observation in multiple cities, this book analyzes and evaluates the contributions of religious activists to the movement. The book explores the ways that religious organizations do this work in concert with low-wage workers, the challenges religious activists face, and how people of faith might better nurture moral agency in relation to the political economy. Ultimately, it provides clarity on how to continue to cultivate, renew, and expand religious resources dedicated to the moral agency of low-wage workers and their allies.

The National Shrine in Washington, D.C., has been deeply loved, blithely ignored, and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a “dazzling jewel” and dismissed as a “towering Byzantine beach ball.” This book shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of 20th-century Catholicism. It organizes the narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism, and ties these themes to the Shrine's material culture—to images, artifacts, or devotional spaces. Thus, the book begins with the Basilica's foundation stone, weaving it into a discussion of “brick and mortar” Catholicism, the drive to build institutions. To highlight the Church's inclination to appeal to women, the book looks at fund-raising for the Mary Memorial Altar, and focuses on the Filipino oratory to Our Lady of Antipolo to illustrate the Church's outreach to immigrants. Throughout, the book employs painstaking detective work to shine a light on the many facets of American Catholicism reflected in the shrine.

This book examines the Catholic participation in the “Long Sixties” in the United States, a decade that, for Catholic Americans, began in 1964 (the year the first reforms mandated by the Second Vatican Council began to be implemented) and continued into the 1970s. The book argues that the most important result of that era was the emergence of the awareness among many of the Catholic faithful that everything in history changes, including the Church. This seemingly obvious insight generated considerable turmoil within the American Catholic community, which was accustomed to thinking of their religious beliefs and practices as timeless. The battles generated by that insight largely shaped the debates within the community during the final quarter of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the process of narrating those turbulent events, the book offers a new master narrative of American Catholicism during the 1960s that seeks to displace the older politicized narrative of “liberals versus conservatives.”

This book answers what, how much, who, where, and why questions of generous activities. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that defines generosity as expressed through multiple forms of giving. The focus is on three primary forms of giving: donating money, volunteering time, and taking political action. Also explored are participation in giving blood, bodily organs, material possessions, relational attention, and participating in environmental sustainability. All findings are based on data from the Science of Generosity Initiative, combining a nationally representative survey of adult Americans with in-depth interviews and ethnographies of a subsample of survey respondents. From the interviews case studies were selected to narratively illustrate core themes. The analyses examine multiple dimensions of resources, social status characteristics, regional cultural norms, different approaches to giving processes, social psychological orientations, and relational contexts of generosity. The conclusion presents a theoretical model of resource-, norm-, and identity-supported “circles of generosity,” which ripple outward in their reach to different targets of giving. Practical implications include tips for readers who are interested in increasing their giving, parents modeling giving to children, spouses desiring giving alignment, and friends and community members wanting to support other people’s giving. Also offered are fundraising ideas for nonprofit, foundation, and religious leaders, as well as scholars of generosity.

How did Americans come to think of themselves as respectable members of the middle class? Was it just by earning a decent living? Or did it require something more? And if it did, what can we learn that may still apply? The quest for middle-class respectability in nineteenth-century America is usually described as a process of inculcating positive values such as honesty, hard work, independence, and cultural refinement. But clergy, educators, and community leaders also defined respectability negatively, by maligning individuals and groups—“misfits”—who deviated from accepted norms. This book argues that respectability is constructed by “othering” people who do not fit into easily recognizable, socially approved categories. It demonstrates this through an in-depth examination of a wide variety of individuals and groups that became objects of derision. We meet a disabled Civil War veteran who worked as a huckster on the edges of the frontier, the wife of a lunatic who raised her family while her husband was institutionalized, an immigrant religious community accused of sedition, and a wealthy scion charged with profiteering. Unlike respected Americans who marched confidently toward worldly and heavenly success, such misfits were usually ignored in paeans about the nation. But they played an important part in the cultural work that made America, and their story is essential for understanding the “othering” that remains so much a part of American culture and politics today.

This book examines contemporary American religious culture through the themes of a “consuming convert’s republic,” “the haunted present,” and “the therapeutic.” The work argues that US religious culture in the twenty-first century can be characterized as immersed in and constitutive of an era of possessions–of both consumer goods and spirit entities such as ghosts and demons–and that these “possessions” are thoroughly saturated with the reverberations of therapeutic discourse. Third Wave evangelicalism and its practice of spiritual warfare provide a case study through which these three tropes converge. The book provides a description and analysis of religion in the contemporary United States. Second, it offers an extended examination of Third Wave evangelicalism, a small but influential movement in both the United States and in Christian mission fields around the world. Third, it maps some of the multiple and often conflicting connections among contemporary American religious forms, consumer capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization.

Most Americans say they believe in God, and more than a third say they attend religious services every week. Yet studies show that people do not really go to church as often as they claim, and it is not always clear what they mean when they tell pollsters they believe in God or pray. This book presents up-to-date information about religious trends in the United States, in a succinct and accessible manner. The book provides essential information about key developments in American religion since 1972, and is the first major resource of its kind to appear in more than two decades. The book looks at trends in diversity, belief, involvement, congregational life, leadership, liberal Protestant decline, and polarization. It draws on two important surveys: the General Social Survey, an ongoing survey of Americans' changing attitudes and behaviors, begun in 1972; and the National Congregations Study, a survey of American religious congregations across the religious spectrum. The book finds that American religious life has seen much continuity in recent decades, but also much change. It challenges the popular notion that religion is witnessing a resurgence in the United States—in fact, traditional belief and practice is either stable or declining. The book examines why the decline in liberal Protestant denominations has been accompanied by the spread of liberal Protestant attitudes about religious and social tolerance, how confidence in religious institutions has declined more than confidence in secular institutions, and a host of other crucial trends.

Yoga, humanistic psychology, meditation, holistic healing: these practices are commonplace today, yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This “soul rush” spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations. This book explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen's foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals' self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

Academics across America are rethinking the place of religion on college and university campuses, and religion has become a hot topic of conversation. Some conversations focus on religious literacy, while others contrast religion with spirituality; some understand religion in light of specific traditions or communities of faith, while others focus attention on concerns such as personal meaning and civic engagement. The American University in a Postsecular Age brings together these divergent conversations. Three of the fourteen essays in the volume are written by the editors, including an introductory essay that explains the term “postsecular,” another on church‐related higher education, and a concluding essay that suggests a framework for talking about religion in the academy. The other authors represented in the book are all well known scholars in the fields of religion and higher education including, for example, Amanda Porterfield, past president of the American Society of Church History, Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Robert Wuthnow, the prolific sociologist of religion from Princeton. The volume is divided into two parts: a first group of essays focuses on religion, institutions, and faculty roles; the second group deals with the place of religion in the curriculum and in student learning. The book as a whole assumes that increased attention to religion will enhance the work of the academy, but a wide variety of perspectives are included.

In the modern world, angels perhaps seem to be no more than a symbol—something encountered only on the top of Christmas trees, or seemingly emblematic of Christian beliefs at their most traditional and unchanging. But in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure angelic assistance for the living and the dead; others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures; and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. This book offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age. Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God.