An Anxious Age

An Anxious Age

Author: Joseph Bottum

Publisher: Image

Published: 2014-02-11

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0385521464

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We live in a profoundly spiritual age, but not in any good way. Huge swaths of American culture are driven by manic spiritual anxiety and relentless supernatural worry. Radicals and traditionalists, liberals and conservatives, together with politicians, artists, environmentalists, followers of food fads, and the chattering classes of television commentators: America is filled with people frantically seeking confirmation of their own essential goodness. We are a nation desperate to stand of the side of morality--to know that we are righteous and dwell in the light. In An Anxious Age, Joseph Bottum offers an account of modern America, presented as a morality tale formed by a collision of spiritual disturbances. And the cause, he claims, is the most significant and least noticed historical fact of the last fifty years: the collapse of the mainline Protestant churches that were the source of social consensus and cultural unity. Our dangerous spiritual anxieties, broken loose from the churches that once contained them, now madden everything in American life. Updating The Protestant Ethic and the Sprit of Capitalism, Max Weber's sociological classic, An Anxious Age undertakes two case studies of contemporary social classes adrift in a nation without the religious understandings that gave them meaning. Looking at the college-educated elite he calls "the Poster Children," Bottum sees the post-Protestant heirs of the old mainline Protestant domination of culture: dutiful descendants who claim the high social position of their Christian ancestors even while they reject their ancestors' Christianity. Turning to the Swallows of Capistrano, the Catholics formed by the pontificate of John Paul II, Bottum evaluates the early victories--and later defeats--of the attempt to substitute Catholicism for the dying mainline voice in public life. Sweeping across American intellectual and cultural history, An Anxious Age traces the course of national religion and warns about the strange angels and even stranger demons with which we now wrestle. Insightful and contrarian, wise and unexpected, An Anxious Age ranks among the great modern accounts of American culture.


Liberty for All

Liberty for All

Author: Andrew T. Walker

Publisher: Brazos Press

Published: 2021-05-04

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1493431153

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Christians are often thought of as defending only their own religious interests in the public square. They are viewed as worrying exclusively about the erosion of their freedom to assemble and to follow their convictions, while not seeming as concerned about publicly defending the rights of Muslims, Hindus, Jews, and atheists to do the same. Andrew T. Walker, an emerging Southern Baptist public theologian, argues for a robust Christian ethic of religious liberty that helps the church defend religious freedom for everyone in a pluralistic society. Whether explicitly religious or not, says Walker, every person is striving to make sense of his or her life. The Christian foundations of religious freedom provide a framework for how Christians can navigate deep religious difference in a secular age. As we practice religious liberty for our neighbors, we can find civility and commonality amid disagreement, further the church's engagement in the public square, and become the strongest defenders of religious liberty for all. Foreword by noted Princeton scholar Robert P. George.


Why Men Hate Going to Church

Why Men Hate Going to Church

Author: David Murrow

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2011-10-31

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0849949815

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“Church is boring.” “It’s irrelevant.” “It’s full of hypocrites.” You’ve heard the excuses—now learn the real reasons men and boys are fleeing churches of every kind, all over the world, and what we can do about it. Women comprise more than 60% of the adults in a typical worship service in America. Some overseas congregations report ten women for every man in attendance. Men are less likely to lead, volunteer, and give in the church. They pray less, share their faith less, and read the Bible less. In Why Men Hate Going to Church, David Murrow identifies the barriers keeping many men from going to church, explains why it’s so hard to motivate the men who do attend, and also takes you inside several fast-growing congregations that are winning the hearts of men and boys. In this completely revised, reorganized, and rewritten edition of the classic book, with more than 70 percent new content, explore topics like: The increase and decrease in male church attendance during the past 500 years Why Christian churches are more feminine even though men are often still the leaders The difference between the type of God men and women like to worship The lack of volunteering and ministry opportunities for men The benefits men get from attending church regularly Men need the church but, more importantly, the church needs men. The presence of enthusiastic men is one of the surest predictors of church health, growth, giving, and expansion. Why Men Hate Going to Church does not call men back to church—it calls the church back to men.


Pagans and Christians in the City

Pagans and Christians in the City

Author: Steven D. Smith

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

Published: 2018-11-15

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 1467451487

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Traditionalist Christians who oppose same-sex marriage and other cultural developments in the United States wonder why they are being forced to bracket their beliefs in order to participate in public life. This situation is not new, says Steven D. Smith: Christians two thousand years ago faced very similar challenges. Picking up poet T. S. Eliot’s World War II–era thesis that the future of the West would be determined by a contest between Christianity and “modern paganism,” Smith argues in this book that today’s culture wars can be seen as a reprise of the basic antagonism that pitted pagans against Christians in the Roman Empire. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City looks at that historical conflict and explores how the same competing ideas continue to clash today. All of us, Smith shows, have much to learn by observing how patterns from ancient history are reemerging in today’s most controversial issues.


Jesus and Other Men

Jesus and Other Men

Author: Susanna Asikainen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-01-03

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 900436109X

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In Jesus and Other Men, Susanna Asikainen explores the masculinities of Jesus and other male characters and the ideal femininities in the Synoptic Gospels.


Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Author: Mark David Hall

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1400211115

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A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions. In 2010, David Mark Hall gave a lecture at the Heritage Foundation entitled "Did America Have a Christian Founding?" His balanced and thoughtful approach to this controversial question caused a sensation. C-SPAN televised his talk, and an essay based on it has been downloaded more than 300,000 times. In this book, Hall expands upon this essay, making the airtight case that America's Founders were not deists. He explains why and how the Founders' views are absolutely relevant today, showing that they did not create a "godless" Constitution; that even Jefferson and Madison did not want a high wall separating church and state; that most Founders believed the government should encourage Christianity; and that they embraced a robust understanding of religious liberty for biblical and theological reasons. This compelling and utterly persuasive book will convince skeptics and equip believers and conservatives to defend the idea that Christian thought was crucial to the nation's founding--and that this benefits all of us, whatever our faith (or lack of faith).


Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages

Author: P. H. Cullum

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2005-01-01

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9780802048929

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Studies in gender in medieval culture have tended to focus on femininity, however the study of medieval masculinities has developed greatly over the last few years. Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages is the first volume to concentrate on this specific aspect of medieval gender studies, and looks at the ways in which varieties of medieval masculinity intersected with concepts of holiness. Patricia Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis have collected an exceptional group of essays that explore differing notions of medieval holiness, understood variously as religious, saintly, sacred, pure, morally perfect, and consider topics such as significance of the tonsure, sanctity and martyrdom, eunuch saints, and the writings of Henry Suso. Holiness and Masculinity in the Middle Ages deals with a wide variety of texts and historical contexts, from Byzantium to Anglo-Saxon and late-medieval England.