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This volume, a sequel to the author's earlier book The Beauty of the Cross, carries the study of Christian soteriology into the Renaissance, Reformation and Counter‐Reformation eras. Drawing on original documents and classic works of art and music, it uses the theology of the passion to exemplify the parallels and the divergences between conceptual and aesthetic theologies of this era, which represented a crucial turning point in both religion and the arts. The book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West, the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, showing how they affected each other and transformed Christian thinking and imagination. After an introductory section dealing with a “paradigmatic” artistic portrayal of the Passion, each chapter examines the “theoretical” as well as the “aesthetic” mediations of the theology of the Passion of Christ and its relationship to human salvation. The theologies of Savonarola, Vincent Ferrer, Gabriel Biel and the nominalists, Luther, Calvin, Robert Bellarmine, and the Council of Trent are examined as examples of the early Catholic Reformation, the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter‐Reformation. These are placed in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Frà Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Dürer, Cranach, and the Mannerists. In addition to specifically theological themes, the book explores the effects of theology and preaching on the arts, examining the iconoclasm of some of the early Reformers, the use of pictorial art in service of the word in Lutheranism, and the regulation of the arts by the Council of Trent.

This book presents an account of the provenance of De Doctrina Christiana, with a history of the manuscript, a reconstruction of the way it was assembled and revised, and an assessment of its place in the interpretation of other works by John Milton. It resolves issues relating to its place in Milton's canon, thus concluding a controversy that has recently been central to Milton studies.

The westward movement of people connected to the nineteenth‐century expansionism of the developing U.S. helped promote the growth and expansion of many of the mainline Protestant denominations that traveled to the southwest borderlands of this country. Following the expanding western frontier, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) entered what is today the state of Texas and came face to face with the Tejanos. Bringing Protestantism as a new element in the southwest borderlands of Texas, the Disciples of Christ also carried with them the Euro‐American ideologies and self‐definitions that would function at two levels. First, these would shape their relationship as English‐speaking Protestants with the Spanish‐speaking Roman Catholic Tejanos, and secondly, an ethos was created that would influence the Disciples’ ministry to the Mexican population. This shaping and influence were notable in the often racist and paternalistic missionary ideology of the Disciples throughout the late nineteenth century, into the twentieth century, and even to the present day. This is one slice of the religious history of the nineteenth‐century borderlands where the frontier ethos – with its manifest destiny ideology about a chosen race, a virgin land, divine providence, and democracy – prevented Protestantism from developing and maintaining helpful and empowering relationships with the Tejano‐Mexican community it encountered.

Examines the readership of the contemporary best-selling series Left Behind, drawing on a qualitative study of readers. Rapture Culture asks what role an anti-worldly theory like dispensationalism plays in contemporary evangelicalism when evangelicals have gained increasing social and political power. The book argues that apocalyptic stories are a form of social relationship. They shape identity not only through agreement and a sense of belonging, but also through disagreement and dissent. The most urgent message of the rapture for readers of Left Behind is that the end of time could come soon, and therefore a decision about personal salvation is necessary. While it is true that the Left Behind series plays on readers’ fears, the primary fear is not so much a social or political fear as a personal one—a fear that the reader himself or herself might be left behind. The primary purpose of the Left Behind series is to promote evangelism. Readers feel convicted by the books of the need to tell their loved ones about Christ and to seek the conversion of others. In addition, the story of rapture and tribulation provides a lens through which readers can interpret the chaotic and sometimes disconcerting events of the world. The popularity of the Left Behind series and its diffusion into mainstream culture leads the book to conclude with the suggestion that evangelicalism is wrongly understood as a “subculture” and instead needs to be conceived as a broad and fluid part of dominant popular culture in the United States. Rapture Culture urges its readers to take seriously both the fears and the desires about social life present in the testimonies of Left Behind’s readership and to consider popular fiction reading as a complex and dynamic act of faith in American Protestantism.

This book focuses on changing seventeenth-century English views of maternal nurture and the nation. The revaluation of maternal nursing goes hand-in-hand with the reformation of the nation, especially between 1603 and 1675. Maternal nurture gains new prominence in the early modern cultural imagination at the precise moment when England undergoes a major conceptual paradigm shift — from the traditional, dynastic body politic, organized by organic bonds, to the post-dynastic, modern nation, comprised of symbolic and affective relations. The period’s interlocking reassessments of maternal nurture and the nation also manifest (especially in the case of Milton) English Protestant views of Judeo-Christian relations. The book’s five chapters examine a wide range of reformed-and-traditional, well-known-and-somewhat-obscure texts — including A pitiless Mother, William Gouge’s Of Domesticall Duties, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Charles I’s Eikon Basilike, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes — and such early modern visual images as The power of women (a late sixteenth-century Dutch engraving), William Marshall’s engraved frontispiece to Richard Braithwaite’s The English Gentleman and Gentlewoman (1641), and Peter Paul Rubens’s painting of Roman Charity (1630). The book demonstrates that the idealized figure of the nurturing mother equivocally mediates between customary Judaic/Hebraic paradigms of English kingship and reformed models of England as the new Israel.

This book is a philosophical and theological exploration and defense of the doctrine of purgatory. After a historical overview of the development of the doctrine, it examines Protestant objections to the doctrine as well as Protestant accounts of how believers are purged of their imperfections and made ready for heaven. It goes on to show that the doctrine of purgatory has been construed in different ways, and that some of these are compatible with Protestant theology. Next, it shows that purgatory assumes not only continuity of personal identity but also conscious survival between death and resurrection. Such continuity of identity also arguably requires gradual moral development over time, which also supports a doctrine of purgatory. The traditional doctrine of purgatory is not understood as a second chance for salvation, but rather, only as a matter of perfecting persons who die in a state of grace. It is argued that the doctrine of purgatory should be modified to allow for postmortem repentance and conversion. The final long chapter of the book shows that popular writer C. S. Lewis not only believed in purgatory, but proposed a version of the doctrine that may appeal to Christians on both sides of the Reformation divide.

The role of liberalized, ecumenical Protestantism in American history has too often been obscured by the more flamboyant and orthodox versions of the faith that oppose evolution, embrace narrow conceptions of family values, and continue to insist that the United States should be understood as a Christian nation. This book examines how liberal Protestant thinkers struggled to embrace modernity, even at the cost of yielding much of the symbolic capital of Christianity to more conservative, evangelical communities of faith. If religion is not simply a private concern, but a potential basis for public policy and a national culture, does this mean that religious ideas can be subject to the same kind of robust public debate normally given to ideas about race, gender, and the economy? Or is there something special about religious ideas that invite a suspension of critical discussion? These essays, collected here for the first time, demonstrate that the critical discussion of religious ideas has been central to the process by which Protestantism has been liberalized throughout the history of the United States, and shed light on the complex relationship between religion and politics in contemporary American life. The book brings together in one volume the author's most influential writings on ecumenical Protestantism. It features an informative general introduction as well as concise introductions to each essay.

This book examines anti-Catholicism’s central importance to the liberal democratic tradition in the United States. Charting the echoes of the Continental Congress’s early characterization of Catholicism as “dangerous in an extreme degree … to the civil rights and liberties of all America” through literary and political texts of the nineteenth century, this book argues that the notions of pluralism and “liberty of conscience” so central to U.S. liberal democracy emerged from a discourse that characterized the United States as “free” by placing it at odds with the Catholic. The book situates a variety of textual productions—from the Federalist Papers to antebellum biographies of Toussaint Louverture, from nativist treatises to Margaret Fuller’s journalism, from popular convent exposés to novels by prominent figures such as Catharine Sedgwick and Mark Twain—within the context of political philosophies of pluralism and democracy. Taken together, these materials demonstrate anti-Catholicism’s pervasive influence on both the liberal tradition and early U.S. culture. More particularly, Religious Liberties argues, they show that anti-Catholicism facilitated an alignment of U.S. nationalism with Protestantism and thereby ensured the mutual dependence, rather than the “separation” we so often take for granted, of church and state.

Max Weber, widely considered a founder of sociology and the modern social sciences, visited the United States in 1904 with his wife Marianne. The trip was a turning point in Weber's life and it played a pivotal role in shaping his ideas, yet until now virtually the only source of information about the trip was Marianne Weber's faithful, but not always reliable, 1926 biography of her husband. The book carefully reconstructs this important episode in Weber's career, and shows how the subsequent critical reception of Weber's work was as American a story as the trip itself. The book provides new details about Weber's visit to the United States—what he did, what he saw, whom he met and why, and how these experiences profoundly influenced Weber's thought on immigration, capitalism, science and culture, Romanticism, race, diversity, Protestantism, and modernity. It traces Weber's impact on the development of the social sciences in the United States following his death in 1920, examining how Weber's ideas were interpreted, translated, and disseminated by American scholars such as Talcott Parsons and Frank Knight, and how the Weberian canon, codified in America, was reintroduced into Europe after World War II.

The Second Disestablishment: Church and State in Nineteenth-Century America is a history of the development of church-state law during what may be called the “forgotten century.” Traditional accounts of church and state commonly discuss the events surrounding the drafting of the First Amendment to the Constitution and then shift to the modern era of church-state relations, which began with the involvement of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1940s and incorporation of the Bill of Rights. The events that connect the first disestablishment with twentieth-century incorporation have been little studied or understood. The Second Disestablishment fills this gap by describing the dynamic events of the nineteenth century that affected church-state relationships: the rise of evangelical Protestantism to cultural dominance through moral reform societies; the enforcement of sumptuary laws through a maxim that Christianity formed part of the law; the gradual secularization of the law through the adoption of alternative theories; the challenges of an increasing religious pluralism; and the transformation of a Protestant-oriented public education system. The book examines the competing ideologies represented by evangelical Protestants who sought to create a “Christian nation” and other citizens who advocated broader notions of the separation of church and state. The Second Disestablishment demonstrates that, during the nineteenth century, a gradual transformation occurred in legal and popular attitudes toward church-state matters, leading to broader understandings of disestablishment and laying the foundation for modern Supreme Court jurisprudence.

Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an Irishman who in June 1922 was assassinated on his doorstep in London by Irish republicans, was one of the most controversial British soldiers of that age. Before 1914 he did much to secure the Anglo-French alliance and was responsible for the planning which saw the British Expeditionary Force successfully despatched to France after the outbreak of war with Germany. A passionate Irish unionist, he gained a reputation as an intensely ‘political’ soldier, especially during the ‘Curragh crisis’ of 1914 when some officers resigned their commissions rather than coerce Ulster unionists into a Home Rule Ireland. During the war he played a major role in Anglo-French liaison, and ended up as Chief of the Imperial General Staff, professional head of the army, a post he held until February 1922. After Wilson retired from the army, he became an MP and was chief security adviser to the new Northern Ireland government. As such, he became a target for nationalist Irish militants, being identified with the security policies of the Belfast regime, though wrongly with Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics. He is remembered today in unionist Northern Ireland as a kind of founding martyr for the state. Wilson's reputation was ruined in 1927 with the publication of an official biography, which quoted extensively and injudiciously from his entertaining, indiscreet, and wildly opinionated diaries, giving the impression that he was some sort of Machiavellian monster.

This is the first major study for over forty years of the liturgical arrangement of Anglican churches in the period between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement. The book is based both on surviving buildings and on a wide range of archival sources, such as seating plans, which are used to document internal changes and to suggest reasons behind them. This book challenges many widely held assumptions about the liturgical outlook of the Pre-Tractarian period, and about the impact of ecclesiology on the Church of England. In particular, it emphasises the existence, hitherto disregarded, of a Church of England movement for liturgical renewal between 1780 and 1840, which to a degree anticipated some of the ideas previously attributed solely to the ecclesiologists. The discussion is firmly set within the context of European Protestantism, and comparisons are drawn with the liturgical practices both of Calvinists and Lutherans.