History of religion Books

Revised with Comprehensive Scriptural Index to Wesley's PoetryThe theology of Charles Wesley is expressed primarily in hymns and sacred poems-that is, in a literary and liturgical form of art. Wesley's theological concerns, as seen through his hymns and...

Throughout the entire world, Auschwitz has become known as the Concentration Camp (KZ) in which the bureaucratic, alarmingly and perfectly organized mass exterminations of human beings found its abysmal culmination. Less well known is the first period of...

This book offers a swift trek through two millennia of Christendom, with all the information provided by boring textbooks. The author presents the Christian story within the framework of a warning of Jesus in his famous Sermon on the Mount: "You are the...

Who would have imagined that the hippies, those long-haired, psychedelia-influenced youth of the 1960s, would have initiated a spiritual revolution that has transformed American Christianity? If you are unfamiliar with the 1960s, the counterculture, the...

Dr. John Taylor rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth century with his devastating attack on the doctrine of Original Sin. This drew fierce counterattacks from prominent Methodists such as John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards. While Wesley referred...

Philippians has been called the "laughing letter", because, perhaps more than any of his other writings, this one is redolent with joy. Given what Paul had suffered in Philippi (a flogging, torture in the stocks, and imprisonment), and that when he wrote...

Praise for Man of Blessing"The difference with Butcher's book... is the exploration of Benedict's unusual life; his relationship with his twin sister, Scholastica; and the illumination of the saint's miracles. The book's readability...

Jesus taught that love for others is the path to God, that you can't love God if you don't love your neighbor. In An Evangelical Social Gospel?, Tim Suttle shows how the exaggerated individualism of American culture distorts the gospel and weakens the...

Evidence of mainstream denominational decline virtually throws itself in our faces--growing religious pluralism in North America; the decline over the last half century in the salience, prestige, power, and vitality of Protestant denominational...

This book provides a detailed account of what camp meeting was (and still is) like with a daily log that covers every major event and service. This account includes summaries of sermons delivered by its presidents and evangelists of the past and present,...

One of the most contested questions in historical theology concerns John Calvin's understanding of the so-called ""extent of the atonement."" On a popular level, Calvin's name is closely associated with the ""limited atonement"" stance canonized within...

For more than half a century, the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne was unquestionably the most rigorously evangelical and missions-oriented diocese in Australia. The Diocese of Sydney, in that same period, was decidedly broader in theological and liturgical...

""Faith"" gets its most powerful definition from the New Testament book of Hebrews. Yet this anonymous treatise tantalizes with both its lack of contemporary precision about faith's definition and its shrouded original context. There are, however,...

There are many book studies of particular books of the Bible. There is also a myriad of devotional and inspirational books regarding the Bible, and many questions about it. Why are there different accounts of some events? Why is the description of the...

Vast changes are sweeping over society. We relate to one another in ways unheard of a generation ago, and the church too must change if it is going to continue to serve. We are not the same people for whom Victorian churches were designed, yet that is...

Our late modern era is marked by the rapidity of change; waxing pluralism; focus on the future, not the past; the elevation of personal choice over communal obligation; and, for some, a sense of spiritual and intellectual disorientation that can lead to...

A devastating war, a burning cross, a crime network, and a victorious general--these are some of the many threads Hadžić and Irby weave together to clarify one of history's most misunderstood symbols: the cross.The authors interweave Hadžić's story with...

Most ecotheologies build their arguments on the Bible's creation-story and resurrection-narrative in the hope to save the ecology through spiritual meditation, reforming capitalism, and/or deliberative democracy. However, based on a Chinese Christian...

The present work pursues an apologetic plea on behalf of the gospel. It would seem to many that the gospel is doing just fine, and we need to concentrate on other very pressing and important issues such as missions, evangelism, social justice, moral...

Soteriology and the End of Animal Sacrifice traces the historically sustained critique of animal sacrifice in both the Jewish prophets and Greek philosophers and offers a reinterpretation of the fundamental expression of piety in both cultures. The...

The Gospels are the most important texts of the Bible because they tell the story about Jesus--who he was and what he achieved. If we did not have the Gospels, the prophecies about the Messiah in the Old Testament would be left hanging and the passing...

Beginning with the desires of our hearts and ending with the priesthood of all believers, this series of meditations traces a path through some central concerns of the Reformation. Along this path, the authors, all faculty at Wycliffe College, engage...

This is a book about prayer, about Christian prayer, about Christian contemplative or meditative prayer as a way of simply being in the loving presence of God. It begins with prayer as that natural sense of the divine, what has been known for centuries...

""Is there a God?"" is one of those irrepressible questions that has been debated throughout human history, with scholars from opposites camps making the case for or against the existence of God. It is a never-ending debate.This book first examines the...

By the time of his death in 1933 Henri Bremond, priest and member of the elite Academie francaise, had established himself in France, and increasingly in England and the United States, as a distinguished historian of Christian spirituality and as a...

We human beings are mortal. Our lives in this world inevitably terminate in death. This reality, however, need not cause us to despair, since Jesus Christ has gone before us into the far country of death, giving us hope that this defining feature of our...

If the origin of the world is not a part of the world, what are the implications for our understanding of ourselves, the world, and its origin? In antiquity, both gentile and Christian authors agreed that the significance of this question could only be...

Who is Jesus Christ? What does it mean to say that we are created in the image of God? What does salvation mean? What is the meaning of baptism? What characterizes the Christian fellowship? What hope does a Christian faith give for the future? These are...

Irish Anglican clergymen played an important role in the creation of a nineteenth-century ""Greater Ireland,"" a term denoting a diasporic movement in which the Irish transformed into a global people, actively participating in British imperial expansion...

This is the first volume of a two-volume set.

This volume gathers together twelve essays on the doctrine of the Trinity. It includes the work of systematic theologians, analytic theologians, and biblical scholars who address a range of issues concerning the Christian doctrine of God. Contributors...

James Leo Garrett Jr., has been called "the last of the gentlemen theologians" and "the dean of Southern Baptist theologians." In The Collected Writings of James Leo Garrett Jr., 1950-2015, the reader will find a truly dazzling collection of works that...

Does the discipline of history need a reformation? How should Christian faith shape the ways historians do their work? This book, written for students, considers the "how" of doing history. The authors first examine the current "liturgies" of the...

Did you know the name Aaron is of Hebrew origin meaning "mountain of strength"? Did you know Balaam means "the destruction of the people"? In The One Hundred, author Justin Morris offers a biographical look at one hundred of the people mentioned in the...

Meet this Alaskan Chief of Eagle Village raised before ancient skills and traditions were forgotten. His friendship, mentoring and wisdom helped a begrizzled war veteran find purpose and healing.Chief Isaac Juneby (the "Senator") with keen native eye and...

Not Peace But a Sword provides a case study in religious radicalism, as exemplified by the Puritanism of the English Revolution. Based on sermons preached to the Long Parliament and other political bodies, Stephen Baskerville demonstrates how Puritan...

Just after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., there lived a poor and ugly nail-maker who was also, for a time, the leading rabbi of his generation. His name was Joshua ben Hananiah, and he helped give us the Judaism we know--the complicated,...

This anthology is a collection of readings on the Christian life. They were carefully selected from every era of history and from across the spectrum of Christian traditions. They include letters, sermons, treatises and disputations, poems, songs and...

The essays contained in this book provide an introduction to the history, challenges, and hopes of contemporary evangelical Arab Christians in Israel (and to a lesser degree in the West Bank). After opening with a general overview of Arab Christianity in...

The arrival of three Sisters of St. Mary of Namur at the railroad station of Waco, Texas, on September 23, 1873, brought remarkable change to the state of education in the center and north of the state. Hoping ""to do a little good"" by living their...

Las Vegas has long been characterized as ""Sin City."" It is a common assumption of many outsiders that Las Vegas is a spiritual wasteland, devoid of any significant religious community and bereft of traditional values. This is most certainly not the...

The Glasites or Sandemanians were a branch of the church with their roots in Scotland, but who spread much wider. This study seeks to explore their distinctives, both of theology and practice, and to place them in a wider context. The examination of a...

In an age of e-books and screens, it may seem antiquated to create a handwritten, illuminated Bible. The Benedictine monks at Saint John's Abbey and University, however, determined to produce such a Bible for the twenty-first century, a Bible that would...

In the controversy over the role of women in the church, complementarians/hierarchists routinely claim to be upholding the "traditional" position. Like the little boy who declared that "the emperor has no clothes," J. G. Brown exposes the fallacies in...

Around the turn of the twentieth century, revivalist Protestantism in America splintered into multiple pieces. Few persons of that era knew as many of the central figures of the splinter groups as Aaron Merritt Hills. Originally a Congregationalist who...

Public discussion about the relationship between religion and public life in Canada can be heated at times, and scholars have recently focused on the historical study of the many expressions of this relationship. The experience of Canada's smaller...