Building God's Kingdom

Building God's Kingdom
Author: Julie Ingersoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199913781

In this fascinating book, Julie Ingersoll draws on years of research, Reconstructionist publications, and interviews with believers to paint the most complete portrait of the Christian Reconstructionist movement yet published.

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America

Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America
Author: Crawford Gribben
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199370249

Over the last thirty years, conservative evangelicals have been moving to the Northwest of the United States, where they hope to resist the impact of secular modernity and to survive the breakdown of society that they anticipate. These believers have often given up on the politics of the Christian Right, adopting strategies of hibernation while developing the communities and institutions from which a new America might one day emerge. Their activity coincides with the promotion by prominent survivalist authors of a program of migration to the "American Redoubt," a region encompassing Idaho, Montana, parts of eastern Washington and Oregon, and Wyoming, as a haven in which to endure hostile social change or natural disaster and in which to build a new social order. These migration movements have independent origins, but they overlap in their influences and aspirations, working in tandem to offer a vision of the present in which Christian values must be defended as American society is rebuilt according to biblical law. This book examines the origins, evolution, and cultural reach of this little-noted migration and considers what it might tell us about the future of American evangelicalism. Drawing on Calvinist theology, the social theory of Christian Reconstruction, and libertarian politics, these believers are projecting significant soft power. Their books are promoted by leading mainstream publishers and listed as New York Times bestsellers. Their strategy is gaining momentum, making an impact in local political and economic life, while being repackaged for a wider audience in publications by a broader coalition of conservative commentators and in American mass culture. This survivalist evangelical subculture recognizes that they have lost the culture war - but another kind of conflict is beginning.

Christian Reconstruction

Christian Reconstruction
Author: Michael J. McVicar
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2015-04-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1469622750

This is the first critical history of Christian Reconstruction and its founder and champion, theologian and activist Rousas John Rushdoony (1916–2001). Drawing on exclusive access to Rushdoony's personal papers and extensive correspondence, Michael J. McVicar demonstrates the considerable role Reconstructionism played in the development of the radical Christian Right and an American theocratic agenda. As a religious movement, Reconstructionism aims at nothing less than "reconstructing" individuals through a form of Christian governance that, if implemented in the lives of U.S. citizens, would fundamentally alter the shape of American society. McVicar examines Rushdoony's career and traces Reconstructionism as it grew from a grassroots, populist movement in the 1960s to its height of popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. He reveals the movement's galvanizing role in the development of political conspiracy theories and survivalism, libertarianism and antistatism, and educational reform and homeschooling. The book demonstrates how these issues have retained and in many cases gained potency for conservative Christians to the present day, despite the decline of the movement itself beginning in the 1990s. McVicar contends that Christian Reconstruction has contributed significantly to how certain forms of religiosity have become central, and now familiar, aspects of an often controversial conservative revolution in America.

Religion and Social Reconstruction in Africa

Religion and Social Reconstruction in Africa
Author: Elias Kifon Bongmba
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2018-06-13
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1351167383

Religion has played a major role in both the division and unification of peoples and countries within Africa. Its capacity to cause, and to heal, societal rifts has been well documented. This book addresses this powerful societal force, and explores the implications of a theology of reconstruction, most notably articulated by Jesse Mugambi. This way of thinking seeks to build on liberation theology, aiming to encourage the rebuilding of African society on its own terms. An international panel of contributors bring an interdisciplinary perspective to the issues around reconstructing the religious elements of African society. Looking at issues of reconciliation, postcolonialism and indigenous spirituality, among others, they show that Mugambi’s cultural and theological insight has the potential to revolutionise the way people in Africa address this issue. This is a fascinating exploration of the religious facets of African life. As such, it will be of great interest to scholars of religious studies, theology and African studies.

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book

Christianity and the Transformation of the Book
Author: Anthony Grafton
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674037863

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

Just Revolution

Just Revolution
Author: Anna Floerke Scheid
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2015-06-17
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0739190954

Despite the U.S Catholic Bishops’ 1983 declaration that “insufficient analytical attention has been given to the moral issues of revolutionary warfare,” theological scholarship has been slow to engage in systematic analysis of what makes a revolution ethical or unethical. Just Revolution: A Christian Ethic of Political Resistance and Social Transformation aims to address this lacuna. What principles and practices ought to guide people who want to free themselves from dictatorial or oppressive governments? With this question in mind, this book focuses on oppressed peoples as agents of their own processes of social transformation. The model of just revolution proposed endeavors to limit violence to do the least possible harm while overcoming political oppression, working toward a justice, and promoting long-term efforts at peacebuilding and sociopolitical reconciliation. Using the South African struggle against apartheid as a case study, Just Revolution posits an ethic for revolutionary activity that begins with nonviolent just peacemaking practices, allows for limited and restrained armed resistance in accordance with revised just war criteria, and promotes post-revolutionary transitional justice and social reconciliation. Together the practices and criteria that emerge from this study yield a rich and theologically grounded ethic of just revolution.

Moral Reconstruction

Moral Reconstruction
Author: Gaines M. Foster
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2003-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807860166

Between 1865 and 1920, Congress passed laws to regulate obscenity, sexuality, divorce, gambling, and prizefighting. It forced Mormons to abandon polygamy, attacked interstate prostitution, made narcotics contraband, and stopped the manufacture and sale of alcohol. Gaines Foster explores the force behind this unprecedented federal regulation of personal morality--a combined Christian lobby. Foster analyzes the fears of appetite and avarice that led organizations such as the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the National Reform Association to call for moral legislation and examines the efforts and interconnections of the men and women who lobbied for it. His account underscores the crucial role white southerners played in the rise of moral reform after 1890. With emancipation, white southerners no longer needed to protect slavery from federal intervention, and they seized on moral legislation as a tool for controlling African Americans. Enriching our understanding of the aftermath of the Civil War and the expansion of national power, Moral Reconstruction also offers valuable insight into the link between historical and contemporary efforts to legislate morality.