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Reforming Sodom

Author: Heather R. White

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2015-07-24

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 1469624125

With a focus on mainline Protestants and gay rights activists in the twentieth century, Heather R. White challenges the usual picture of perennial adversaries with a new narrative about America's religious and sexual past. White argues that today's antigay Christian traditions originated in the 1920s when a group of liberal Protestants began to incorporate psychiatry and psychotherapy into Christian teaching. A new therapeutic orthodoxy, influenced by modern medicine, celebrated heterosexuality as God-given and advocated a compassionate "cure" for homosexuality. White traces the unanticipated consequences as the therapeutic model, gaining popularity after World War II, spurred mainline church leaders to take a critical stance toward rampant antihomosexual discrimination. By the 1960s, a vanguard of clergy began to advocate for homosexual rights. White highlights the continued importance of this religious support to the consolidating gay and lesbian movement. However, the ultimate irony of the therapeutic orthodoxy's legacy was its adoption, beginning in the 1970s, by the Christian Right, which embraced it as an age-old tradition to which Americans should return. On a broader level, White challenges the assumed secularization narrative in LGBT progress by recovering the forgotten history of liberal Protestants' role on both sides of the debates over orthodoxy and sexual identity.

Hinduism Before Reform

Author: Brian A. Hatcher

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-03-10

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0674988221

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A bold retelling of the origins of contemporary Hinduism, and an argument against the long-established notion of religious reform. By the early eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire was in decline, and the East India Company was making inroads into the subcontinent. A century later Christian missionaries, Hindu teachers, Muslim saints, and Sikh rebels formed the colorful religious fabric of colonial India. Focusing on two early nineteenth-century Hindu communities, the Brahmo Samaj and the Swaminarayan Sampraday, and their charismatic figureheads—the “cosmopolitan” Rammohun Roy and the “parochial” Swami Narayan—Brian Hatcher explores how urban and rural people thought about faith, ritual, and gods. Along the way he sketches a radical new view of the origins of contemporary Hinduism and overturns the idea of religious reform. Hinduism Before Reform challenges the rigid structure of revelation-schism-reform-sect prevalent in much history of religion. Reform, in particular, plays an important role in how we think about influential Hindu movements and religious history at large. Through the lens of reform, one doctrine is inevitably backward-looking while another represents modernity. From this comparison flows a host of simplistic conclusions. Instead of presuming a clear dichotomy between backward and modern, Hatcher is interested in how religious authority is acquired and projected. Hinduism Before Reform asks how religious history would look if we eschewed the obfuscating binary of progress and tradition. There is another way to conceptualize the origins and significance of these two Hindu movements, one that does not trap them within the teleology of a predetermined modernity.

Calvin and the Reformed Tradition

Author: Richard A. Muller

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2012-11-15

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 1441242546

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Richard Muller, a world-class scholar of the Reformation era, examines the relationship of Calvin's theology to the Reformed tradition, indicating Calvin's place in the tradition as one of several significant second-generation formulators. Muller argues that the Reformed tradition is a diverse and variegated movement not suitably described either as founded solely on the thought of John Calvin or as a reaction to or deviation from Calvin, thereby setting aside the old "Calvin and the Calvinists" approach in favor of a more integral and representative perspective. Muller offers historical corrective and nuance on topics of current interest in Reformed theology, such as limited atonement/universalism, union with Christ, and the order of salvation.

What is Reformed Theology?

Author: R. C. Sproul

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2016-09-13

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1585586528

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What Do the Five Points of Calvinism Really Mean? Many have heard of Reformed theology, but may not be certain what it is. Some references to it have been positive, some negative. It appears to be important, and they'd like to know more about it. But they want a full, understandable explanation, not a simplistic one. What Is Reformed Theology? is an accessible introduction to beliefs that have been immensely influential in the evangelical church. In this insightful book, R. C. Sproul walks readers through the foundations of the Reformed doctrine and explains how the Reformed belief is centered on God, based on God's Word, and committed to faith in Jesus Christ. Sproul explains the five points of Reformed theology and makes plain the reality of God's amazing grace.

Reforming the Christian Faith

Author: Mark W. Karlberg

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2017-10-12

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1532637667

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Central to the mission of the church with each passing generation is the elucidation of the gospel of Christ, which is the heart of the Christian message. Witness to God’s saving word in Scripture comes in response to discussions and debates arising over the course of church history. Our study highlights some of the unity and disunity found within the Reformed tradition, Reformation and modern. Beginning with the subject of the development of doctrine over the course of church history, we take up the foundational issue of biblical hermeneutics (the question of how we are to interpret the Bible). The year 2017 marks the Protestant Church’s 500th anniversary (October 31). We consider, secondly, Protestantism’s two leading theological principles—the formal (the doctrine of Scripture) and the material (the doctrine of justification by faith alone). In the final section, we critique departures from the teaching of historic federalism found within contemporary Reformed orthodoxy, which strikes at the very heart of what it means to be “Reformed” in theology. Crucial in this long-standing and ongoing dispute is the interpretation of the Mosaic Covenant as in some sense a “republication” of the original Covenant of Works with Adam at creation. Covenant and justification are the focal doctrines under study.

Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools

Author: Candy Gunther Brown

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2019-03-27

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1469648490

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Yoga and mindfulness activities, with roots in Asian traditions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, have been brought into growing numbers of public schools since the 1970s. While they are commonly assumed to be secular educational tools, Candy Gunther Brown asks whether religion is truly left out of the equation in the context of public-school curricula. An expert witness in four legal challenges, Brown scrutinized unpublished trial records, informant interviews, and legal precedents, as well as insider documents, some revealing promoters of "Vedic victory" or "stealth Buddhism" for public-school children. The legal challenges are fruitful cases for Brown's analysis of the concepts of religious and secular. While notions of what makes something religious or secular are crucial to those who study religion, they have special significance in the realm of public and legal norms. They affect how people experience their lives, raise their children, and navigate educational systems. The question of religion in public education, Brown shows, is no longer a matter of jurisprudence focused largely on the establishment of a Protestant Bible or nonsectarian prayer. Instead, it now reflects an increasingly diverse American religious landscape. Reconceptualizing secularization as transparency and religious voluntarism, Brown argues for an opt-in model for public-school programs.

Reforming Hollywood

Author: William D. Romanowski

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-06-14

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 0199942587

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Religious Communication Association's Book of the Year Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable. In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. He shows how a broad spectrum of religious forces have played a role in Hollywood, from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched sources, he describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation's moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. "It is this human choice," noted one Protestant leader, "that is the basis of our religion." Tensions with Catholics, too, have loomed large--many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood's corrupting power. Romanowski shows that the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture, in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced "Hollywood elites," major studios noted the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. 20th Century-Fox formed FoxFaith to go after the "Passion dollar," and Disney took on evangelical Philip Anschutz as a partner to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen. William Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture. Reforming Hollywood is his most revealing, provocative, and groundbreaking work on this vital area of American society.

Reforming Liberalism

Author: Robert Devigne

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-10-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0300133901

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In Reforming Liberalism, Robert Devigne challenges prevailing interpretations of the political and moral thought of John Stuart Mill and the theoretical underpinnings of modern liberal philosophy. He explains how Mill drew from ancient and romantic thought as well as past religious practices to reconcile conflicts and antinomies (liberty and virtue, self-interest and morality, equality and human excellence) that were hobbling traditional liberalism. The book shows that Mill, regarded as a seminal writer in the liberal tradition, critiques liberalism’s weaknesses with a forcefulness usually associated with its well-known critics. Devigne explores Mill’s writings to demonstrate how his thought has been misconstrued--as well as oversimplified--to the detriment of our understanding of liberalism itself.