Awash In A Sea Of Faith

Author : Jon Butler
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674056015
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Awash in a Sea of Faith written by Jon Butler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the formidable tradition that places early New England Puritanism at the center of the American religious experience, Yale historian Jon Butler offers a new interpretation of three hundred years of religious and cultural development. Butler stresses the instability of religion in Europe where state churches battled dissenters, magic, and astonishingly low church participation. He charts the transfer of these difficulties to America, including the failure of Puritan religious models, and describes the surprising advance of religious commitment there between 1700 and 1865. Through the assertion of authority and coercion, a remarkable sacralization of the prerevolutionary countryside, advancing religious pluralism, the folklorization of magic, and an eclectic, syncretistic emphasis on supernatural interventionism, including miracles, America emerged after 1800 as an extraordinary spiritual hothouse that far eclipsed the Puritan achievement--even as secularism triumphed in Europe. Awash in a Sea of Faith ranges from popular piety to magic, from anxious revolutionary war chaplains to the cool rationalism of James Madison, from divining rods and seer stones to Anglican and Unitarian elites, and from Virginia Anglican occultists and Presbyterians raised from the dead to Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, and Abraham Lincoln. Butler deftly comes to terms with conventional themes such as Puritanism, witchcraft, religion and revolution, revivalism, millenarianism, and Mormonism. His elucidation of Christianity's powerful role in shaping slavery and of a subsequent African spiritual "holocaust," with its ironic result in African Christianization, is an especially fresh and incisive account. Awash in a Sea of Faith reveals the proliferation of American religious expression--not its decline--and stresses the creative tensions between pulpit and pew across three hundred years of social maturation. Striking in its breadth and deeply rooted in primary sources, this seminal book recasts the landscape of American religious and cultural history.

Author : Dee E. Andrews
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400823595
Total Pages : 384 pages
Book Rating : 4.98/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760-1800 written by Dee E. Andrews and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Methodists and Revolutionary America is the first in-depth narrative of the origins of American Methodism, one of the most significant popular movements in American history. Placing Methodism's rise in the ideological context of the American Revolution and the complex social setting of the greater Middle Atlantic where it was first introduced, Dee Andrews argues that this new religion provided an alternative to the exclusionary politics of Revolutionary America. With its call to missionary preaching, its enthusiastic revivals, and its prolific religious societies, Methodism competed with republicanism for a place at the center of American culture. Based on rare archival sources and a wealth of Wesleyan literature, this book examines all aspects of the early movement. From Methodism's Wesleyan beginnings to the prominence of women in local societies, the construction of African Methodism, the diverse social profile of Methodist men, and contests over the movement's future, Andrews charts Methodism's metamorphosis from a British missionary organization to a fully Americanized church. Weaving together narrative and analysis, Andrews explains Methodism's extraordinary popular appeal in rich and compelling new detail.

Author : John H. Wigger
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 9780252069949
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taking Heaven by Storm written by John H. Wigger and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1770 there were fewer than 1,000 Methodists in America. Fifty years later, the church counted more than 250,000 adherents. Identifying Methodism as America's most significant large-scale popular religious movement of the antebellum period, John H. Wigger reveals what made Methodism so attractive to post-revolutionary America. Taking Heaven by Storm shows how Methodism fed into popular religious enthusiasm as well as the social and economic ambitions of the "middling people on the make"--skilled artisans, shopkeepers, small planters, petty merchants--who constituted its core. Wigger describes how the movement expanded its reach and fostered communal intimacy and "intemperate zeal" by means of an efficient system of itinerant and local preachers, class meetings, love feasts, quarterly meetings, and camp meetings. He also examines the important role of African Americans and women in early American Methodism and explains how the movement's willingness to accept impressions, dreams, and visions as evidence of the work and call of God circumvented conventional assumptions about education, social standing, gender, and race. A pivotal text on the role of religion in American life, Taking Heaven by Storm shows how the enthusiastic, egalitarian, entrepreneurial, lay-oriented spirit of early American Methodism continues to shape popular religion today.

Author : Richard Harries
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN 13 : 9780199244850
Total Pages : 302 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Christianity written by Richard Harries and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by a team of top experts on the history of Christianity, this lucid and often witty book celebrates the highlights of two millennia of religious thought and practice. Each author describes Christianity's most fascinating contributions to the history of western civilization. Theresulting book is one of different approaches to the different periods, from the early Church right up to the twentieth century. The authors chose their highlights with care. The selection provides a framework of development giving new insights into what it means to be a twenty-first century Christian. Readers can enjoy any of these essays in its own right; individually each chapter shows the changes of development in thehistory of ideas: the very changes of atmosphere. This book gains its full effect, therefore, by being read in the round. As a finale, the Bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, concludes with a thought for the future: How should Christianity proceed into the new millennium?

Author : Carl J. Richard
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780742534360
Total Pages : 380 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Battle for the American Mind written by Carl J. Richard and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2006-08 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Battle for the American Mind brings together religion, politics, economics, science, and literature to present a compelling history of the American people. In this brief and entertaining book, noted historian Carl J. Richard argues that there have been three worldviews that have dominated American thought--theism, humanism, and skepticism. Theists put their faith in God, humanists in man, and skeptics have faith in neither god nor man. Each worldview has had an epoch of domination, leading to the present "Age of Confusion" where theists, humanists, and skeptics battle one another for control of American hearts and minds. By clearly explaining what Americans believed, exploring why they did so, and showing how that impacted the nation's development, Carl J. Richard presents a unique portrait of the United States--past and present.

Author : Mark A. Lamport
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1538138816
Total Pages : 581 pages
Book Rating : 4.16/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States written by Mark A. Lamport and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States is a one-volume examination of Christianity in its role, contributions, and embattled engagements with the contemporary culture of the postmodern United States. While Christianity has been a sustaining force and dominant storyline of the historical foundations of America, obvious social, political, and scientific inroads have lessened its influence and altered the issues considered. The handbook explores the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian faith and traditions in the United States and its rich and textured history with a discernable eye toward how the message, strategies, and initiatives of Christianity has adapted to contemporary American life.

Author : Michael P. Young
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226960862
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bearing Witness Against Sin written by Michael P. Young and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1830s the United States experienced a wave of movements for social change over temperance, the abolition of slavery, anti-vice activism, and a host of other moral reforms. Michael Young argues for the first time in Bearing Witness against Sin that together they represented a distinctive new style of mobilization—one that prefigured contemporary forms of social protest by underscoring the role of national religious structures and cultural schemas. In this book, Young identifies a new strain of protest that challenged antebellum Americans to take personal responsibility for reforming social problems.In this period activists demanded that social problems like drinking and slaveholding be recognized as national sins unsurpassed in their evil and immorality. This newly awakened consciousness undergirded by a confessional style of protest, seized the American imagination and galvanized thousands of people. Such a phenomenon, Young argues, helps explain the lives of charismatic reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison and the Grimké sisters, among others. Marshalling lively historical materials, including letters and life histories of reformers, Bearing Witness against Sin is a revelatory account of how religion lay at the heart of social reform.

Author : Jon Butler
Publisher : Belknap Press
ISBN 13 : 0674045688
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God in Gotham written by Jon Butler and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity's rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion's demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem's storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan's young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island's booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than floundered in it. Far from the world of "disenchantment" that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

Author : Bryan F. Le Beau
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136688919
Total Pages : 372 pages
Book Rating : 4.11/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of Religion in America written by Bryan F. Le Beau and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A History of Religion in America: From the First Settlements through the Civil War provides comprehensive coverage of the history of religion in America from the pre-colonial era through the aftermath of the Civil War. It explores major religious groups in the United States and the following topics: • Native American religion before and after the Columbian encounter • Religion and the Founding Fathers • Was America founded as a Christian nation? • Religion and reform in the 19th century • The first religious outsiders • A nation and its churches divided Chronologically arranged and integrating various religious developments into a coherent historical narrative, this book also contains useful chapter summaries and review questions. Designed for undergraduate religious studies and history students A History of Religion in America provides a substantive and comprehensive introduction to the complexity of religion in American history.

Author : Jon Butler
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674006674
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Becoming America written by Jon Butler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Multinational, profit-driven, materialistic, politically self-conscious, power-hungry, religiously plural: America three hundred years ago -- and today. Here are Britain's mainland American colonies after 1680, in the process of becoming the first modern society -- a society the earliest colonists never imagined, a "new order of the ages" that anticipated the American Revolution. Jon Butler's panoramic view of the colonies in this epoch transforms our customary picture of prerevolutionary America; it reveals a strikingly "modern" character that belies the eighteenth-century quaintness fixed in history. Stressing the middle and late decades (the hitherto "dark ages") of the American colonial experience, and emphasizing the importance of the middle and southern colonies as well as New England, Becoming America shows us transformations before 1776 among an unusually diverse assortment of peoples. Here is a polyglot population of English, Indians, Africans, Scots, Germans, Swiss, Swedes, and French; a society of small colonial cities with enormous urban complexities; an economy of prosperous farmers thrust into international market economies; peoples of immense wealth, a burgeoning middle class, and incredible poverty. Butler depicts settlers pursuing sophisticated provincial politics that ultimately sparked revolution and a new nation; developing new patterns in production, consumption, crafts, and trades that remade commerce at home and abroad; and fashioning a society remarkably pluralistic in religion, whose tolerance nonetheless did not extend to Africans or Indians. Here was a society that turned protest into revolution and remade itself many times during the next centuries -- asociety that, for ninety years before 1776, was becoming America.