The history of Christianity in America has been marked by recurring periods of religious revivals or awakenings. In this book, George M. Thomas addresses the economic and political context of evangelical revivalism and its historical linkages with economic expansion and Republicanism in the nineteenth century. Thomas argues that large-scale change results in social movements that articulate new organizations and definitions of individual, society, authority, and cosmos. Drawing on religious newspapers, party policies and agendas, and quantitative analyses of voting patterns and census data, he claims that revivalism in this period framed the rules and identities of the expanding market economy and the national policy. "Subtle and complex. . . . Fascinating."—Randolph Roth, Pennsylvania History "[Revivalism and Cultural Change] should be read with interest by those interested in religious movements as well as the connections among religion, economics, and politics."—Charles L. Harper, Contemporary Sociology "Readers old and new stand to gain much from Thomas's sophisticated study of the macrosociology of religion in the United States during the nineteenth century. . . . He has given the sociology of religion its best quantitative study of revivalism since the close of the 1970s."—Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion

The book is an introduction to the study of culture, with emphasis on the dynamism factor intrinsic and susceptible to generating growth, development initiatives and change, especially in religion and other aspects of Nigerian society. The collection of 19 papers is organised into five parts: Concepts and Theoretical Alignments, Social Institutions in Culture Change and Development, Religious Traditions and Change Experience, Votaries and Sectarian Reaction to Culture and Religious Change, and Pastoral Objective and the Management of Cultural Diversity and Change in Christianity.

The only way to change culture is to create culture. Andy Crouch says we must reclaim the cultural mandate to be the creative cultivators God designed us to be. In this expanded edition of his award-winning book he unpacks how culture works and gives us tools to partner with God's own making and transforming of culture.

We all want revival. We talk about it, pray for it, and devise every evangelism strategy imaginable. We read about the Great Awakening and recall the Jesus Movement. And today we stand at the precipice of another sweeping spiritual outbreak that could reach the ends of the earth. But are we ready? Revival Culture is an inspirational, biblical, and empowering manual for the next generation of revivalists. Michael Brodeur and Banning Liebscher have been witnessing a spiritual renewal at Bethel Church in Redding, California, and through Jesus Culture, that goes beyond slogans and high hopes to actually reaching. They have learned that transformation happens when we see the unreached as Jesus sees them and when we make revival a part of our lives rather than an event. This is the full picture of revival culture.

Long before today’s culture wars, the “Third Great Awakening” rocked America. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday roused citizens to renounce sin as it manifested in popular culture, moral ambiguity, and the changing role of women. Sin in the City examines three urban revivals in turn-of-the-century Chicago to show how revivalists negotiated that era’s perceived racial, sexual, and class threats. While most studies of this movement have focused on its male leaders and their interactions with society, Thekla Ellen Joiner raises new questions about gender and race by exploring Third Awakening revivalism as the ritualized performance of an evangelical social system defined by middle-class Protestant moral aspirations for urban America. Rather than approaching these events merely as the achievements of persuasive men, she views them as choreographed collective rituals reinforcing a moral order defined by ideals of femininity, masculinity, and racial purity. Joiner reveals how revivalist rhetoric and ritual shifted from sentimentalist identification of sin with males to a more hard-nosed focus on females, castigating “loose women” whose economic and sexual independence defied revivalist ideals and its civic culture. She focuses on Dwight L. Moody’s 1893 World’s Fair revival, the 1910 Chapman-Alexander campaign, and the 1918 Billy Sunday revival, comparing the locations, organization, messages, and leaders of these three events to depict the shift from masculinized to feminized sin. She identifies the central role women played in the Third Awakening as the revivalists promoted feminine virtue as the corrective to America’s urban decline. She also shows that even as its definition of sin became more feminized, Billy Sunday’s revivalism began to conform to Chicago’s emerging color line. Enraged by rapid social change in cities like Chicago, these preachers spurred Protestant evangelicals to formulate a gendered and racialized moral regime for urban America. Yet, as Joiner shows, even as revivalists demonized new forms of entertainment, they used many of the modern cultural practices popularized in theaters and nickelodeons to boost the success of their mass conversions. Sin in the City shows that the legacy of the Third Awakening lives on today in the religious right’s sociopolitical activism; crusade for family values; disparagement of feminism; and promotion of spirituality in middle-class, racial, and cultural terms. Providing cultural and gender analysis too often lacking in the study of American religious history, it offers a new model for understanding the development of a gendered theology and set of religious practices that influenced Protestantism in a period of enormous social change.

In Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, McLoughlin draws on psychohistory, sociology, and anthropology to examine the relationship between America's five great religious awakenings and their influence on five great movements for social reform in the United States. He finds that awakenings (and the revivals that are part of them) are periods of revitalization born in times of cultural stress and eventuating in drastic social reform. Awakenings are thus the means by which a people or nation creates and sustains its identity in a changing world. "This book is sensitive, thought-provoking and stimulating. It is 'must' reading for those interested in awakenings, and even though some may not revise their views as a result of McLoughlin's suggestive outline, none can remain unmoved by the insights he has provided on the subject."—Christian Century "This is one of the best books I have read all year. Professor McLoughlin has again given us a profound analysis of our culture in the midst of revivalistic trends."—Review and Expositor

Murray analyses a crucial period in American religious history,with particular attention to the major theme of the nature ofreligious revival. He rejects the common identification of revival & revivalism, showing that the latter differed from the former both in its origins & in its implications. Whereas in the earlier period, revival was understood as supernatural & heaven-sent, in the later period the ethos was much more man-centred & the methods employed much closer to the manipulative. The change in perspective can be summed up by saying that revival was first viewed as OEsent down, but later seen as OEworked up. A pivotal figure in the change & a major promoter of the new methods, was Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875). Murray traces developments from the time of Samuel Davies (1763-61), through the age of the Second Great Awakening, to the New York Awakening of 1857-8. In addition to Davies & Finney, major leaders whose names recur in these pages include Archibald Alexander (1772-1851) of Princeton Theological Seminary, Edward D. Griffin (1770-1837) & Asahel Nettleton (1783-1844).Arnold DallimoreAn outstanding biography, scholarly, yet popularly written, of theleading preacher of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival.Whitefield (1714-70) is acknowledged to have made a greaterimpact on evangelical Christianity on both sides of the Atlanticthan any other preacher of the eighteenth century. The firstvolume traces the early career of Whitefield to the end of 1740, atwhich point the twenty-six-year-old was already the most brilliantand popular preacher of the time, and had already, at age 24,commanded the largest congregations yet seen in America. Thesecond volume traces the doctrinal conflict with John and CharlesWesley, Whitefield?s visits to Scotland and Wales, as well as theAmerican colonies, and the emergence of a Calvinistic branch ofMethodism. Also provided are details of Whitefield?s marriage,friendships, ceaseless labours and early death aged 55. The two-volume set casts new light on Whitefield?s early life in Gloucester,religious conditions in England at the commencement of hispreaching ministry, his influence on the Great Awakening of 1739-40 in America, his relationships with the Wesleys, hisphilanthropic endeavours and his impact on all classes of Englishsociety including the aristocracy.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

On the street and in the corridors of power, religion is surging worldwide. From Russia to Turkey to India, nations that swore off faith in the last century--or even tried to stamp it out--are now run by avowedly religious leaders. This book examines this new world, from exorcisms in São Paulo to religious skirmishing in Nigeria, to televangelism in California and house churches in China. Since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have assumed that modernization would kill religion--and that religious America is an oddity. As these authors argue, religion and modernity can thrive together, and America is becoming the norm. The failure of communism and the rise of globalism helped spark the global revival, but, above all, 21st century religion is being fueled by a very American emphasis on competition and a customer-driven approach to salvation, and its destabilizing effects can already be seen far from Iraq or the World Trade Center.--From publisher description.