How does community arise in and exist through communication? Blending theory and case studies, Civic Communion looks at community-building in rural America and how civic-minded people come together through a variety of ways, such as hosting and attending festivals, addressing conflict, planning the community, and maintaining heritage museums. David E. Procter's insightful work reveals a specific and significant form of community 'talk' that serves to build and sustain community.
This study is the first monograph to attempt a synthetic treatment of the career of Thomas Erastus (1524-1583). Erastus was a central player in the conversion of the Electoral Palatinate to Reformed Christianity in the early 1560s and a co-author of the Heidelberg Catechism. In the church discipline controversy of the 1560s and 1570s, Erastus opposed the Calvinist effort to institute a consistory of elders with independent authority over excommunication. Erastus’s defeat in this controversy, and the ensuing Antitrinitarian affair, proved the watershed of his career. He turned to the refutation of Paracelsus and a debate with Johann Weyer on the punishment of witches. The epilogue tracks Erastus’s later career and the reception of his works into the seventeenth century.
DIVThis briskly told history of Reformed Protestantism takes these churches through their entire 500-year history—from sixteenth-century Zurich and Geneva to modern locations as far flung as Seoul and São Paulo. D. G. Hart explores specifically the social and political developments that enabled Calvinism to establish a global presence./divDIV /divDIVHart’s approach features significant episodes in the institutional history of Calvinism that are responsible for its contemporary profile. He traces the political and religious circumstances that first created space for Reformed churches in Europe and later contributed to Calvinism’s expansion around the world. He discusses the effects of the American and French Revolutions on ecclesiastical establishments as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century communions, particularly in Scotland, the Netherlands, the United States, and Germany, that directly challenged church dependence on the state. Raising important questions about secularization, religious freedom, privatization of faith, and the place of religion in public life, this book will appeal not only to readers with interests in the history of religion but also in the role of religion in political and social life today./div
Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, architectural historian Robert Proctor examines the transformations in British Roman Catholic church architecture that took place in the two decades surrounding this crucial event. Inspired by new thinking in theology and changing practices of worship, and by a growing acceptance of modern art and architecture, architects designed radical new forms of church building in a campaign of new buildings for new urban contexts. A focussed study of mid-twentieth century church architecture, Building the Modern Church considers how architects and clergy constructed the image and reality of the Church as an institution through its buildings. The author examines changing conceptions of tradition and modernity, and the development of a modern church architecture that drew from the ideas of the liturgical movement. The role of Catholic clergy as patrons of modern architecture and art and the changing attitudes of the Church and its architects to modernity are examined, explaining how different strands of post-war architecture were adopted in the field of ecclesiastical buildings. The church building’s social role in defining communities through rituals and symbols is also considered, together with the relationships between churches and modernist urban planning in new towns and suburbs. Case studies analysed in detail include significant buildings and architects that have remained little known until now. Based on meticulous historical research in primary sources, theoretically informed, fully referenced, and thoroughly illustrated, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the church architecture, art and theology of this period.
