This study lies at the intersection of three principal areas of social history: demography, religion, and quantitative methods. It is a microanalysis of an English population at the level of the Anglican parish, during the era of the evangelical revival, which includes, unusually, Protestant dissenters from the Established church, in this case Particular Baptists, who were moderate Calvinists. It goes a step beyond previous studies by giving Anglicans and Dissenters co-equal status in a comparative demographic analysis and by demonstrating how religious values informed procreative activity. It does so through a combination of advanced statistical methodologies and an innovative treatment of data collection forms as readable texts. The study concludes that the likelihood of another birth increased following a religious conversion experience, especially among both Anglican and Baptist wives following marriage. Mortality too had a less constraining effect on procreative activity which, in conformity with the English experience, was driven largely by fertility.

Friends, Neighbours, Sinners shows the crucial role of religious difference in shaping English culture and society after 1689. By throwing into relief the cultural impact of England's unstable religious settlement, it highlights the centrality of religious difference to understanding social and cultural change after 1689.

This book conducts a post-colonial, gendered investigation of women-centred South Asian films. In these films, the narrative becomes an act of political engagement and a site of feminist struggle: a map that weaves together multiple strands of subjectivity—gender, caste, race, class, religion, and colonialism. The book explores the cinematic construction of an oppositional narrative of feminist dissent with a view to elaborate a historical understanding and theorisation of the ‘materiality and politics’ of the everyday struggle of Indian women. The book analyzes the ways that ‘cultural workers’ have tended to use subversive narratives as a tool of resistance. Narratives that are political, ideological, classed, raced and gendered offer the focus of this exploration. Through strategies of disclosure and documentation of memory, personal experiences, and imaginary events shaped by the larger historical, political, and cultural contexts, these discursive texts engage in the processes of struggle against a plethora of oppression: caste, class, religion, patriarchal, sexual, and (neo)colonial. The study looks at the manner in which, through their creative and aesthetic interventions, South Asian film makers enable the articulation of an alternative gendered subjectivity as well as constitute the ground for personal and collective empowerment. Films discussed include Shyam Benegal’s Nishaant, Nandita Das’ Firaaq, Beate Arnestad’s My Daughter the Terrorist, and Sarah Gavron’s Brick Lane.

This book looks at texts produced before and after 9/11 by novelists with Muslim backgrounds in Britain. It delves into the ways in which the politics of representation have changed in the wake of 9/11 and highlights the conflicts that arise in these coming-of-age narratives between the demands of a liberal individualist lifestyle and those of community, family, and faith. Drawing on the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Qaisra Shahraz, Leila Aboulela, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Zia Haider Rahman, and Ahdaf Soueif, Community, Faith, and Resistance discusses how these authors distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islam as a culture and negotiate complex themes of religion, representation, recognition, and secularism in their works. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers, particularly those focused on literature, politics, cultural studies, South Asian studies, Islamic studies, and decolonial studies, providing valuable insights and fostering deeper understanding in these disciplines.

Winner of the Book of the Year Award for the Conference on Christianity and Literature.--Thomas H. Luxon, Dartmouth College "CHOICE"

Transforming Faith Communities argues for a model of being church that combines congregationalism with a constructive approach to church-state relationships. Congregationalism within a vision for a renewed Christendom is commended here as a viable option for Christian mission in the twenty-first-century world. In making this case, two movements are explored--those inspired by sixteenth-century Anabaptism and late twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. Each movement is held up as a mirror to the other. A continuing vision for the transformation of church and society emerges from this book as a number of contemporary resonances begin to sound. These include an outline of some likely common features in the development of radical religious communities, an examination of some of the factors that create world-affirming Christian faith communities, and many examples of effective and constructive engagement with church and society across the centuries.

There are no atheists in foxholes; or so we hear. The thought that the fear of death motivates religious belief has been around since the earliest speculations about the origins of religion. There are hints of this idea in the ancient world, but the theory achieves prominence in the works of Enlightenment critics and Victorian theorists of religion, and has been further developed by contemporary cognitive scientists. Why do people believe in gods? Because they fear death. Yet despite the abiding appeal of this simple hypothesis, there has not been a systematic attempt to evaluate its central claims and the assumptions underlying them. Do human beings fear death? If so, who fears death more, religious or nonreligious people? Do reminders of our mortality really motivate religious belief? Do religious beliefs actually provide comfort against the inevitability of death? In Death Anxiety and Religious Belief, Jonathan Jong and Jamin Halberstadt begin to answer these questions, drawing on the extensive literature on the psychology of death anxiety and religious belief, from childhood to the point of death, as well as their own experimental research on conscious and unconscious fear and faith. In the course of their investigations, they consider the history of ideas about religion's origins, challenges of psychological measurement, and the very nature of emotion and belief.

The debate over the framers' concept of freedom of religion has become heated and divisive. This scrupulously researched book sets aside the half-truths, omissions, and partisan arguments, and instead focuses on the actual writings and actions of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and others. Legal scholar Michael I. Meyerson investigates how the framers of the Constitution envisioned religious freedom and how they intended it to operate in the new republic. Endowed by Our Creator shows that the framers understood that the American government should not acknowledge religion in a way that favors any particular creed or denomination. Nevertheless, the framers believed that religion could instill virtue and help to unify a diverse nation. They created a spiritual public vocabulary, one that could communicate to all—including agnostics and atheists—that they were valued members of the political community. Through their writings and their decisions, the framers affirmed that respect for religious differences is a fundamental American value, Meyerson concludes. Now it is for us to determine whether religion will be used to alienate and divide or to inspire and unify our religiously diverse nation.

The Great Christian Jurists series comprises a library of national volumes of detailed biographies of leading jurists, judges and practitioners, assessing the impact of their Christian faith on the professional output of the individuals studied. Little has previously been written about the faith of the great judges who framed and developed the English common law over centuries, but this unique volume explores how their beliefs were reflected in their judicial functions. This comparative study, embracing ten centuries of English law, draws some remarkable conclusions as to how Christianity shaped the views of lawyers and judges. Adopting a long historical perspective, this volume also explores the lives of judges whose practice in or conception of law helped to shape the Church, its law or the articulation of its doctrine.

The subject of religious liberty in the nineteenth century has been defined by a liberal narrative that has prevailed since Mill and Macaulay to Trevelyan and Commager, to name only a few philosophers and historians who wrote in English. Underlying this narrative is a noble dream--liberty for every person, guaranteed by democratic states that promote social progress though not interfering with those broadly defined areas of life, including religion, that are properly the preserve of free individuals. At the end of the twentieth century, however, it becomes clear that religious liberty requires a more comprehensive, subtle, and complex definition than the liberal tradition affords, one that confronts such questions as gender, ethnicity, and the distinction between individual and corporate liberty. None of the authors in this volume finds the familiar liberal narrative an adequate interpretive context for understanding his particular subject. Some address the liberal tradition directly and propose modified versions; others approach it implicitly. All revise it, and all revise in ways that echo across the chapters. The topics covered are religious liberty in early America (Nathan O. Hatch), science and religious freedom (Frank M. Turner), the conflicting ideas of religious freedom in early Victorian England (J. P. Ellens), the arguments over theological innovation in the England of the 1860’s (R. K. Webb), European Jews and the limits of religious freedom (David C. Itzkowitz), restrictions and controls on the practice of religion in Bismarck’s Germany (Ronald J. Ross), the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Europe (Raymond Grew), religious liberty in France, 1787-1908 (C. T. McIntyre), clericalism and anticlericalism in Chile, 1820-1920 (Simon Collier), and religion and imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain (Jeffrey Cox).