Stories from around the world, particularly from areas of Christian persecution or conflict zones. Today over 250 million Christians are suffering persecution, while tens of thousands are martyred every year. >

This work explores the interaction of American Protestant missionaries with Iranians during the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the missionary activities of four American Protestant groups: Presbyterians, Assemblies of God, International Missions, and Southern Baptists. It argues that American missionaries’ predisposition toward their own culture confused their message of the gospel and added to the negative perception of Christianity among Iranians. This bias was seen primarily in the American missionaries’ desire to modernize Iran through education and healthcare, and between the missionaries’ relationship with Iranian Christians. Iranian attitudes towards missionary involvement in these areas are investigated, as is the changing American missionary strategy from a traditional method where missionaries had the final say on most matters related to American and Iranian Christian interaction, to the beginnings of an indigenous system where a partnership developed between the missionary and the Iranian Christian.

Baroness Cox of Queensbury was appointed a Life Peer in 1982. A former deputy speaker of the House of Lords, she is a tireless advocate for international human rights. She visits the most forgotten people in the world, often in highly dangerous conditions, to carry their stories of abuse and persecution back to the West. She has been under fire many times while taking aid to war victims in Armenia, Sudan and Indonesia. Vice President of the Royal College of Nursing, Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, recipient of the Wilberforce Award and of the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland, she has also received honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Her motivation is profoundly Christian: "Faith without deeds is dead; love without action is dead."

The Anglican Communion is one of the largest Christian denominations in the world. Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion is the first study of its dramatic growth and decline in the years since 1980. An international team of leading researchers based across five continents provides a global overview of Anglicanism alongside twelve detailed case studies. The case studies stretch from Singapore to England, Nigeria to the USA and mostly focus on non-western Anglicanism. This book is a critical resource for students and scholars seeking an understanding of the past, present and future of the Anglican Church. More broadly, the study offers insight into debates surrounding secularisation in the contemporary world.

This beautifully designed, full-color textbook offers a comprehensive introduction to the world's religions, including history, beliefs, worship practices, and contemporary expressions. Charles Farhadian, a seasoned teacher and recognized expert on world religions, provides an empathetic account that both affirms Christian uniqueness and encourages openness to various religious traditions. His nuanced, ecumenical perspective enables readers to appreciate both Christianity and the world's religions in new ways. The book highlights similarities, dissimilarities, and challenging issues for Christians and includes significant selections from sacred texts to enhance learning. Pedagogical features include sidebars, charts, key terms, an extensive glossary, over two hundred illustrations, and about a dozen maps. This book is supplemented with helpful web materials for both students and professors through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources. Resources include self quizzes, discussion questions, additional further readings, a sample syllabus, and a test bank.

Slavery remains rampant worldwide. At least 27 million men, women, and children are enslaved today, ranging from prostitutes in London to indentured workers in Burma. This book tells some of their stories. -The statistics of modern day slavery are shocking,- writes Baroness Cox. -Behind each statistic is a human being ' a man, woman, or child; and behind each human being is a family and a community which have been devastated or destroyed. As real-life experiences often speak louder than words, we introduce some of the hundreds of former slaves we have met personally.- The picture is changing rapidly: there are grounds for optimism, but also fresh concern. This popularly written but carefully researched volume has been fully updated for this new edition. It includes chapters on the causes of slavery, on the history of the practice, on different forms of contemporary slavery and truly shocking case studies from Sudan, Burma, Uganda, Indonesia, and the UK. Dr Lydia Tanner contributes a new chapter on human trafficking, and Mal Egner provides a chapter on the conditions endured by the Dalits of India. Former slave and South Sudanese Olympic athlete, Guor Marial, writes the foreword.

According to the World Evangelical Alliance, over 200 million Christians in at least 60 countries are denied fundamental human rights solely because of their faith. Many face widespread and systematic persecution. The Very Stones Cry Out is a passionate challenge to the rest of the Church, and all advocates of religious freedom, to break their silence on this issue. Baroness Cox presents graphic photographs and survivors' accounts as testimony to widespread destruction, and provides powerful documentary evidence of contemporary persecution. Featuring contributions from those with on the ground experience of the nations concerned, this book details the impact that sustained persecution has on individuals, families and communities. In doing so, it provides a moving account of resilience in the face of destruction, and joy in spite of trials, making this a book that is as much about celebration as it is about challenge.

“You are a man who has vowed to protect his family, even at the cost of your own life. So you have no other choice. . . . You must fight, Samson. You must.” The year is 1941, and Samson Abrams makes a life-or-death decision that lands him, and his entire family, in the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz. When Samson is recognized by Dr. Josef Mengele and Commandant Rudolf Höss as a former boxing champion, he is ordered box for their entertainment. A win means extra rations, but the penalty for losing is death in the gas chambers. One question haunts Samson as he and his family face one atrocity after another: Where is God in the face of such evil? An unexpected friendship between the Jewish Samson and the Polish Catholic priest Maximilian Kolbe challenges Samson to examine what little is left of his faith, but will it give him strength when he needs it most? Based on true stories, Samson: A Savior Will Rise blends Shawn Hoffman’s thorough research with a compelling narrative that provokes questions about faith, hope, and love.

At the heart of the Soviet experiment was a belief in the impermanence of the human spirit: souls could be engineered; conscience could be destroyed. The project was, in many ways, chillingly successful. But the ultimate failure of a totalitarian regime to fulfill its ambitions for social and spiritual mastery had roots deeper than the deficiencies of the Soviet leadership or the chaos of a "command" economy. Beneath the rhetoric of scientific communism was a culture of intellectual and cultural dissidence, which may be regarded as the "prehistory of perestroika." This volume explores the contribution of Christian thought and belief to this culture of dissent and survival, showing how religious and secular streams of resistance joined in an unexpected and powerful partnership. The essays in The Dangerous God seek to shed light on the dynamic and subversive capacities of religious faith in a context of brutal oppression, while acknowledging the often-collusive relationship between clerical elites and the Soviet authorities. Against the Marxist notion of the "ideological" function of religion, the authors set the example of people for whom faith was more than an opiate; against an enduring mythology of secularization, they propose the centrality of religious faith in the intellectual, political, and cultural life of the late modern era. This volume will appeal to specialists on religion in Soviet history as well as those interested in the history of religion under totalitarian regimes.

A riveting investigation of the jagged fault line between the Christian and Muslim worlds The tenth parallel—the line of latitude seven hundred miles north of the equator—is a geographical and ideological front line where Christianity and Islam collide. More than half of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims live along the tenth parallel; so do sixty percent of the world's 2 billion Christians. Here, in the buzzing megacities and swarming jungles of Africa and Asia, is where the two religions meet; their encounter is shaping the future of each faith, and of whole societies as well. An award-winning investigative journalist and poet, Eliza Griswold has spent the past seven years traveling between the equator and the tenth parallel: in Nigeria, the Sudan, and Somalia, and in Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The stories she tells in The Tenth Parallel show us that religious conflicts are also conflicts about land, water, oil, and other natural resources, and that local and tribal issues are often shaped by religious ideas. Above all, she makes clear that, for the people she writes about, one's sense of God is shaped by one's place on earth; along the tenth parallel, faith is geographic and demographic. An urgent examination of the relationship between faith and worldly power, The Tenth Parallel is an essential work about the conflicts over religion, nationhood and natural resources that will remake the world in the years to come.