Who was Elizabeth Tuttle? In most histories, she is a footnote, a blip. At best, she is a minor villain in the story of Jonathan Edwards, perhaps the greatest American theologian of the colonial era. Many historians consider Jonathan Edwards a theological genius, wildly ahead of his time, a Puritan hero. Elizabeth Tuttle was Edwards’s “crazy grandmother,” the one whose madness and adultery drove his despairing gran ...
Religion and the Creation of Race and Ethnicity is the first collection devoted to demonstrating the role that religion and myth have played in the creation of the categories of “race” and “ethnicity.” When scholars approach religion and race, they tend to focus on such issues as how African Americans have expressed Christianity, or how Japanese or Mexicans have lived “religiously.” T ...
From 1925 to 1941, approximately one hundred African American clergymen teamed up with leading record labels such as Columbia, Paramount, Victor-RCA to record and sell their sermons on wax. While white clerics of the era, such as Aimee Semple McPherson and Charles Fuller, became religious entrepreneurs and celebrities through their pioneering use of radio, black clergy were largely marginalized from radio. Instead, they relied on other means to ...
For most of its history, contemporary Paganism has been a religion of converts. Yet as it enters its fifth decade, it is incorporating growing numbers of second‑generation Pagans for whom Paganism is a family tradition, not a religious worldview arrived at via a spiritual quest. In Pagan Family Values, S. Zohreh Kermani explores the ways in which North American Pagan families pass on their beliefs to their children, and how the effort ...
The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins has become a popular culture phenomenon, selling an astonishing 40 million copies to date. These novels, written by two well-known evangelical Christians, depict the experiences of those «left behind» in the aftermath of the Rapture, when Christ removes true believers, leaving everyone else to suffer seven years of Tribulation under Satan's proxy, Antichrist.In Marks of the Beast ...
Since the Revolutionary War, Mainline Christianity has been comprised of the Seven Sisters of American Protestantism—the Congregational Church, the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Convention, and the Disciples of Christ.These denominations have been the dominant cultural representatives since the nineteenth century of how and where the majorit ...
From the late nineteenth century through the post-Holocaustera, the world was divided between countries that tried to expel their Jewishpopulations and those that refused to let them in. The plight of thesetraumatized refugees inspired numerous proposals for Jewish states. Jews andChristians, authors and adventurers, politicians and playwrights, and rabbisand revolutionaries all worked to carve out autonomous Jewish territories inremote and ofte ...
Most widely known for its adherents chanting “Hare Krishna” and distributing religious literature on the streets of American cities, the Hare Krishna movement was founded in New York City in 1965 by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. Formally known as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, or ISKCON, it is based on the Hindu Vedic scriptures and is a Western outgrowth of a popular yoga tradition which began i ...
The «Hizmet» («Service»)Movement of Fethullah Gülen is Turkey’s most influential Islamic identitycommunity. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderatevariation on Islamic political identity, the Gülen Movement has long been atopic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey. In Gülen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that the Gülen Movement shouldbe given credit for playing a signific ...
