This first volume of A Global Sourcebook in Protestant Political Thought provides a window into the early Protestant world, and the ways in which Protestants wrestled with politics and religion in ...the wake of the Reformation. This period saw political authorities and church hierarchies challenged and defended by scholars, clerics, and laypeople alike. The volume engages the full spectrum of Protestants, with reference to theology, geography, ethnicity, historical importance, socio-economic background, and gender. This diversity highlights how Protestants felt pulled towards differing political positions and used several maps to chart their course – conscience, custom, history, ecclesiastical tradition, and the laws of God, nature, nation, or community. On most important issues, Protestants lined up on opposing sides. Additionally, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox political thought, as well as interactions with Jewish and Muslim texts and thinkers, profoundly influenced different directions taken in the history of Protestant political thought. Even as our own time is fraught with deep disagreement and political polarisation, so too was early modern Europe, and we might read it in the anxieties, uncertainties, hopes, and expectations that the sources vividly express. This sourcebook will enrich both research and classroom teaching in politics, theology, and history, whether geared towards general political or religious history, or towards more specialised courses on colonialism, warfare, gender, race or religious diversity.
Fundamentally revising our understanding of the nature and intellectual contours of early English Protestantism, Karl Gunther argues that sixteenth-century English evangelicals were calling for ...reforms and envisioning godly life in ways that were far more radical than have hitherto been appreciated. Typically such ideas have been seen as later historical developments, associated especially with radical Puritanism, but Gunther's work draws attention to their development in the earliest decades of the English Reformation. Along the way, the book offers new interpretations of central episodes in this period of England's history, such as the 'Troubles at Frankfurt' under Mary and the Elizabethan vestments controversy. By shedding new light on early English Protestantism, the book ultimately casts the later development of Puritanism in a new light, enabling us to re-situate it in a history of radical Protestant thought that reaches back to the beginnings of the English Reformation itself.
Para entender el fenómeno del protestantismo es importante reconocer el ambiente político que lo propició y la influencia teológica en su formación y praxis. El presente artículo aborda, mediante una ...investigación bibliográfica y documental, como se forjaron las diferentes expresiones del protestantismo latinoamericano durante el siglo XX bajo la influencia de movimientos teológicos propiciados por los Congresos Misioneros Mundiales de Edimburgo y Panamá, el movimiento pentecostal, y los cambios en la política estadounidense. Estos movimientos enriquecieron el protestantismo latinoamericano como un movimiento multiforme con una teología y praxis dinámicas que permitieron su contextualización y el desarrollo de su identidad.
InSaving Faith, David Mislin chronicles the transformative historical moment when Americans began to reimagine their nation as one strengthened by the diverse faiths of its peoples. Between 1875 and ...1925, liberal Protestant leaders abandoned religious exclusivism and leveraged their considerable cultural influence to push others to do the same. This reorientation came about as an ever-growing group of Americans found their religious faith under attack on social, intellectual, and political fronts. A new generation of outspoken agnostics assailed the very foundation of belief, while noted intellectuals embraced novel spiritual practices and claimed that Protestant Christianity had outlived its usefulness.
Faced with these grave challenges, Protestant clergy and their allies realized that the successful defense of religion against secularism required a defense ofallreligious traditions. They affirmed the social value-and ultimately the religious truth-of Catholicism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. They also came to view doubt and uncertainty as expressions of faith. Ultimately, the reexamination of religious difference paved the way for Protestant elites to reconsider ethnic, racial, and cultural difference. Using the manuscript collections and correspondence of leading American Protestants, as well the institutional records of various churches and religious organizations, Mislin offers insight into the historical constructions of faith and doubt, the interconnected relationship of secularism and pluralism, and the enormous influence of liberal Protestant thought on the political, cultural, and spiritual values of the twentieth-century United States.
For God and Globerecovers the history of an important yet largely forgotten intellectual movement in interwar America. Michael G. Thompson explores the way radical-left and ecumenical Protestant ...internationalists articulated new understandings of the ethics of international relations between the 1920s and the 1940s. Missionary leaders such as Sherwood Eddy and journalists such as Kirby Page, as well as realist theologians including Reinhold Niebuhr, developed new kinds of religious enterprises devoted to producing knowledge on international relations for public consumption.For God and Globecenters on the excavation of two such efforts-the leading left-wing Protestant interwar periodical,The World Tomorrow, and the landmark Oxford 1937 ecumenical world conference. Thompson charts the simultaneous peak and decline of the movement in John Foster Dulles's ambitious efforts to link Christian internationalism to the cause of international organization after World War II.
Concerned with far more than foreign policy, Christian internationalists developed critiques of racism, imperialism, and nationalism in world affairs. They rejected exceptionalist frameworks and eschewed the dominant "Christian nation" imaginary as a lens through which to view U.S. foreign relations. In the intellectual history of religion and American foreign relations, Protestantism most commonly appears as an ideological ancillary to expansionism and nationalism.For God and Globechallenges this account by recovering a movement that held Christian universalism to be a check against nationalism rather than a boon to it.
Whilst much recent research has dealt with the popular response to the religious change ushered in during the mid-Tudor period, this book focuses not just on the response to broad liturgical and ...doctrinal change, but also looks at how theological and reform messages could be utilized among local leaders and civic elites. It is this cohort that has often been neglected in previous efforts to ascertain the often elusive position of the common woman or man. Using the Vale of Gloucester as a case study, the book refocuses attention onto the concept of "commonwealth" and links it to a gradual, but long-standing dissatisfaction with local religious houses. It shows how monasteries, endowed initially out of the charitable impulses of elites, increasingly came to depend on lay stewards to remain viable. During the economic downturn of the mid-Tudor period, when urban and landed elites refocused their attention on restoring the commonwealth which they believed had broken down, they increasingly viewed the charity offered by religious houses as insufficient to meet the local needs. In such a climate the Protestant social gospel seemed to provide a valid alternative to which many people gravitated. Holding to scrutiny the revisionist revolution of the past twenty years, the book reopens debate and challenges conventional thinking about the ways the traditional church lost influence in the late middle ages, positing the idea that the problems with the religious houses were not just the creation of the reformers but had rather a long history. In so doing it offers a more complete picture of reform that goes beyond head-counting by looking at the political relationships and how they were affected by religious ideas to bring about change.
Contents: Preface; Introduction; Government, business and urban politics in late medieval Gloucester; Gloucester's ecclesiastical community and education during the Middle Ages; Gloucestershire's leading gentlemen before the Reformation; The Gloucester Vale on the eve of the reformation (1520-1540); Gloucester during the great transfer (1536-1551); The Gloucestershire gentry during the great transfer (1540-1551); Commonwealth and reform: Bishop Hooper in Gloucester (1551-55); A troubled city (1555 and beyond); Appendices; Bibliography; Index.
Dr Ben Lowe is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA.
"Fat People Don't Go to Heaven!" screamed a headline in the tabloidGlobein November 2000. The story recounted the success of the Weigh Down Workshop, the nation's largest Christian diet corporation ...and the subject of extensive press coverage fromLarry King Liveto theNew Yorker.In the United States today, hundreds of thousands of people are making diet a religious duty by enrolling in Christian diet programs and reading Christian diet literature likeWhat Would Jesus Eat?andFit for God.Written with style and wit, far ranging in its implications, and rich with the stories of real people,Born Again Bodieslaunches a provocative yet sensitive investigation into Christian fitness and diet culture. Looking closely at both the religious roots of this movement and its present-day incarnations, R. Marie Griffith vividly analyzes Christianity's intricate role in America's obsession with the body, diet, and fitness. As she traces the underpinning of modern-day beauty and slimness ideals-as well as the bigotry against people who are overweight-Griffith links seemingly disparate groups in American history including seventeenth-century New England Puritans, Progressive Era New Thought adherents, and late-twentieth-century evangelical diet preachers.
Between the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, rural workers were the protagonists of a time of great social upheaval. Working in the Peasant Leagues or in the rural unions, the workers mobilized ...struggles that had the purpose of conquering rights, achieving better living and working conditions. These experiences were carefully recorded by the police authorities of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social (DOPS), who saw in the mobilizations the development of the communist threat in Pernambuco. From police records it was possible to identify the mobilization of workers in Goiana, a municipality in the Zona da Mata Norte of Pernambuco. Based on the report of fires in the sugar cane fields belonging to Companhia Açucareira de Goiana, police investigators described in their reports the presence of “dangerous elements” that contributed to the “destabilization of order” in that municipality. At the same time, the analysis of police records brought to light the participation of protestants in these social mobilizations that, according to the researchers’ interpretation, promoted a new modality of “communist infiltration into the countryside”. Therefore, our objective rests on the investigation of Protestant participation in rural mobilizations in Goiana, emphasizing the role of these leaders and their approach to the discussion on the Social Gospel.
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