This is a thorough yet easy-to-read biography of one of the major figures in Presbyterian and ecumenical church history. During the course of his forty-six-year career as Secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), Robert Speer shaped church policy, increased Presbyterian funding of world missions, and influenced many church leaders, including John D. Rockefeller Jr., Henry Sloane Coffin, and John Mackay. Pastors, laity, professors, and students interested in the history of mission work and ecumenical relations will be interested in the life and accomplishments of this influential Presbyterian.

The Swiss theologian Adolf Keller was the leading ecumenist on the European continent between the two world wars. In this book the historian Marianne Jehle-Wildberger delineates his life and its achievements. Based on research in forty archives in Europe and the United States, a picture emerges that shows a wonderful man who was a personal friend oft Karl Barth, C. G. Jung, Thomas Mann, and Albert Schweitzer--and thus who was influenced by the spiritual tendencies of the twentieth century. Keller cooperated closely with the National Council of Churches. His Central Bureau of Relief in Geneva (Inter-Church Aid) was supported by American churches. His lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary on "Religion and Revolution" (1933)--in which he was one of the first commentators to denounce National Socialism in Germany--set a new standard of political discussion and are unsurpassed. Marianne Jehle-Wildbergers' book is an important contribution to twentieth-century church history and to the history of the twentieth century in general.

Bound for the Promised Land is the first extensive examination of the impact on the American religious landscape of the Great Migration—the movement from South to North and from country to city by hundreds of thousands of African Americans following World War I. In focusing on this phenomenon’s religious and cultural implications, Milton C. Sernett breaks with traditional patterns of historiography that analyze the migration in terms of socioeconomic considerations. Drawing on a range of sources—interviews, government documents, church periodicals, books, pamphlets, and articles—Sernett shows how the mass migration created an institutional crisis for black religious leaders. He describes the creative tensions that resulted when the southern migrants who saw their exodus as the Second Emancipation brought their religious beliefs and practices into northern cities such as Chicago, and traces the resulting emergence of the belief that black churches ought to be more than places for "praying and preaching." Explaining how this social gospel perspective came to dominate many of the classic studies of African American religion, Bound for the Promised Land sheds new light on various components of the development of black religion, including philanthropic endeavors to "modernize" the southern black rural church. In providing a balanced and holistic understanding of black religion in post–World War I America, Bound for the Promised Land serves to reveal the challenges presently confronting this vital component of America’s religious mosaic.

Together with a list of auxiliary and cooperating societies, their officers, and other data.