Was America founded as a Christian nation—or is the truth far more complex?In God We Trust invites readers to think and reflect critically about the truths and complexities of the role of religion and the founding of America in order to separate history from political ideology and to understand why this distinction matters for the future of our nation and democracy.Both supporters of Christian nationalism and those who oppose it often pick and choose pieces of American history to support their o...
The World of the Parables invites readers to meet the people behind the parables—from children and parents to shepherds and merchants—so that they may hear Jesus’ words as first-century Galileans did, coming away with deeper understanding and appreciation.
The parables of Jesus are filled with familiar figures—farmers and fishermen, widows and landowners, fathers and sons, merchants and laborers. Yet when we hear these stories today, we often miss the full force of their meaning because we no lo...
Did Jesus intend to start a new religion—or was Christianity simply born from conflict?Did Jesus intend to found a church separate from Judaism? Who were the very first followers of Jesus? And how did a clash between two families—the family of Jesus on one hand and the family of high priest Annas and their aristocratic allies on the other—eventually lead to the formation of Christianity?Best-selling author Craig A. Evans looks at how a tumultuous chain of events from 30-70 CE—beginning with Jesu...
Turn the traditional generational groupings on their head through this examination of Black life, culture, and the struggle for racial justice in the United States. The Shaping of Black Identities explores the generations of African Americans who have lived in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and the impact that living in the United States has had on them. Jimmie R. Hawkins examines how identity is formed and shaped by internal and external forces. He investigates collective memory...
A hard, haunting, and hopeful history that will leave an indelible mark and transform your understanding of both Christianity and the United States.
Reckoning with History confronts the histories of settler colonialism and slavery and illumines how these two devastating realities informed and ultimately deformed Protestant Christianity in the North American colonies and antebellum United States. In this book, William Yoo analyzes primary sources from Indigenous, African, European, and American p...
The Spirit of American Liberal Theology is an interpretation of the entire U.S. American tradition of liberal theology. A highly condensed and far-more-accessible summary of Gary Dorrien’s three-volume trilogy, The Making of American Liberal Theology (Westminster John Knox Press 2001, 2003, and 2006), Dorrien here presses the argument that the most abundant, diverse, and persistent tradition of liberal theology is the one that blossomed in the United States and is still refashioning itself...
Austen Hartke’s groundbreaking, best-selling book is now updated and expanded with new insights and terminology, plus new materials for study groups, preaching, and pastoral care.In 2014, Time magazine announced that America had reached “the transgender tipping point,” suggesting that transgender issues would become the next civil rights frontier. Years later, many people—even many LGBTQIA+ allies—still lack understanding of gender identity and the transgender experience. Into this void, trans b...
2023 Award of Excellence, Religion Communicators CouncilLike most Americans, Presbyterians in the United States know woefully little about the history of slavery and the rise of anti-Black racism in our country. Most think of slavery as a tragedy that “just happened,” without considering how it happened and who was involved. In What Kind of Christianity, William Yoo paints an accurate picture of the complicity of the majority of Presbyterians in promoting, supporting, or willfully ignoring ...
In this compelling and informative volume, Jimmie R. Hawkins walks the reader through the many forms of Black protest in American history, from pre-colonial times through the George Floyd protests of 2020. Hawkins breaks American history into five sections, with subsections highlighting how Black identity helped to shape protest during that period. These protests include slave ship mutinies, the abolitionist movement, the different approaches to protest from Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. Dubois, and...
Hundreds of women studied and interpreted the Bible between the years 100–2000 CE, but their stories have remained largely untold. In this book, Schroeder and Taylor introduce readers to the notable contributions of female commentators through the centuries. They unearth fascinating accounts of Jewish and Christian women from diverse communities—rabbinic experts, nuns, mothers, mystics, preachers, teachers, suffragists, and household managers—who interpreted Scripture through their writings. Thi...
Written primarily for undergraduate classes in American religious history and organized chronologically, this new textbook presents the broad scope of the story of religion in the American colonies and the United States. While following certain central narratives, including the long shadow of Puritanism, the competition between revival and reason, and the defining role of racial and ethnic diversity, the book tells the story of American religion in all its historical and moral complexity. To app...
The first biography of its kind about Desmond Tutu, this book introduces readers to Tutu’s spiritual life and examines how it shaped his commitment to restorative justice and reconciliation.
Desmond Tutu was a pivotal leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and remains a beloved and important emblem of peace and justice around the world. Even those who do not know the major events of Tutu’s life—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, serving as the first black archbishop of Cap...
The first biography of its kind about Desmond Tutu, this book introduces readers to Tutu’s spiritual life and examines how it shaped his commitment to restorative justice and reconciliation.
Desmond Tutu was a pivotal leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa and remains a beloved and important emblem of peace and justice around the world. Even those who do not know the major events of Tutu’s life—receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, serving as the first black archbishop of Cap...
Howard Thurman was famously known as one of the towering giants of American religion in the twentieth century. His writings have influenced some of the most important religious and political figures of the last century, from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama. Theologians such as James Cone and Cornel West regularly signal their indebtedness to him. He was a mystic, a preacher, an educator, a theologian, and much more. It is impossible to understand the African American church today without an a...
This book features a learned and fascinating debate between two great Bible scholars about the New Testament as a reliable source on the historical Jesus. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic New Testament scholar, debates Craig Evans, an evangelical New Testament scholar, about the historical Jesus and what constitutes ""history."" Their interaction includes such compelling questions as: What are sound methods of historical investigation? What are reliable criteria for determining the authenticity of an an...
Ancient Jewish and Christian Scriptures examines the writings included in and excluded from the Jewish and Christian canons of Scripture and explores the social settings in which some of this literature was viewed as authoritative and some was viewed either as uninspired or as heretical. John J. Collins, Craig A. Evans, and Lee Martin McDonald examine how those noncanonical writings demonstrate the historical, literary, and religious aspects of the culture that gave rise to the writings. They al...
The Historic Address to Congress of Henry Highland Garnet
""In a time of division, we can have no better prophetic voice to frame today's discussions of justice and freedom than a one-legged fugitive slave who came to a Capitol without a Dome to tell how the Constitution could be made more perfect, in the name of God.""
—from a letter sent by the President of the Presbyterian Historical Society to the President of the Maryland State Senate
In February 1865, just days after the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery, Presbyterian pastor a...
Historical events have long been the standard lens through which scholars have sought to understand the theology of Christianity in late antiquity. The lives of significant theological figures, the rejection of individuals and movements as heretical, and the Trinitarian and christological controversies—the defining theological events of the early church—have long provided the framework with which to understand the development of early Christian belief. In this groundbreaking work, esteemed histo...
No story has been more foundational to triumphalist accounts of Western modernity than that of Martin Luther, the heroic individual, standing before the tribunes of medieval authoritarianism to proclaim his religious and intellectual freedom, “Here I stand!” How Luther Became the Reformer returns to the birthplace of this origin myth, Germany in the late nineteenth century, and traces its development from the end of World War I through the rise of National Socialism. Why were German intell...
From a distinguished assembly of twelve internationally acclaimed scholars comes this rich, interdisciplinary study that explores the Protestant Reformation and its resultant effects on the church as well as the world.The Reformation extended from the church to revolutionize art, music, literature, architecture, and aesthetics and transformed economics, trade, and banking; these transformations shifted power away from the church to the state as they unleashed radical new campaigns for freedom, e...
What has Christianity ever done for us? A lot more than you might think, as Nick Spencer reveals in this fresh exploration of our cultural origins. Looking at the big ideas that characterize the West, such as human dignity, the rule of law, human rights, science, and even, paradoxically, atheism and secularism,he traces the varied ways in which many of our present values grew up and flourished in distinctively Christian soil. Always alert to the tensions and mess of history, and careful not to o...
This book presents an overview of the ministry of women associated with Princeton Theological Seminary over the last two hundred years. Beginning with a historical overview of early pioneering women at the seminary and a chapter highlighting selected trailblazers in ministry, it goes on to showcase twenty-eight first-person narratives by women from diverse racial-ethnic, geographical, and denominational backgrounds in a variety of ministry settings. It concludes by developing new un...
This book introduces readers to the Presbyterian movement in the United States as told by those who lived through and contributed to its history. William Yoo has drawn together essential documents from the colonial period to the present that illustrate and illumine U.S. Presbyterianism across diversities of race, ethnicity, geography, gender, age, and theological position. Readers will follow the church's journey from modest origins as a Scots-Irish immigrant church to prominence on...
Honoring the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, Christopher Elwood offers an insightful and accessible overview of John Calvin's theological ideas within their historical context. A Brief Introduction to John Calvin discusses the trials and tribulations Calvin encountered as he ministered and taught in Geneva, paying special attention to the theological controversies associated with the Trinity and predestination. In this concise introduction, Elwood explores the development of C...
Jackie Robinson believed in a God who sides with the oppressed and who calls us to see one another as sisters and brothers. This faith was a powerful but quiet engine that drove and sustained him as he shattered racial barriers on and beyond the baseball diamond.Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography explores the faith that, Robinson said, carried him through the torment and abuse he suffered for integrating the major leagues and drove him to get involved in the civil rights movemen...
