Biblical illiteracy and doctrinal ignorance are like two subtle viruses of twenty-first century America. Always only one generation away from being a pagan nation, as has been said, America needs the Christian Church to rise to the challenge of imparting true and vigorous Christian education to todays generation. Frontiers of Faithseeks to arouse the faith of young believers and to deepen the faith of veteran Christians. Theology, which was once called the Queen of the sciences, today is an unexplored frontier for many Christians. Our hope is that this book will be a trustworthy guide for many into the primary paths of truth that are foundational for a Christians faith.

Sana Haroon examines religious organisation and mobilisation in the North-West Frontier Tribal Areas, a non-administered region on the Indo-Afghan border. The Tribal Areas was defined topographically as a strategic zone of defence for British India, but also determined to be socially distinct and hence left outside the judicial, legislative and social institutions of greater colonial India. Conditions of Tribal Areas autonomy came to emphasize the role and importance of the mullahs operating in the region, and the mullahs jealously protected this administrative alienation. Despite its great distance from the centers of political organization in India and Afghanistan, the frontier occasionally functioned as a military organization ground for both Indian and Afghan anti-colonial activists until independence and partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Thereafter the Tribal Areas maintained status as an administratively and socially autonomous region in both the Afghan and Pakistani national imaginations and cartographic descriptions. The regional mullas continued to contribute to armed mobilizations of national importance in Pakistan and in Afghanistan over the next half century, in return for which nationalist actors supported the mullahs and their personal interest in regional autonomy. This was the hinterland of successive, contradictory jihads in support of Pakhtun ethnicism, anti-colonial nationalism, Pakistani territorialism, religious revivalism, Afghan anti-Soviet resistance, and anti-Americanism. Only the claim to autonomy persisted unchanged and uncompromised, and within that claim the functional role of religious leaders as social moderators and ideological guides was preserved. From outside, patrons recognised and supported that claim, reliant in their own ways on the possibilities the autonomous Tribal Areas and its mullahs afforded.

American religious histories have often focused on the poisoned relations between Catholics and Protestants during the colonial period or on the virulent anti-Catholicism and nativism of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Between these periods, however, lies an important era of close, peaceable, and significant interaction between these discordant factions. Frontiers of Faith: Bringing Catholicism to the West in the Early Republic examines how Catholics in the early nineteenth-century Ohio Valley expanded their church and strengthened their connections to Rome alongside the rapid development of the Protestant Second Great Awakening. In competition with clergy of evangelical Protestant denominations, priests and bishops aggressively established congregations, constructed church buildings, ministered to the faithful, and sought converts. Catholic clergy also displayed the distinctive features of Catholicism that would inspire Catholics and, hopefully, impress others. The clerics' optimism grew from the opportunities presented by the western frontier and the presence of non-Catholic neighbors. The fruit of these efforts was a European church translated to the American West. In spite of the relative harmony with Protestants and pressures to Americanize, Catholics relied on standard techniques of establishing the authority, institutions, and activities of their faith. By the time Protestant denominations began to resent the Catholic presence in the 1830s, they also had reason to resent Catholic successes—and the many manifestations of that success—in conveying the faith to others. Using extensive correspondence, reports, diaries, court documents, apologetical works, and other records of the Catholic clergy, John R. Dichtl shows how Catholic leadership successfully pursued strategies of growth in frontier regions while continually weighing major decisions against what it perceived to be Protestant opinion. Frontiers of Faith helps restore Catholicism to the story of religious development in the early republic and emphasizes the importance of clerical and lay efforts to make sacred the landscape of the New West.

Through a systematic analysis of the sources, compositional structure, and apologetic and polemical strategies of the early fourth century Acts of Archelaus ("Acta Archelai"), this volume explores inter-religious contact, conflict, and comprehension in the encounter between Christianity and Manichaeism.

Faith and Frontiers is a story about how trusting in God leads a man and his wife into unchartered territories and allows them to soar to new heights. In his inspirational memoirs, Eli Miller shares how even as a young Amish boy in Ohio he knew his path lay outside the community. Leaving his home at the tender age of seventeen, and with very little real-life experience, Eli soon finds his life is off track – so much so that even meeting and marrying the love of his life is not enough to settle him down. But then in a moment of despair, an encounter with the Holy Spirit turns his life around and sets him on a path to share the Word of God with others. As Eli continues his spiritual journey and becomes an ordained minister, he and his wife take a leap of faith and become founding members of a Christian community that embraces a frontier lifestyle in the wilderness of Northern British Columbia. After a multitude of adventures, and several years and children later, Eli then leans into his next calling and moves back to “civilization” where he becomes influential in the development and growth of several congregations and begins to lecture and minister across five continents. Told with humour and sincerity, Eli recounts the trials and tribulations of a lifetime of living on faith and shares the message of hope that he has spent his whole life proclaiming.

In this book, Michael Nazir-Ali, author of Conviction and Conflict: Islam, Christianity and World Order (2006), discusses themes of major theological and missiological importance for the Christian encounter with Islam. Chapters include ÒThe Christian Doctrine of God in an Islamic Context,Ó ÒContextualization: The Bible and the Believer in Contemporary Muslim Society,Ó ÒChristian Theology for Inter-Faith Dialogue,Ó and ÒWholeness and Fragmentation: The Gospel and Repression.Ó

Roman Catholic sisters first traveled to the American West as providers of social services, education, and medical assistance. In Across God's Frontiers, Anne M. Butler traces the ways in which sisters challenged and reconfigured contemporary ideas about women, work, religion, and the West; moreover, she demonstrates how religious life became a vehicle for increasing women's agency and power. Moving to the West introduced significant changes for these women, including public employment and thoroughly unconventional monastic lives. As nuns and sisters adjusted to new circumstances and immersed themselves in rugged environments, Butler argues, the West shaped them; and through their labors and charities, the sisters in turn shaped the West. These female religious pioneers built institutions, brokered relationships between Indigenous peoples and encroaching settlers, and undertook varied occupations, often without organized funding or direct support from the church hierarchy. A comprehensive history of Roman Catholic nuns and sisters in the American West, Across God's Frontiers reveals Catholic sisters as dynamic and creative architects of civic and religious institutions in western communities.

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico. Pilgrim soon sparked a tense confrontation with the National Park Service fiercely dividing the community over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. As the battle grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, veteran Alaska journalist, Tom Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.

Spain, 1000–1200: Art at the Frontiers of Faith tells a nuanced story of the dynamic and interconnected medieval Iberian Peninsula while celebrating the artistic exchange among Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the region during the Middle Ages. This Bulletin emphasizes the variety and richness of the Museum’s holdings of medieval Iberian artworks which include mosaics, frescos, architectural decorations, manuscripts, textiles, ivories, and metalwork. Exploring how artists in medieval Spain drew from many sources of inspiration and navigated religious differences in their art, this text underscores the complexity of interfaith interaction during a pivotal era in Spanish history.