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In Kingdom of God Theodore Kallman illuminates the brief life of a Christian Socialist community founded by four men—a minister, and editor, a professor, and an engineer—on a worn-out cotton plantation just outside of Columbus, Georgia in 1896. While Christian Commonwealth only lasted until 1900, its combination of religious communitarianism and socialist ideology proved attractive to many. It was a place where women enjoyed a sort of political equality and where its school—open to all white students of Muscogee County—emphasized a critique of private property. Kallman explains how particular brand of Tolstoyan anarchism inspired by the Russian novelist’s philosophical treatise The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894) and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount took root in west-central Georgia and attracted attention from famous onlookers--Leo Tolstoy and Jane Addams included. In Kallman's capable hands, what appears to be merely a blip barely worth mentioning for historians of Georgia and the larger United States, instead emerges as a story that has much to teach us about Gilded Age American and provides necessary context for the surging interest in America's socialist past.
Today the chasm between rich and poor is constantly widening. While the wealthy seem to acquire more and more, the impoverished struggle to survive and thrive. This problem pervades not only the secular world but also modern Christianity. The Western church continues to spend more of its resources on its own needs than on those whom God calls us to see and to serve. Perhaps worse, the wealthiest church in history has often become complicit with systemic structures that perpetuate poverty in their own cities. Author and pastor Jimmy Dorrell explains that Scripture demands a drastically different attitude and approach from the wealthy regarding the poor. In Commonwealth: Transformation through Christian Community Development, Dorrell explores the cultural entrapment of the modern church regarding wealth and relationships and calls all Christians to live out genuine love for their neighbors. Drawing on experiences from his time at Mission Waco Mission World and Church Under the Bridge, and undergirded by a thorough and holistic engagement with Scripture, Christian history, and effective models, Dorrell provides a practical and timely exploration of what it means for the church to be a place of redemption for all of God's people--the rich and the poor. Christian community development rooted in the Gospel of Jesus Christ is how we become neighbors in the biblical sense. Beyond handouts and increased donations, it is only when the poor and marginalized of our communities are empowered that the whole city truly prospers. There is a commonwealth of resources and gifts in all classes, and, if we choose to work together, we can change unjust structures of privilege and favoritism. Dorrell challenges us to see that it is only when we understand how financial prosperity often deepens hardheartedness toward Christ and our neighbors that the Christian church can make the good news of Jesus Christ tangible in our communities and world.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of Zealot explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle
Robert Bellarmine was one of the pillars of post-Reformation Catholicism: he was a celebrated theologian and a highly ranked member of the Congregations of the Inquisition and of the Index, the censor in charge of the Galileo affair. Bellarmine was also one of the most original political theorists of his time, and he participated directly in many of the political conflicts that agitated Europe between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Stefania Tutino offers the first full-length study of the impact of Bellarmine's theory of the potestas indirecta in early modern Europe. Following the reactions to Bellarmine's theory across national and confessional boundaries, this book explores some of the most crucial political and theological knots in the history of post-Reformation Europe, from the controversy over the Oath of Allegiance to the battle over the Interdetto in Venice. The book sets those political and religious controversies against the background of the theological and institutional developments of the post-Tridentine Catholic Church. By examining the violent and at times surprising controversies originated by Bellarmine's theory, this book challenges some of the traditional assumptions regarding the theological shape of post-Tridentine Catholicism; it offers a fresh perspective on the centrality of the links between confessional affiliation and political allegiance in the development of the modern nation-states; and it contributes to our understanding of the development of 'modern' notions of power and authority.
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In 1812, eight American missionaries, under the direction of the recently formed American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sailed from the United States to South Asia. The plans that motivated their voyage were ano less grand than taking part in the Protestant conversion of the entire world. Over the next several decades, these men and women were joined by hundreds more American missionaries at stations all over the globe. Emily Conroy-Krutz shows the surprising extent of the early missionary impulse and demonstrates that American evangelical Protestants of the early nineteenth century were motivated by Christian imperialism—an understanding of international relations that asserted the duty of supposedly Christian nations, such as the United States and Britain, to use their colonial and commercial power to spread Christianity. In describing how American missionaries interacted with a range of foreign locations (including India, Liberia, the Middle East, the Pacific Islands, North America, and Singapore) and imperial contexts, Christian Imperialism provides a new perspective on how Americans thought of their country’s role in the world. While in the early republican period many were engaged in territorial expansion in the west, missionary supporters looked east and across the seas toward Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Conroy-Krutz’s history of the mission movement reveals that strong Anglo-American and global connections persisted through the early republic. Considering Britain and its empire to be models for their work, the missionaries of the American Board attempted to convert the globe into the image of Anglo-American civilization.