"This book is a clarion call for African American preachers to think more deeply about the aims and ends of their preachingnamely to stop putting so much emphasis on celebratory endings to our sermons and focus more on the substantive content in our sermons. Our so-called celebratory preaching, designed to excite the congregation into action through a highly emotional closing of the sermon, has had the opposite effect. Rather than inducing action, it has lulled generations of black congregants to sleep. While we are jumping up and down, shouting, and waving our hands in the air every Sunday during the worship hour, we seem not to notice the growing number of churched and unchurched alike who are becoming powerfully alienated from any form of institutional religion." from the introduction "Celebration" is a term that has long been used to describe African American preaching, characterized by content that affirms the goodness and powerful intervention of God as well as style that builds from quiet beginnings to an emotionally rich crescendo in conclusion. Cleophus J. LaRue argues that while celebration is one of African American preaching's greatest gifts to the larger church, too many black preachers have become content with the form of celebrationvolume, vocabulary, pitch, speed, rhythm, and the liketo the neglect of its essencethe proclamation of the mighty acts of God in the lives of their congregations and communities. This kind of preaching, LaRue contends, fails to address the ongoing problems of the African American community and is powerless to prevent the growing disaffection of black America with the black church. In words both prophetic and practical, LaRue suggests ways to improve black preaching that honor both the form and the power of the African American homiletical practice of celebration. Preachers will learn how to use celebration more selectively and as part of a fully formed preaching practice rather than as a means of distracting the congregation from pressing social and theological questions. The book includes six illustrative sermons from LaRue as well as Paschal Sampson Wilkinson Sr., Brian K. Blount, and Claudette Anderson Copeland.

Most evangelical Christians believe that those people who are not saved before they die will be punished in hell forever. But is this what the Bible truly teaches? Do Christians need to rethink their understanding of hell? In the late twentieth century, a growing number of evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers began to reject the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment in hell in favor of a minority theological perspective called conditional immortality. This view contends that the unsaved are resurrected to face divine judgment, just as Christians have always believed, but due to the fact that immortality is only given to those who are in Christ, the unsaved do not exist forever in hell. Instead, they face the punishment of the "second death"--an end to their conscious existence. This volume brings together excerpts from a variety of well-respected evangelical thinkers, including John Stott, John Wenham, and E. Earl Ellis, as they articulate the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for conditionalism. These readings will give thoughtful Christians strong evidence that there are indeed compelling reasons for rethinking hell.

Christians often see the Old Testament law as out of date and irrelevant now Christ has come. Lalleman rejects this view and makes the case for the ongoing importance of the Law in the Christian life - something to celebrate. Most helpfully Lalleman sets out a model for interpreting Old Testament laws in the context of the whole of the Bible. She interacts with scholarly literature on the subject and provides some basic biblical principles for integrating the whole of God's word in our lives. Lalleman then fleshes out by applying them to three difficult topics in Old Testament law - food laws, the cancellation of debts, and warfare. At the heart of this celebration of the law, she contends, is the wholeness, holiness, and integrity of God himself. Celebrating the Law? shows how God calls us to be his distinctive people displaying the same wholeness, holiness, and integrity as he himself has.

Provides resources for teaching elementary and secondary school students about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.

Based on an in-depth examination of the Brazillian case, this book argues that we need to rethink important theoretical issues and empirical realities of party systems in the third wave of democratization.

This book adresses a question of fundamental importance to contemporary representative democracies: How could political parties reconnect with society? It advances a normative account of party reform, drawing on both democratic theory and political science scholarship on parties.

During the early years of the Great Depression, New York City's first Puerto Rican library, Pura Belpre, introduces the public library to immigrants living in El Barrio and hosts the neighborhood's first Three Kings' Day fiesta.

LaRue provides important insights on why black preaching is strong and active, and connects with the real-life experiences of listeners. (Christian)

From the author of A Midwife's Tale, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize for History, and The Age of Homespun--a revelatory, nuanced, and deeply intimate look at the world of early Mormon women whose seemingly ordinary lives belied an astonishingly revolutionary spirit, drive, and determination. A stunning and sure-to-be controversial book that pieces together, through more than two dozen nineteenth-century diaries, letters, albums, minute-books, and quilts left by first-generation Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, the never-before-told story of the earliest days of the women of Mormon "plural marriage," whose right to vote in the state of Utah was given to them by a Mormon-dominated legislature as an outgrowth of polygamy in 1870, fifty years ahead of the vote nationally ratified by Congress, and who became political actors in spite of, or because of, their marital arrangements. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, writing of this small group of Mormon women who've previously been seen as mere names and dates, has brilliantly reconstructed these textured, complex lives to give us a fulsome portrait of who these women were and of their "sex radicalism"--the idea that a woman should choose when and with whom to bear children.