The Spiritual Vision of Frank Buchman is an in-depth look at the life, spirituality, and ideology of one of the most original figures in twentieth-century religion. Frank Buchman (1878–1961), the Pennsylvania-born initiator of the movement known as the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament, was a Lutheran pastor who first had influence as a college evangelist and missionary with the YMCA. His thinking then evolved during the 1930s, the Second World War, and the early Cold War as he tried to develop a world philosophy that could offer an answer to war and materialism. His impact was particularly felt in the areas of conflict resolution between nations and interfaith dialogue, and Alcoholics Anonymous also owed much to his methods. Philip Boobbyer’s book is the first scholarly overview of Buchman’s ideas and is an important addition to the growing corpus of academic literature on his worldwide outreach. Boobbyer shows how his work reflected broader processes in twentieth-century religion and politics and can be seen as a spiritual response to an emerging global society.

Interpreting the Great Awakening of the 18th century was in large part the work of Jonathan Edwards, whose writings on the subject defined the revival tradition in America. This text demonstrates how Edwards defended the evangelical experience against overheated zealous and rationalistic critics.

Newton engagingly recalls a lifetime of friendship with five giants of the twentieth century. Foreword by Anne Morrow Lindbergh; Index; photographs.

Reprint of an edition published in New York in 1937 by Oxford University Press.

Standing against conventional wisdom, historian James Levy reevaluates Britain's twin policies of appeasement and rearmament in the late 1930s. By carefully examining the political and economic environment of the times, Levy argues that Neville Chamberlain crafted an active, logical and morally defensible foreign policy designed to avoid and deter a potentially devastating war. Levy shows that through Chamberlain's experience as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he knew that Britain had not yet fully recovered from the first World War and the longer an international confrontation could be avoided, the better Britain's chances of weathering the storm. In the end, Hitler could be neither appeased nor deterred, and recognizing this, Britain and France went into war better armed and better prepared to fight.

From 1625 to 1627 scholar-officials belonging to a militant Confucianist group known as the "Donglin Faction" suffered one of the most gruesome political repressions in China's history. Many were purged from key positions in the central government for their relentless push for a national moral rearmament under the Tianqi emperor. While their martyrs' deaths won them a lasting reputation for heroism and steadfastness, their opponents are remembered for fatally degrading the quality of Ming political life with their arrests and tortures of Donglin partisans. John Dardess employs a wide range of little-used primary sources (letters, diaries, eyewitness accounts, memorials, imperial edicts) to provide a remarkably detailed narrative of the inner workings of Ming government and of this dramatic period as a whole. Comparing the repression with the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, he argues that Tiananmen offers compelling clues to a rereading of the events of the 1620s. Leaders of both movements were less interested in practical reform than in communicating sincere moral feelings to rulers and the public. In the end the protesters succeeded in commemorating their dead and imprisoned and in disgracing those responsible for the violence. A work of unprecedented depth skillfully told, Blood and History in China will be appreciated by specialists in intellectual history and Ming and early Qing studies.“/p>

During the interwar period, Japanese intellectuals, writers, activists, and politicians, although conscious of the many points of intersection between their politics and those of Mussolini, were ambivalent about the comparability of Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy. In The Fascist Effect, Reto Hofmann uncovers the ideological links that tied Japan to Italy, drawing on extensive materials from Japanese and Italian archives to shed light on the formation of fascist history and practice in Japan and beyond. Moving between personal experiences, diplomatic and cultural relations, and geopolitical considerations, Hofmann shows that interwar Japan found in fascism a resource to develop a new order at a time of capitalist crisis. Japanese thinkers and politicians debated fascism as part of a wider effort to overcome a range of modern woes, including class conflict and moral degeneration, through measures that fostered national cohesion and social order. Hofmann demonstrates that fascism in Japan was neither a European import nor a domestic product; it was, rather, the result of a complex process of global transmission and reformulation. By focusing on how interwar Japanese understood fascism, Hofmann recuperates a historical debate that has been largely disregarded by historians, even though its extent reveals that fascism occupied a central position in the politics of interwar Japan. Far from being a vague term, as postwar historiography has so often claimed, for Japanese of all backgrounds who came of age from the 1920s to the 1940s, fascism conjured up a set of concrete associations, including nationalism, leadership, economics, and a drive toward empire and a new world order.