America Religions Religion

Canada has the reputation of being a boring place. More tranquil than its southern neighbor, it goes along in its quiet way sustaining one of the most stable and prosperous democracies in the world, and does so with little fuss or drama. It doesn't get in the news much, which considering the content of most news stories is a good thing. People get along, the economy is expanding, and there are no regular disasters. While all this makes Canada a pleasant place to live, it does not make it particularly interesting. But dig a little below the surface, and you'll find a different Canada, a stranger Canada, one of murder, mystery, and paranormal experiences.

God miraculously guided James to a city in America where many other Bangladeshis had escaped. A city where he came to understand why the Lord had allowed him to be driven out. Coming out of a train station, he had a surprise encounter with a missionary from Guyana, Rev. Udit. Udit said to him, "You don't know me but I believe God may have chosen you to be a missionary among Muslims here in New York." It was a chance encounter according to a plan.

“The Light of Man” brings science, religion, history, spirituality, quantum physics, metaphysics and belief systems all together to create a pivot, a transformational moment in the world’s history and what people believe God or a “higher power” is!

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.

Forged during the tumultuous but triumphant postwar years when America came of age as a world power, The Irony of American History is more relevant now than ever before. Cited by politicians as diverse as Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Niebuhr's masterpiece on the incongruity between personal ideals and political reality is both an indictment of American moral complacency and a warning against the arrogance of virtue.

The Stony Plain Red Brick School and Oppertshauser House are active haunts in Alberta, Canada. Prairie Spirits presents firsthand accounts and interviews from staff and visitors who have encountered the spooky personality of the buildings, from orbs to apparitions, rearranged furniture, unexplainable music, energetic hot spots, and more. Meet the ghosts, discover tools to communicate with the supernatural, and dig into paranormal investigations. This is a bone-chilling listen for anyone interested in the rich local history and hauntings in Stony Plain.

Welcome to the Myrtles, the most haunted house in America. In this spine-tingling chronicle, Frances tells the story of how she was drawn to this former plantation mansion, its bone-chilling history, and the incredible encounters of the ghostly kind she had that forever changed her beliefs about the supernatural - and just may change yours.

While not every Founding Father was a Christian, a Bible-believer, or a paragon of virtue and not every leader has honored the Bible nor appreciated its influence, there is an undeniable history of leaders who’ve been intimately acquainted with the contents of the Bible, who’ve studied its scriptures and respected its teachings. Journey with Robert J. Morgan as he teaches about the Bible’s role in the defining moments and impact on the people of our nation’s history, reminding us of the beauty at the intersection of faith and country.

In the autumn of 1834, New York City was awash with rumors of a strange religious cult operating nearby, centered around a mysterious, self-styled prophet named Matthias. It was said that Matthias the Prophet was stealing money from one of his followers; then came reports of lascivious sexual relations, based on odd teachings of matched spirits, apostolic priesthoods, and the inferiority of women. At its climax, the rumors transformed into legal charges, as the Prophet was arrested for the murder of a once highly regarded Christian gentleman who had fallen under his sway.

A self-proclaimed skeptic, the food writer dismissed rumors of a mischievous resident poltergeist named Lucy when he moved in, but he quickly found himself at a loss to explain the disembodied footsteps and mysterious odors that seemed to plague the old house. Soon, he was talking to neighbors and fellow homeowners, and it seemed that everyone had stories of strange events and supernatural occurrences in their own dwellings. As a result, David set out to document and research these reports...

In the winter of 1692 something terrible and frightening began in Salem Village. It started with several villagers having strange fits, screaming, and unnaturally contorting themselves and ended with almost 200 people in jail and at least 25 dead. Witchcraft accusations - claims that some inhabitants had forsaken God to become servants of the Devil - spread from Salem Village across Massachusetts, ensnaring innocent people from all strata of society under a burden of assumed guilt. One of the most significant and unlikely accusations was against 71-year-old grandmother Rebecca Nurse.

William Sidis, 1897-1944, was the world's greatest child prodigy. His IQ was an estiamted 50 to 100 points higher than Einstein's, the highest ever recorded or estimated. His father, a pioneer in the field of abnormal psychology, believed that he and his wife could create a genius in the cradle. They hung alphabet blocks over the baby's crib-and within six months little Billy was speaking. At 18 months he was reading The New York Times; at three, Homer in the original Greek. At six he spoke at least seven languages.

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was not trying to start a movement. She was simply tired of the social injustice. Yet her simple act of courage started a chain of events that forever shaped the landscape of American race relations. Now, decades after her quiet defiance inspired the modern civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks' own words tell of her courageous life, her passion for freedom and equality, and her strong faith.

In Frontier Religion, Konden Smith Hansen examines the dramatic influence these perceptions of the frontier had on Mormonism and other religions in America. Endeavoring to better understand the sway of the frontier on religion in the United States, this book follows several Mormon-American conflicts, from the Utah War and the antipolygamy crusades to the Reed Smoot hearings. The story of Mormonism’s move toward American acceptability represents a larger story of the nation’s transition to modernity and the meaning of religious pluralism.

The prophets of old were not easy to listen to because they did not flatter. They did not cajole. They spoke hard words that often chafed and unsettled their listeners. Like the Old Testament prophets, and more recent prophetic voices like Frederick Douglass, Dr. Eric Mason calls the evangelical church to a much-needed reckoning.

"Candy Jones" was the stage name of Jessica Wilcox who became famous as a model and "pinup girl" in the early 1940s. Her story seems too bizarre to be true. One of America's most famous models, brainwashed by the CIA? Yes, it is another example of truth being stranger than fiction. The story begins with Candy's wedding to Long John Nebel, New York's most successful radio talk-show host. During the wedding, and regularly thereafter, Candy's personality would seem to shift. She would suddenly change from her affable, self-effacing self to a brusque, aggressive "stranger".

As America begins to come to terms with the costs of White privilege to Black lives, this book urges a soul-searching examination of the role American Christianity has played in sustaining everyday white supremacy by assuring White people of their innocence. In Mormonism and White Supremacy, Joanna Brooks offers an unflinching look at her own people's history and culture and finds in them lessons that will hit home for every scholar of American religion and person of faith.

Whether you’re a believer, a skeptic, or somewhere in between, you’ll find a story that sticks with you in this compendium of the best of Leslie Rule’s ghost explorations and interviews. With the most-spine tingling stories from the author’s previous four books, Coast to Coast Ghosts, When the Ghost Screams, Ghosts Among Us, and Ghost in the Mirror, along with new and updated accounts and theories, Rule brings her original voice to this omnibus of chilling, fascinating tales.

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans, and torn apart by the Civil War.

Two hundred and fifty years later, Jonathan Edwards, America’s consummate pastor-theologian, continues to capture the attention of Christians around the world. Yet Edwards left us over 1,200 sermons and thousands of pages of other publications, not to mention the literal thousands of books that have been written about Edwards since he died. The Essential Jonathan Edwards serves as a perfect introduction to Edwards’s life and thought. It explores Edwards day-to-day life, and his views on beauty, true Christianity, heaven and hell, and the good life.