Unraveling Religious Leadership invites readers to reconsider foundational assumptions in Christian communities. Drawing upon decolonial frameworks and realities beyond white, eurowestern, modern ideals of who leaders are and what they do, this work pulls on the threads of colonialism and empire to create new possibilities for religious leaders.
Fifty years ago, nearly 200,000 religious sisters worked in Catholic schools, hospitals and other institutions throughout the United States. American Catholics honored these women of faith who founded and built these flourishing works of mercy. Then came the ideological shifts and moral upheavals of the 1960s, and ever since, most women's orders in the United States have been in a state of crisis. Now the sisters are aging, with fewer and fewer younger women to take their place. Perhaps related to this demographic shift is the continuing doctrinal confusion that has come under the scrutiny of the Vatican. Using the archival records of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and other prominent groups of sisters, journalist and author Ann Carey shows how feminist activists unraveled American women's religious communities from their leadership positions in national organizations and large congregations. She also explains the recent and necessary interventions by the Vatican. After examining the many forces that have contributed to the crisis, Carey reports on a promising sign of renewal in American religious life: the growing number of young women attracted to older communities that have retained their identity and newly formed, yet traditional, congregations.
Great moral leaders inspire, challenge, and unite us--even in a time of deep divisions. Moral Leadership for a Divided Age explores the lives of fourteen great moral leaders and the wisdom they offer us today. Through skillful storytelling and honest appraisals of their legacies, we encounter exemplary human beings who are flawed in some ways, gifted in others, but unforgettable all the same. The authors tell the stories of remarkable leaders, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, William Wilberforce, Harriet Tubman, Florence Nightingale, Mohandas Gandhi, Malala Yousafzai, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Oscar Romero, Pope John Paul II, Elie Wiesel, Mother Teresa, Abraham Lincoln, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Short biographies of each leader combine with a tour of their historical context, unique faith, and lasting legacy to paint a vivid picture of moral leadership in action. Exploring these lives makes us better leaders and people and inspires us to dare to change our world.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The “paradigm-influencing” book (Christianity Today) that is fundamentally transforming our understanding of white evangelicalism in America. Jesus and John Wayne is a sweeping, revisionist history of the last seventy-five years of white evangelicalism, revealing how evangelicals have worked to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism—or in the words of one modern chaplain, with “a spiritual badass.” As acclaimed scholar Kristin Du Mez explains, the key to understanding this transformation is to recognize the centrality of popular culture in contemporary American evangelicalism. Many of today’s evangelicals might not be theologically astute, but they know their VeggieTales, they’ve read John Eldredge’s Wild at Heart, and they learned about purity before they learned about sex—and they have a silver ring to prove it. Evangelical books, films, music, clothing, and merchandise shape the beliefs of millions. And evangelical culture is teeming with muscular heroes—mythical warriors and rugged soldiers, men like Oliver North, Ronald Reagan, Mel Gibson, and the Duck Dynasty clan, who assert white masculine power in defense of “Christian America.” Chief among these evangelical legends is John Wayne, an icon of a lost time when men were uncowed by political correctness, unafraid to tell it like it was, and did what needed to be done. Challenging the commonly held assumption that the “moral majority” backed Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 for purely pragmatic reasons, Du Mez reveals that Trump in fact represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values: patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community. A much-needed reexamination of perhaps the most influential subculture in this country, Jesus and John Wayne shows that, far from adhering to biblical principles, modern white evangelicals have remade their faith, with enduring consequences for all Americans.
This 2-volume set within The SAGE Reference Series on Leadership tackles issues relevant to leadership in the realm of religion. It explores such themes as the contexts in which religious leaders move, leadership in communities of faith, leadership as taught in theological education and training, religious leadership impacting social change and social justice, and more. Topics are examined from multiple perspectives, traditions, and faiths. Features & Benefits: By focusing on key topics with 100 brief chapters, we provide students with more depth than typically found in encyclopedia entries but with less jargon or density than the typical journal article or research handbook chapter. Signed chapters are written in language and style that is broadly accessible. Each chapter is followed by a brief bibliography and further readings to guide students to sources for more in-depth exploration in their research journeys. A detailed index, cross-references between chapters, and an online version enhance accessibility for today's student audience.
As American mega-churches continue to grow in both number and congregation size, more and more people want to know what all the commotion is about. Here, MacNair shows the emergence of the modern mega-church as not only a disturbing break from tradition, but as a distortion of the Christian tradition of worship - morphing the Church into something more like a business than a place of worship or a place where the presence of Jesus is preserved for future generations. This book answers several questions in an effort to help readers better understand this trend: What is the impact of the emergence of the mega-church, what does this mean to modern Christianity and to the future of Christianity? What does this tell us about the practice of religion today and about faith in God, in any God, in any religion, in the face of the encroachment of mega organizational thinking and money-making upon traditional belief systems? An inside observer, social scientist and faith leader, MacNair offers an insightful critique of mega-churches and their proliferation throughout the country. Reporting from within the halls of Christian history and the Christian intellectual tradition, he offers a new perspective on a growing trend in American Christianity. Taking readers on a tour of a typical mega-church, MacNair reveals the inner workings of this growing organizational approach to American Christianity. He looks at the physical meeting place, the music, the sermon, the groups and services available to congregants, the messages and values it promotes, and the future of the mega-church in America. He argues that the main goal of the mega-church is growth and expansion, and that such an approach distorts the essence of Christianity and sends the wrong message to followers. With more than 1200 mega-churches in the U.S., and hundreds of thousands of congregants, this controversial work will pique the interest of anyone who wishes to know more about the movement as well as the critiques it engenders.
Leaders in congregations and Christian organizations wrestle with an unraveling of the world in which they have little experience and training. While they are offered unending resources by experts on leadership, some with claims to biblical blueprints, the challenges seem mismatched to those methods. Branson and Roxburgh frame the situation as one in which "modernity's wager"--the conviction that God is not necessary for life and wisdom and meaning--has defined the Western imagination. Because churches and leaders are colonized by this ethos, even when God is named and beliefs are claimed, approaches to leadership are blind to God's agency. Branson and Roxburgh approach this challenge as a work in practical theology, attending to our cultural context, narratives of God's disruptive initiatives in Scripture, and a reshaping of leadership theories with a priority on God's agency. With years of experience as teachers, consultants, and guides, they name practices which lead to more faithful participation. Leadership, God's Agency, and Disruption is wide-ranging in cultural and biblical scholarship, challenging in its engagement with numerous leadership studies, and practical with its focus toward the on-the-ground life of churches and organizations.
At the start of the twenty-first century, America was awash in a sea of evangelical talk. The Purpose Driven Life. Joel Osteen. The Left Behind novels. George W. Bush. Evangelicalism had become so powerful and pervasive that political scientist Alan Wolfe wrote of -a sense in which we are all evangelicals now.- Steven P. Miller offers a dramatically different perspective: the Bush years, he argues, did not mark the pinnacle of evangelical influence, but rather the beginning of its decline. The Age of Evangelicalism chronicles the place and meaning of evangelical Christianity in America since 1970, a period Miller defines as America's -born-again years.- This was a time of evangelical scares, born-again spectacles, and battles over faith in the public square. From the Jesus chic of the 1970s to the satanism panic of the 1980s, the culture wars of the 1990s, and the faith-based vogue of the early 2000s, evangelicalism expanded beyond churches and entered the mainstream in ways both subtly and obviously influential. Born-again Christianity permeated nearly every area of American life. It was broad enough to encompass Hal Lindsey's doomsday prophecies and Marabel Morgan's sex advice, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Carter. It made an unlikely convert of Bob Dylan and an unlikely president of a divorced Hollywood actor. As Miller shows, evangelicalism influenced not only its devotees but its many detractors: religious conservatives, secular liberals, and just about everyone in between. The Age of Evangelicalism contained multitudes: it was the age of Christian hippies and the -silent majority, - of Footloose and The Passion of the Christ, of Tammy Faye Bakker the disgraced televangelist and Tammy Faye Messner the gay icon. Barack Obama was as much a part of it as Billy Graham. The Age of Evangelicalism tells the captivating story of how born-again Christianity shaped the cultural and political climate in which millions Americans came to terms with their times.
Six years after its enactment, Obamacare remains one of the most controversial, divisive, and enduring political issues in America. In this much-anticipated follow-up to his critically acclaimed Unprecedented: The Constitutional Challenge to Obamacare (2013), Josh Blackman argues that, to implement the law, President Obama has broken promises about cancelled insurance policies, exceeded the traditional bounds of executive power, and infringed on religious liberty. At the same time, conservative opponents have stopped at nothing to unravel Obamacare, including a three-week government shutdown, four Supreme Court cases, and fifty repeal votes. This legal thriller provides the definitive account of the battle to stop Obamacare from being 'woven into the fabric of America'. Unraveled is essential reading to understand the future of the Affordable Care Act in America's gridlocked government in 2016, and beyond.
Religion has always been shaped by the media of its time, and today we live in a media culture that informs much of what we think and how we behave. Religious believers, communities and institutions use media as tools to communicate, but also as locations where they construct and express identity, practice religion, and build community. This lively book offers a comprehensive introduction to the contemporary field of religion, media, and culture. It explores: the religious content of media texts and the reception of those texts by religious consumers who appropriate and reuse them in their own religious work; how new forms of media provide fresh locations within which new religious voices emerge, people reimagine the "task" of religion, and develop and perform religious identity. Jeffrey H. Mahan includes case study examples from both established and new religions and each chapter is followed by insightful reflections from leading scholars in the field. Illustrated throughout, the book also contains a glossary of key terms, discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading.
