-
Educating the Women of Hainan: The Career of Margaret Moninger in China, 1915-1942
For Margaret Moninger—a brilliant, fun-loving, and dedicated young woman from Iowa—a career as a missionary in China promised adventure and the chance for responsibility and authority denied most American women of her time. In 1915 she went as a Presbyterian missionary to Hainan Island, China’s southernmost territory, where she remained until repatriated in 1942.
During her years in Hainan, Moninger played many roles: she headed a girls’ mission school, wrote scholarly articles on the Miao aborigines, collected botanical specimens for scientists at home, and served as mission treasurer. She was responsible for communications with American diplomatic personnel and was one ...Read More
-
English Congregational Hymns in the Eighteenth Century
Historians of the English congregational hymn, focusing on its literary or theological aspects, have usually found the genre out of step with the rationalist era that produced it. This book takes a more balanced approach to the work of four writers and concludes that only eighteenth-century Britain, with its understanding of public verse, common truth, and the utility of poetry, could have invented the English hymn as we know it.
The early hymns sought to inspire, teach, stir, and entertain congregations. The essential purpose shifted slightly in line with each poet's setting and in accord with the poetic thought of ...Read More
-
Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic
This book examines how Catholics in the early nineteenth-century Ohio Valley—despite the evangelical success of the Protestant faith during the Second Great Awakening —expanded their church, strengthened their connections to Rome, and sought fellowship with their non-Catholic neighbors. Using extensive correspondence, reports, diaries, court documents, apologetical works, and other records of Catholic clergy, the book shows how Catholic leadership successfully pursued strategies of growth in frontier regions while continually weighing major decisions against established Protestant doctrine. This book helps restore Catholicism to the story of religious development in the Early Republic and emphasizes the importance of clerical and lay efforts ...Read More
-
God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society
Raised as a Southern Baptist in Rome, Georgia, Susan M. Shaw earned graduate degrees from the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, was ordained a Southern Baptist minister, and prepared herself to lead a life of leadership and service among Southern Baptists. However, dramatic changes in both the makeup and the message of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s and 1990s (a period known among Southern Baptists as “the Controversy”) caused Shaw and many other Southern Baptists, especially women, to reconsider their allegiances.
In God Speaks to Us, Too: Southern Baptist Women on Church, Home, and Society, Shaw ...Read More
-
Thomas Merton's Gethsemani: Landscapes of Paradise
For twenty-seven years, renowned and beloved monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) belonged to Our Lady of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery established in 1848 amid the hills and valleys near Bardstown, Kentucky. In Thomas Merton's Gethsemani, dramatic black-and-white photographs by Harry L. Hinkle and artful text by Merton scholar Monica Weis converge in a unique experience for lovers of Merton.
Hinkle was allowed unprecedented access to many areas inside the monastery and on its grounds that are generally restricted. His photographs invite the reader to experience the various knobs, lakes, woods, and hermitages Merton sought out for times of solitude and contemplation ...Read More
-
Serving Two Masters: Moravian Brethren in Germany and North Carolina, 1727-1801
The eighteenth century was a time of significant change in the perception of marriage and family relations, the emphasis of reason over revelation, and the spread of political consciousness. The Unity of the Brethren, known in America as Moravians, experienced the resulting tensions firsthand as they organized their protective religious settlements in Germany. A group of the Brethren who later settled in Salem, North Carolina, experienced the stresses of cultural and generational conflict when its younger members came to think of themselves as Americans.
The Moravians who first immigrated to America actively maintained their connections to those who remained in ...Read More
-
A Genealogy of Dissent: Southern Baptist Protest in the Twentieth Century
Between the Civil War and the turn of the last century, Southern Baptists gained prominence in the religious life of the South. As their power increased, they became defenders of the racial, political, social, and economic status quo. By the beginning of this century, however, a feisty tradition of dissent began to appear in Southern Baptist life as criticism of the center increased from both the left and the right. The popular belief in a doctrine of "once saved, always saved" led progressive Baptists to claim that moderates, once saved, did not address the serious social and political problems that ...Read More
-
Selling Catholicism: Bishop Sheen and the Power of Television
When the popularity of Milton Berle's television show began to slip, Berle quipped, "At least I'm losing my ratings to God!" He was referring to the popularity of "Life Is Worth Living" and its host, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. The show aired from 1952 to 1957, and Sheen won an Emmy, beating competition that included Lucille Ball, Jimmy Durante, and Edward R. Murrow.
What was the secret to Sheen's on-air success? Christopher Lynch examines how he reached a diverse audience by using television to synthesize traditional American Protestantism with a reassuring vision of Catholicism as patriotic and traditional. Sheen provided ...Read More
-
Jonathan Dickinson and the Formative Years of American Presbyterianism
During the eighteenth century Presbyterians of the Middle Colonies were separated by divergent allegiances, mostly associated with groups migrating from New England with an English Puritan background and from northern Ireland with a Scotch-lrish tradition. Those differences led first to a fiery ordeal of ecclesiastical controversy and then to a spiritual awakening and a blending of diversity into a new order, American Presbyterianism. Several men stand out not only for having been tested by this ordeal but also for having made real contributions to the new order that arose from the controversy. The most important of these was Jonathan Dickinson.
...Read More -
Religion In Antebellum Kentucky
Religion permeated the day-to-day life of antebellum Kentucky. This engaging account of Kentucky's various Christian denominations, first published as part of the Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf, traces the history of the Great Revival of 1800–1805, the subsequent schism in Protestant ranks, the rise of Catholicism, the development of a distinctive black Christianity, and the growth of a Christian antislavery tradition.
Paying special attention to the role of religion in the everyday life of early Kentuckians and their heritage, John B. Boles provides a concise yet enlightening introduction to the faith and the people of the Bluegrass State. Religion In Antebellum Kentucky ...Read More
Printing is not supported at the primary Gallery Thumbnail page. Please first navigate to a specific Image before printing.
