Embattled Ecumenism
Embattled Ecumenism

Author: Jill Gill

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-09-01

Total Pages: 565

ISBN-13: 1501756966

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The Vietnam War and its polarizing era challenged, splintered, and changed The National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. (NCC), which was motivated by its ecumenical Christian vision to oppose that war and unify people. The NCC's efforts on the war exposed its strengths and imploded its weaknesses in ways instructive for religious institutions that bring their faith into politics. Embattled Ecumenism explores the ecumenical vision, anti-Vietnam War efforts, and legacy of the NCC. Gill's monumental study serves as a window into the mainline Protestant manner of engaging political issues at a unique time of national crisis and religious transformation. In vibrant prose, Gill illuminates an ecumenical institution, vision, and movement that has been largely misrepresented by the religious right, dismissed by the secular left, misunderstood by laity, and ignored by scholars outside of ecumenical circles. At a time when the majority of scholarly work is committed to looking at the religious right, Gill's groundbreaking study of the Protestant Left is a welcome addition. Embattled Ecumenism will appeal to scholars of U.S. religion, politics, and culture, as well as historians of evangelicalism and general readers interested in U.S. history and religion.

Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed
Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed

Author: R. David Nelson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-07-27

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0567318575

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Ecumenism: A Guide for the Perplexed is a comprehensive introduction to the methods, achievements, and future prospects of the modern ecumenical movement. The authors begin the volume by charting out a serviceable definition of ecumenism, a term that has long been a source of confusion for students of theology and church history. They review the chronology of the modern ecumenical movement and highlight the major events, figures, accomplishments, and impasses. This historical survey is followed by critical examinations of three significant challenges for contemporary ecumenical theology and practice. Along the way, the authors provide commentary upon the difficulties and prospects that the ecumenical movement might anticipate as it enters this new millennium.

Until There Is Justice
Until There Is Justice

Author: Jennifer Scanlon

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-20

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0190248602

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A demanding feminist, devout Christian, and savvy grassroots civil rights organizer, Anna Arnold Hedgeman played a key role in over half a century of social justice initiatives. Like many of her colleagues, including A. Philip Randolph, Betty Friedan, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Hedgeman ought to be a household name, but until now has received only a fraction of the attention she deserves. In Until There Is Justice, author Jennifer Scanlon presents the first-ever biography of Hedgeman. Through a commitment to faith-based activism, civil rights, and feminism, Hedgeman participated in and led some of the 20th century's most important developments, including advances in education, public health, politics, and workplace justice. Simultaneously a dignified woman and scrappy freedom fighter, Hedgeman's life upends conventional understandings of many aspects of the civil rights and feminist movements. She worked as a teacher, lobbyist, politician, social worker, and activist, often crafting and implementing policy behind the scenes. Although she repeatedly found herself a woman among men, a black American among whites, and a secular Christian among clergy, she maintained her conflicting identities and worked alongside others to forge a common humanity. From helping black and Puerto Rican Americans achieve critical civil service employment in New York City during the Great Depression to orchestrating white religious Americans' participation in the 1963 March on Washington, Hedgeman's contributions transcend gender, racial, and religious boundaries. Engaging and profoundly inspiring, Scanlon's biography paints a compelling portrait of one of the most remarkable yet understudied civil rights leaders of our time. Until There Is Justice is a must-read for anyone with a passion for history, biography, and civil rights.

The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States
The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Contemporary Christianity in the United States

Author: Mark A. Lamport

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 581

ISBN-13: 1538138816

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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.

The End of Empathy
The End of Empathy

Author: John W. Compton

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 019006918X

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How did white evangelicals, a group that had once rallied national support for the federal minimum wage and progressive child labor laws, vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016? In The End of Empathy, John W. Compton presents a nuanced portrait of the changing values of evangelical voters over the last century. To explain the rise of white Protestant social concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century and its sudden demise at the end of the twentieth, Compton argues that religious conviction, by itself, is rarely sufficient to motivate empathetic political behavior. When believers do act empathetically--championing reforms that transfer resources or political influence to less privileged groups within society, for example--it is typically because strong religious institutions have compelled them to do so.

The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America
The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America

Author: James Hudnut-Beumler

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2018-01-09

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 0231545037

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As recently as the 1960s, more than half of all American adults belonged to just a handful of mainline Protestant denominations—Presbyterian, UCC, Disciples of Christ, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, and American Baptist. Presidents, congressmen, judges, business leaders, and other members of the elite overwhelmingly came from such backgrounds. But by 2010, fewer than 13 percent of adults belonged to a mainline Protestant church. What does the twenty-first century hold for this once-hegemonic religious group? In this volume, experts in American religious history and the sociology of religion examine the extraordinary decline of mainline Protestantism over the past half century and assess its future. Contributors discuss the demographics of mainline Protestants; their beliefs, practices, and modes of worship; their political views and partisan affiliations; and the social and moral questions that unite and divide Protestant communities. Other chapters examine Protestant institutions, including providers of health care and education; analyze churches’ public voice; and probe what will come from a diminished role relative to other groups in society, especially the ascendant evangelicals. Far from going extinct, the book argues, the mainline Protestant movement will continue to be a vital remnant in an American religious culture torn between the contending forces of secularism and evangelicalism.

Imagining Persecution
Imagining Persecution

Author: Jason Bruner

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2021-03-12

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1978816812

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Many American Christians believe they belong to the most persecuted religious community in the world. This book provides a historical account of this way of imagining the world, evaluating the evidence used to support it, and reflecting upon its religious and political implications.

Bringing God to Men
Bringing God to Men

Author: Jacqueline E. Whitt

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2014-02-17

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 146961295X

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During the second half of the twentieth century, the American military chaplaincy underwent a profound transformation. Broad-based and ecumenical in the World War II era, the chaplaincy emerged from the Vietnam War as generally conservative and evangelical. Before and after the Vietnam War, the chaplaincy tended to mirror broader social, political, military, and religious trends. During the Vietnam War, however, chaplains' experiences and interpretations of war placed them on the margins of both military and religious cultures. Because chaplains lived and worked amid many communities--religious and secular, military and civilian, denominational and ecumenical--they often found themselves mediating heated struggles over the conflict, on the home front as well as on the front lines. In this benchmark study, Jacqueline Whitt foregrounds the voices of chaplains themselves to explore how those serving in Vietnam acted as vital links between diverse communities, working personally and publicly to reconcile apparent tensions between their various constituencies. Whitt also offers a unique perspective on the realities of religious practice in the war's foxholes and firebases, as chaplains ministered with a focus on soldiers' shared experiences rather than traditional theologies.

Good and Mad
Good and Mad

Author: Margaret Bendroth

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-11-05

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0197654061

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"Good and Mad tells the story of women in liberal Protestant churches, the so-called "mainline," during a complex era, after the suffrage amendment and before the advent of second wave feminism. These socially progressive churchwomen, predominantly white but also African American, coastal urbanites as well as salt-of-the-earth Southerners and Midwesterners, campaigned for human rights and global peace, worked for interracial cooperation, and opened the path to women's ordination-and chose to do so within churches that denied them equality. Historian Margaret Bendroth explores the paradoxes and conflicting loyalties of churchwomen in this "between time," interweaving a larger story with vignettes of individual women who knew both the value of compromise and the cost of anger. This lively historical account, told with women at the center rather than the periphery, incorporates the efforts of churchwomen from the rural South to the halls of the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. It explains not just how feminism finally took root in American mainline churches, but why change was so long in coming"--

Renewal
Renewal

Author: Mark Wild

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2019-03-21

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 022660537X

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In the decades following World War II, a movement of clergy and laity sought to restore liberal Protestantism to the center of American urban life. Chastened by their failure to avert war and the Holocaust, and troubled by missionaries’ complicity with colonial regimes, they redirected their energies back home. Renewal explores the rise and fall of this movement, which began as an effort to restore the church’s standing but wound up as nothing less than an openhearted crusade to remake our nation’s cities. These campaigns reached beyond church walls to build or lend a hand to scores of organizations fighting for welfare, social justice, and community empowerment among the increasingly nonwhite urban working class. Church leaders extended their efforts far beyond traditional evangelicalism, often dovetailing with many of the contemporaneous social currents coursing through the nation, including black freedom movements and the War on Poverty. Renewal illuminates the overlooked story of how religious institutions both shaped and were shaped by postwar urban America.