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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
More than fifty years after her death, Eleanor Roosevelt is remembered as a formidable first lady and tireless social activist. Often overlooked, however, is her deep and inclusive spirituality. Her personal faith was shaped by reading the New Testament in her youth, giving her a Jesus-centered spirituality that fueled her commitment to civil rights, women's rights, and the rights of all "little people" marginalized in American society.She took seriously Jesus' words and despite her...
John Fea offers a thoroughly researched, evenhanded primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title's question from a historical perspective, helping readers see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. This updated edition reports on the many issues that have arisen in recent years concerning religion's place in American society including the S...
A Copious Fountain tells the two-hundred-year-old story of Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. From its first days at Hampden-Sydney College, Union Presbyterian Seminary has answered its call to equip educated ministers to serve the church. As the first institution of its kind in the South, Union Presbyterian Seminary created a standard for theological education across denominational affiliations.This systematic history of Union Presbyterian Seminary gives cultural ...
Considering that the Bible was used to justify and perpetuate African American enslavement, why would it be given such authority? In this fascinating volume, Powery and Sadler explore how the Bible became a source of liberation for enslaved African Americans by analyzing its function in pre-Civil War freedom narratives. They explain the various ways in which enslaved African Americans interpreted the Bible and used it as a source for hope, empowerment, and literacy. The authors sho...
"Biblical history, enriched by many religious and cultural traditions, flows into and is intertwined with our nation's epic, both for better and for worse. To ignore that history is to cut ourselves off from our roots and to deny the ancestral experiences that forged our individual and collective identity."—from the prologueThis substantial work explores the interplay of religion and politics throughout the history of the United States. Paul D. Hanson traces American history back to ...
This book provides a history of Presbyterians in American culture from the early eighteenth to the late twentieth century. Longfield assesses both the theological and cultural development of American Presbyterianism, with particular focus on the mainline tradition that is expressed most prominently in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). He explores how Presbyterian churches—and individuals rooted in those churches—influenced and were influenced by the values, attitudes,...
In this interesting and important introduction to the life and thought of Martin Luther King Jr., theologian Rufus Burrow explores King's life as well as his thinking and activism. Burrow addresses those who see King as only a social activist by showing how his studies, particularly his theological studies, influenced, shaped, and transformed the activist path he pursued during his public life. This book, with dozens of illustrations by artist Ron Hill, is written for a broad audi...
During the past four decades, large numbers of women have entered ordained leadership positions in American religious bodies, resulting in changes in aspects of church life from liturgy and theology to pastoral leadership. At the same time, an explosion of scholarship about women in American religious history has demonstrated that women have always played important roles in shaping and even leading American religious institutions. This is so despite their lack of access to formal ...
In this concluding volume of his magisterial trilogy, Gary Dorrien sustains his previous definition of liberal theology and his mixture of theological, philosophical, and historical analysis, while emphasizing the unprecedented diversity of liberal theology in the postmodern age. Dorrien argues that liberal theology has been in crisis for the past half-century, yet despite the crisis, and also because of it, it has also experienced a "hidden renaissance" of intellectual creativity. ...
The women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America has primarily been interpreted as a secular movement. However, in From Preachers to Suffragists, Beverly Zink-Sawyer examines the lives of three nineteenth-century clergywomen--Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Olympia Brown, and Anna Howard Shaw--who, seeing their calling to the suffrage movement as an extension of their call to ministry, left the parish to join and become leaders in the movement. Zink-Sawyer tells the storie...
Believing that African American religious studies has reached a crossroads, Cornel West and Eddie Glaude seek, in this landmark anthology, to steer the discipline into the future. Arguing that the complexity of beliefs, choices, and actions of African Americans need not be reduced to expressions of black religion, West and Glaude call for more careful reflection on the complex relationships of African American religious studies to conceptions of class, gender, sexual orientation,...
Drawing on slave narratives found in forty-one volumes of interviews and one hundred autobiographies by former slaves, these contributors explore how enslaved African Americans received the often oppressive faith of their masters but transformed it into a gospel of liberation. This classic work demonstrates how an authentic black theology of liberation today must listen to the divine spirit that once fed and continues to feed the black religious experience. This second edition in...
In this book, the second of his three-volume history, Gary Dorrien explores American theological liberalism in its heyday--at the advent of the research university and the institutionally identified school. He argues that in its prime theological liberalism effected a creative blending of theological schools, featured a tension between its evangelical and modernist impulses, and was fueled by its expectation of social and cultural progress, until its optimism was subjected to wither...
In this first of a three-volume, comprehensive series, Gary Dorrien mixes theological analysis with historical and biographical detail to present the first comprehensive interpretation of American theological liberalism. Arguing that the indigenous roots of American liberal theology existed before the rise of Darwinism, Dorrien maintains that this tradition took shape in the nineteenth century and was motivated by a desire to map a progressive "third way" between authority-based orth...
Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon was a key figure, politically and religiously, in the formative years of the United States. In this fresh account of Witherspoon's thought, L. Gordon Tait focuses on Witherspoon's piety--the way Witherspoon believed that the Christian faith should take visible and practical form in ministry, politics, and everyday obedience and devotion. The Piety of John Witherspoon is filled with photographs from Witherspoon's life, and Tait's comprehensive t...
