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While the concept of an Atlantic world has been central to the work of historians for decades, the full implications of that spatial setting for the lives of religious people have received far less attention. In Religion, Space, and the Atlantic World, John Corrigan brings together research from geographers, anthropologists, literature scholars, historians, and religious studies specialists to explore some of the possibilities for and benefits of taking physical space more seriously in the study...

Several recent studies reveal that churches are haemorrhaging, losing members at a life-threatening rate. Intrigued and disturbed by what appears to be an epidemic, Julia Duin amassed research on the issue, interviewing many who have left the church. These are her findings.

Reaching back to the origins of antievolutionism in the 1920s, and continuing to the promotion of intelligent design today, Michael Lienesch skillfully analyzes the creationism movement, one of the most formidable political movements of the twentieth century. With fresh insights, Lienesch retells the story of the 1925 Scopes 'monkey"" trial and reinterprets its meaning. In tracking the movement from that time to today, he explores the rise of creation science in the 1960s, the alliance with the...

Jacobus Arminius (1559-1609) composed 61 public disputations during his brief tenure as professor of theology at Leiden University, 36 of which have never before been collected and published, and have been neglected by scholars for four centuries. This critical edition supplements the works of Arminius by presenting these texts in the original Latin, complete with notes and summaries in English. The texts are preceded by a helpful introduction to the genre of theological disputations. In additio...

This book examines the organization of religion in the Roman empire from Augustus to Constantine. Although there have been illuminating particular studies of the relationship between religious activity and socio-political authority in the empire, there has been no large-scale attempt to assess it as a whole. Taking as his focus the situation in Carthage, the greatest city of the western provinces, J.B. Rives argues that the traditional religion, predicated on the structure of a city-state, could...

Harsh asceticism, including ritual self-mortification, remains one of the most troubling and least understood aspects of monastic life in the Later Middle Ages. The nuns whose austere lives are celebrated in spiritual biographies and autobiographies in the Order of Preachers were long dismissed by traditional scholars as hysterics or inferior mimics of true mysticism. Some recent feminist studies either gloss over asceticism or portray its practitioners as traumatized victims of patriarchal oppr...

Haliczer's timely work uses a wealth of actual cases to document the eroticizing of the confessional between 1530 and 1819. Trial evidence left by the Spanish Inquisition vividly describes the sexual misconduct of priests and the reactions of the Church. What Haliczer shows is that the Counter-Reformation Church, eager to re-assert its morality and control, actually helped foster sexual solicitation in the confessional.

The main subjects of enquiry in this volume focus upon the major areas in which the honorand, Gordon Leff, has himself made fundamental contributions. Among the topics discussed are learned and popular heresy (Cathars, Wyclif, Lollardy, and the concept of heresy itself); the history of medieval universities and thought (including the religious at Paris and Cambridge, Ockham, and Paris theologians' views on the Jews); and early modern views of the crusades.The book is completed with a bibliograph...

This book is the first history in English of the Lutheran Church in Germany and Scandinavia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A period of fundamental and lasting change in the political landscape with the separation of the old twin monarchies of Sweden-Finland and Denmark-Norway in Scandinavia (1808, 1814), and the unification of Germany (1866-71), this was also a time of particular unease and upheaval for the church. Attempts to emulate the spiritual community of the early church, re...