In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism—all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation’s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science—as the source of all truth—necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

In Reformers, Teachers, Writers, Neal Lerner explores the distinction between curriculum and pedagogy in writing studies—and the ways in which failing to attend to that distinction results in the failure of educational reform. Lerner’s mixed-methods approach—quantitative, qualitative, textual, historical, narrative, and theoretical—reflects the importance and effects of curriculum in a wide variety of settings, whether in writing centers, writing classrooms, or students’ out-of-school lives, as well as the many methodological approaches available to understand curriculum in writing studies. The richness of this approach allows for multiple considerations of the distinction and relationship between pedagogy and curriculum. Chapters are grouped into three parts: disciplinary inquiries, experiential inquiries, and empirical inquiries, exploring the presence and effect of curriculum and its relationship to pedagogy in multiple sites, both historical and contemporary, and for multiple stakeholders. Reformers, Teachers, Writers calls out writing studies’ inattention to curriculum, which hampers efforts to enact meaningful reform and to have an impact on larger conversations about education and writing. The book will be invaluable to scholars, teachers, and administrators interested in rhetoric and composition, writing studies, and education.

This year, many are asking, "How is the Reformation relevant for today?" These prayers, arranged by author and subject, will open a window into the personal faith and spirituality of those on the front lines of that great upheaval in the church and culture.

The idea that American education has been steered by progressivism is accepted as fact by liberals and conservatives alike. Adam Laats shows that this belief is wrong. Calling to center stage conservatives who shaped America’s classrooms, he shows that in the long march of American public education, progressive reform has been a beleaguered dream.

The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.

The conviction that martyrs, though dead, can still speak to the church, led Ryle to pen these pungent biographies of five English Reformers. He analyses the reasons for their martyrdom and points out the salient characteristics of their lives.

By the early twenty-first century, a startling consensus had emerged about the overall aim of American school reform. In an era of political discord, and in a field historically known for contentiousness, the notion of promoting educational excellence for all students was a distinct point of bipartisan agreement. Shaped by a corps of entrepreneurial reformers intent on finding "what works" and taking it to scale, this hybrid vision won over the nation's most ambitious and well-resourced policy leaders at foundations and nonprofits, in state and federal government, and in urban school districts from coast to coast. "Excellence for all" might, at first glance, appear to be nothing more than a rhetorical flourish. Who, after all, would oppose the idea of a great education for every student? Yet it is hardly a throwaway phrase. Rather, it represents a surprising fusion of educational policy approaches that had been in tense opposition throughout the twentieth century--those on the right favoring social efficiency, and those on the left supporting social justice. This book seeks to understand why the "excellence for all" vision took hold at the time it did, unpacks the particular beliefs and assumptions embedded in it, and details the often informal coalition building that produced this period of consensus. Examining the nation's largest urban school districts (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), the author details three major reform efforts in chapters titled "The Right Space: The Small Schools Movement"; "The Right Teachers: Teach for America"; and "The Right Curriculum: Expanding Advanced Placement."

In debates surrounding the New Perspective on Paul, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers are often characterized as the apostle's misinterpreters-in-chief. In this book Stephen Chester challenges that conception with a careful and nuanced reading of the Reformers' Pauline exegesis. Examining the overall contours of Reformation exegesis of Paul, Chester contrasts the Reformers with their opponents and explores particular contributions made by such key figures as Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin. He relates their insights to contemporary debates in Pauline theology about justification, union with Christ, and other central themes, arguing that their work remains a significant resource today. Published in the 500th anniversary year of the Protestant Reformation, Chester's Reading Paul with the Reformers reclaims a robust understanding of how the Reformers actually read the apostle Paul.

First released in 1988, this 25th Anniversary Edition of Timothy George’s Theology of the Reformers includes a new chapter and bibliography on William Tyndale, the reformer who courageously stood at the headwaters of the English Reformation. Also included are expanded opening and concluding chapters and updated bibliographies on each reformer. Theology of the Reformers articulates the theological self-understanding of five principal figures from the period of the Reformation: Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, John Calvin, Menno Simons, and William Tyndale. George establishes the context for their work by describing the spiritual climate of their time. Then he profiles each reformer, providing a picture of their theology that does justice to the scope of their involvement in the reforming effort. George details the valuable contributions these men made to issues historically considered pillars of the Christian faith: Scripture, Jesus Christ, salvation, the church, and last things. The intent is not just to document the theology of these reformers, but also to help the church of today better understand and more faithfully live its calling as followers of the one true God. Through and through, George’s work provides a truly integrated and comprehensive picture of Christian theology at the time of the Reformation.

Corporate school reforms, especially privatization, union busting, and high-stakes testing have been hailed as the last best hope for public education. Yet, as Kenneth Saltman powerfully argues in this new book, corporate school reforms have decisively failed to deliver on what their proponents have promised for two decades: higher test scores and lower costs. As Saltman illustrates, the failures of corporate school reform are far greater and more destructive than they seem. Left unchecked, corporate school reform fails to challenge and in fact worsens the most pressing problems facing public schooling, including radical funding inequalities, racial segregation, and anti-intellectualism. But it is not too late for change. Against both corporate school reformers and its liberal critics, this book argues for the expansion of democratic pedagogies and a new common school movement that will lead to broader social renewal.