Unlike many Holocaust books, which deal primarily with the concentration camps, this book focuses on Jewish life before Jews lost their autonomy and fell totally under Nazi power. These essays concern various aspects of Jewish daily life and governance, such as the Judenrat, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, religious life, housing, death, smuggling, art, and the struggle for survival while under siege by the Nazi regime. Written by survivors of the ghettos throughout Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, this collection contains historical and cultural articles by prominent scholars, an essay on Holocaust theatre, and an article on teaching the Holocaust to students.
At long last, the reissue of the classic book by the late, great William ¿Bill¿ Augustus Jones. The original volume featured essays on urban ministry and sermons on social justice, and this new edition has been updated by the late author¿s younger daughter and expanded to add several never-before-published sermons from the preaching giant. The book also features new essays reflecting on the legacy and influence of Dr. Jones and his work, from notable leaders including James Forbes, Frederick Haynes, Otis Moss III, J. Alfred Smith Sr., Al Sharpton, Jacqueline Thompson, and more!
Throughout African-American history, religion has been indelibly intertwined with the fight against intolerance and racial prejudice. Martin Luther King, Jr.-America's best-known champion of civil liberties-was a Baptist minister. Father Divine, a fiery preacher who established a large following in the 1920s and 1930s, convinced his disciples that he could cure not only disease and infirmity, but also poverty and racism. An in-depth examination of African-American history and religion, this comprehensive and lively book provides panoramic coverage of the black religious and social experience in America. Renowned historian Albert J. Raboteau traces the subtle blending of African tribal customs with the powerful Christian establishment, the migration to cities, the growth of Islam, and the 200-year fight for freedom and identity which was so often centered around African-American churches. From the African Methodist Episcopal Church to the Nation of Islam and from the first African slaves to Louis Farrakhan, this far-reaching book chronicles the evolution of an important and influential component of our religious and historical heritage. African American Religion combines meticulously researched historical facts with a fast-paced, engaging narrative that will appeal to readers of any age. Religion in American Life explores the evolution, character, and dynamics of organized religion in America from 1500 to the present day. Written by distinguished religious historians, these books weave together the varying stories that compose the religious fabric of the United States, from Puritanism to alternative religious practices. Primary source material coupled with handsome illustrations and lucid text make these books essential in any exploration of America's diverse nature. Each book includes a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and index.
Through brilliant new interpretations of biblical exiles, Daniel Smith-Christopher shows their experience as the most apt model for the Church as witnesses for the peace and justice of God in a strange land.
The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense," the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviors, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion’s sensory and material practice. Sensational Religion refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity’s metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviors, affects, and beliefs.
In this astounding account, a leading sociologist demonstrates that religion in America has become so tamed and softened that it hardly serves any of its original functions.
The integrative role of religion has been a recurrent theme of sociological and anthropological theory. This role is apparent in the Greek-American community; religion functions as a cement of the social fabric. Indeed, it would be hard to overestimate the role of Greek Orthodoxy in joining people of Greek ancestry into a community and reinforcing their sense of ethnic identity. The nature of ethnic identity and the church’s role in fostering and sustaining it are subjects of this study, first published in 1990. In ultimately focusing on the interplay between church, community and individual, the book suggests that understanding the relation of these people to their church is to understand them as a people.
