Ben Wright’s Bonds of Salvation demonstrates how religion structured the possibilities and limitations of American abolitionism during the early years of the republic. From the American Revolution through the eruption of schisms in the three largest Protestant denominations in the 1840s, this comprehensive work lays bare the social and religious divides that culminated in secession and civil war. Historians often emphasize status anxieties, market changes, biracial cooperation, and political maneuvering as primary forces in the evolution of slavery in the United States. Wright instead foregrounds the pivotal role religion played in shaping the ideological contours of the early abolitionist movement. Wright first examines the ideological distinctions between religious conversion and purification in the aftermath of the Revolution, when a small number of white Christians contended that the nation must purify itself from slavery before it could fulfill its religious destiny. Most white Christians disagreed, focusing on visions of spiritual salvation over the practical goal of emancipation. To expand salvation to all, they created new denominations equipped to carry the gospel across the American continent and eventually all over the globe. These denominations established numerous reform organizations, collectively known as the “benevolent empire,” to reckon with the problem of slavery. One affiliated group, the American Colonization Society (ACS), worked to end slavery and secure white supremacy by promising salvation for Africa and redemption for the United States. Yet the ACS and its efforts drew strong objections. Proslavery prophets transformed expectations of expanded salvation into a formidable antiabolitionist weapon, framing the ACS's proponents as enemies of national unity. Abolitionist assertions that enslavers could not serve as agents of salvation sapped the most potent force in American nationalism—Christianity—and led to schisms within the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches. These divides exacerbated sectional hostilities and sent the nation farther down the path to secession and war. Wright’s provocative analysis reveals that visions of salvation both created and almost destroyed the American nation.

The Chance of Salvation offers a history of conversions in the United States which shows how religious identity came to be a matter of choice. Shortly after the American Revolution, people in the United States increasingly encountered an expanded array of religious options. Evangelical Protestants began an effort to convert Americans, while developing new practices that emphasized conversion as an immediate choice. Their missionary effort extended to Native American nations such as the Cherokee in the Southeast, who received Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and newly freed African Americans likewise created a variety of Christian conversion that was centered on religious hope and eschatological expectation. Mormons, drawing on earlier Protestant practices and beliefs, enthusiastically proselytized for a new tradition that emphasized individual choice and free will. By uncovering the way that religious identity is structured as an obligatory decision, this book explains why Americans change their religions so much, and why the United States is both highly religious in terms of religious affiliation and very secular in the sense that no religion is an unquestioned default.--

We live in an age of skepticism. Our society places such faith in empirical reason, historical progress, and heartfelt emotion that it’s easy to wonder: Why should anyone believe in Christianity? What role can faith and religion play in our modern lives? In this thoughtful and inspiring new book, pastor and New York Times bestselling author Timothy Keller invites skeptics to consider that Christianity is more relevant now than ever. As human beings, we cannot live without meaning, satisfaction, freedom, identity, justice, and hope. Christianity provides us with unsurpassed resources to meet these needs. Written for both the ardent believer and the skeptic, Making Sense of God shines a light on the profound value and importance of Christianity in our lives.

“A NOVEL FOR LIFE AFTER THE PANDEMIC…Scratches a particular imaginative itch that we are all experiencing at the precipice of a new era." -- The New Yorker From the National Book Award-winning author of The Friend comes a moving and eerily relevant novel that imagines the aftermath of a pandemic virus as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy uncertain of his destiny. His family's sole survivor after a flu pandemic has killed large numbers of people worldwide, Cole Vining is lucky to have found refuge with the evangelical Pastor Wyatt and his wife in a small town in southern Indiana. As the world outside has grown increasingly anarchic, Salvation City has been spared much of the devastation, and its residents have renewed their preparations for the Rapture. Grateful for the shelter and love of his foster family (and relieved to have been saved from the horrid, overrun orphanages that have sprung up around the country), Cole begins to form relationships within the larger community. But despite his affection for this place, he struggles with memories of the very different world in which he was reared. Is there room to love both Wyatt and his parents? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? As others around him grow increasingly fixated on the hope of salvation and the new life to come through the imminent Rapture, Cole begins to conceive of a different future for himself, one in which his own dreams of heroism seem within reach. Written in Sigrid Nunez's deceptively simple style, Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness, weaving the deeply affecting story of a young boy's transformation with a profound meditation on the meaning of belief and heroism.

Jane Addams was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This biography reveals her early development as a political activist and social philosopher and observes the powerful mind of a woman encountering the radical ideas of her age, most notably the ever-changing meanings of democracy.

This critical appreciation of Thomas Kelly (1893-1941) and his classic A Testament of Devotion (1941) examines the Quaker mystic’s life and devotional writings, often by comparison with Augustine, whose Confessions was a touchstone for him.

"From the end of the Civil War until the early twentieth century, Anglo, immigrant, and African American settlers were moving north and west faster than ministers within the major denominations could follow them with churches. In 1890, Northern Methodists, the largest Protestant denomination, only claimed 3.5 percent of the American population. Roman Catholics claimed 9.9 percent, and African American Baptists, the largest Black denomination, claimed only 18 percent of the African American population. In total, under 30 percent of Americans went to church on a weekly basis. While African American churches served a relatively larger role within their communities, the major white denominations played a minor role in the lives of the working poor. Clergymen like Dwight Moody reflected, "The gulf between the churches and the mases is growing deeper, wider and darker every hour." Home missionaries like Josiah Strong warned, "Few appreciate how we have become a non-churchgoing-people." Strong was right. In large fractions of the country, especially mining and industrial centers in the West, a simple lack of church edifices and long-term ministers to fundraise for them gave way to a vacuum of Protestant, denominational authority. In part, this disconnect between the number of churches and the size of the population was a result of culturally dislocated migrants. In 1890, more than 9 million Americans were foreign-born, and only a small fraction of those Americans had any familiarity with Anglo-Protestant traditions. They were joined by another 1 million African Americans migrants from the South to northern industrial centers. But this was only one of many reasons the poor did not go to church with the wealthy. While middle-class families paid lip service to the importance of building capacious churches, their own policies and practices reinforced the class system. As one minister reflected in 1887, "The working men are largely estranged from the Protestant religion. Old churches standing in the midst of crowded districts are continually abandoned because they do not reach the workingmen." Meanwhile, he continued, "Go into an ordinary church on Sunday morning and you see lawyers, physicians, merchants and business men with their families [-]you see teachers, salesmen, and clerks, and a certain proportion of educated mechanics, but the workingman and his household are not there." As the working-classes swelled with the expansion of American factories, ordained Protestant ministers served an ever-dwindling proportion of the country"--

In their studies of social Christianity, scholars of American religion have devoted critical attention to a group of theologically liberal pastors, primarily in the Northeast. Gary Scott Smith attempts to paint a more complete picture of the movement. Smith's ambitious and thorough study amply demonstrates how social Christianity--which included blacks, women, Southerners, and Westerners--worked to solve industrial, political, and urban problems; reduce racial discrimination; increase the status of women; curb drunkenness and prostitution; strengthen the family; upgrade public schools; and raise the quality of public health. In his analysis of the available scholarship and case studies of individuals, organizations, and campaigns central to the movement, Smith makes a convincing case that social Christianity was the most widespread, long-lasting, and influential religious social reform movement in American history.

In The Medieval Economy of Salvation, Adam J. Davis shows how the burgeoning commercial economy of western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, alongside an emerging culture of Christian charity, led to the establishment of hundreds of hospitals and leper houses. Focusing on the county of Champagne, he looks at the ways in which charitable organizations and individuals—townspeople, merchants, aristocrats, and ecclesiastics—saw in these new institutions a means of infusing charitable giving and service with new social significance and heightened expectations of spiritual rewards. In tracing the rise of the medieval hospital during a period of intense urbanization and the transition from a gift economy to a commercial one, Davis makes clear how embedded this charitable institution was in the wider social, cultural, religious, and economic fabric of medieval life.