January 1977

In their acclaimed, much-used Church History, James Bradley and Richard Muller lay out guidelines, methods, and basic reference tools for research and writing in the fields of church history and historical theology. Over the years, this book has helped countless students define their topics, locate relevant source materials, and write quality papers. This revised, expanded, and updated second edition includes discussion of Internet-based research, digitized texts, and the electronic forms of research tools. The greatly enlarged bibliography of study aids now includes many significant new resources that have become available since the first edition's publication in 1995. Accessible and clear, this introduction will continue to benefit both students and experienced scholars in the field.

Essays range chronologically from Luke Gardiner's analysis of Socrates Scholasticus's retelling of the events of the reign of Theodosius I in the 440s, to John Wolffe's essay on modern religious history and the contemporary church.

A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity's rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion's demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem's storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan's young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island's booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than floundered in it. Far from the world of "disenchantment" that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

'The Church and Empire', the theme of Studies in Church History, 54, reflects the reality that from its beginnings, the Christian Church has had close, often symbiotic, relationships with empires and imperial power. Initially the Church engaged with the Roman Empire, subsequently in Europe with the Carolingian, Anglo-Norman, Genoese, Venetian and Holy Roman Empires, and later - through the Church's global expansion with European empires in the Americas, Africa and Asia - the Spanish, Dutch, French and British empires, and the imperial structures it encountered there. Bringing together the work of twenty-four historians, this volume explores the relations of churches and empires, and Christian conceptions of empire, in the ancient, medieval, early modern and modern periods, as well as the role of empire in the global expansion of Christianity.

Brings together the work of a wide range of scholars to explore the history of churches and education.

God always intended to have a people to love: a church Jesus said nothing could destroy (Matthew 16:18). Simonetta shows how God has kept this promise for two thousand years.

This convenient reference work by Nathan Feldmeth offers brief, up-to-date definitions of the terms, events, movements and figures of church history.