American Religion

The 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin, an African American teenager in Florida, and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, brought public attention to controversial "Stand Your Ground" laws. The verdict, as much as the killing, sent shock waves through the African American community, recalling a history of similar deaths, and the long struggle for justice. On the Sunday morning following the verdict, black preachers around the country addressed the question, "Where is the justice of God? What are we to hope for?"

Imagine awakening to a new reality of who you are, revealing a hidden past that has shaped your family's history for centuries. Fact, not fiction, this experience has been shared by thousands of descendants of Sephardic Jews who fled Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries, seeking safe haven from the ruthless Spanish Inquisition. Many had already converted to Catholicism, but learned that conversion was not enough to save their lives. They established new communities throughout the world, living as Catholics on the outside, but guarding a precious Jewish heritage in secret.

Robert E. Lee was many things - accomplished soldier, military engineer, college president, family man, agent of reconciliation, polarizing figure. He was also a person of deep Christian conviction. In this biography of the famous Civil War general, R. David Cox shows how Lee's Christian faith shaped his crucial role in some of the most pivotal events in American history.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

Shane Dash, a beautiful and brilliant psychoanalyst, is on the brink of self-destruction. With the death of her mother and the discovery that her own child has healing powers beyond her comprehension, Shane questions her entire existence. While dealing with her grief and confusion, Shane follows in her mother's footsteps and is magically guided within. Kai, her mother's mentor, takes her beyond her mind into a world of the mystical.

Eagle Voice Remembers is John Neihardt's mature and reflective interpretation of the old Sioux way of life. He served as a translator of the Sioux past, whose audience has proved not to be limited by space or time. Through his writings, Black Elk, Eagle Elk, and other old men who were of that last generation of Sioux to have participated in the old buffalo-hunting life and the disorienting period of strife with the U.S. Army found a literary voice.

In this heart-wrenching yet stubbornly hopeful narrative, Evangelical Lutheran pastor Kenneth Wheeler exposes white supremacy as America's greatest threat. Transcending the boundaries of memoir, scholarship, theology, and sharp political critique, Pastor Wheeler takes readers on his own seven-decade-long journey that lays bare the terror of being Black in America. From his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi under the trauma of Jim Crow segregation to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Wheeler steadily holds a mirror up to a nation drowning in a rising tide of white supremacy.

American history has profoundly shaped, and been shaped by, Christianity. This engaging introduction provides a brisk and lively yet deeply researched survey of these intertwined forces from the colonial period to the present. Elesha Coffman tells the story of Christianity in the United States by focusing on thirteen key events over four centuries of history. The turning points are as varied as the movements they track, including a naval battle, a revival, a schism, a court case, an outpouring of the Spirit, an act of terrorism, the election of a bishop, and the election of a president.

Among the pressing concerns of Americans in the first century of nationhood were day-to-day survival, political harmony, exploration of the continent, foreign policy, and - fixed deeply in the collective consciousness - hell and eternal damnation. The fear of fire and brimstone and the worm that never dies exerted a profound and lasting influence on Americans' ideas about themselves, their neighbors, and the rest of the world.

Muslim men are stereotyped as either oversexed Casanovas willing to die for 72 virgins in heaven or controlling, big-bearded husbands ready to rampage at the hint of dishonor. The truth is, there are millions of Muslim men trying to figure out the complicated terrain of love, sex, and relationships just like any other American man. In Salaam, Love, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi provide a space for American Muslim men to speak openly about their romantic lives, offering frank, funny, and insightful glimpses into their hearts—and bedrooms.

Step into the locker rooms and living rooms of NFL players and their families. See how a close relationship with God guides football’s biggest stars. In a behind-the-scenes, off-the-field glimpse into one of America’s most beloved sports, Men of Sunday reveals how Sunday’s greatest rely on God to face issues such as drug abuse, family crises, injuries, and temptations resulting from fame and fortune. Compiled from dozens of interviews, Men of Sunday marks the intersection of two Sunday traditions: faith and football.

Exactly what has public education been trying to accomplish? Before the 1830s and Horace Mann, no schools in the US were state-supported or state-controlled. They were local, parent-teacher enterprises, supported without taxes, and taking care of all children. They were remarkably high in standard and were Christian. From Mann to the present, the state has used education to socialize the child. Public education became the means of creating a social order of the educators' design. Such men saw themselves and the school in messianic terms.

The New American Standard Bible is one of the most accurate translations of the Scriptures. In the New Testament gospels you will discover the virgin birth, ministry, crucifixion, and bodily resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ written from four different yet perfectly harmonized vantage points. Historical and life-altering Biblical truths are proclaimed from the birth of the early church to the spread of the Gospel through Paul, Peter, John, and others in the epistles.

On the street, every ballplayer has a story. Onaje X. O. Woodbine, a former streetball player who became an all-star Ivy Leaguer, brings the sights and sounds, hopes and dreams of street basketball to life. He shows that big games have a trickster figure and a master of Black talk whose commentary interprets the game for audiences. The beats of hip-hop and reggae make up the soundtrack, and the ballplayers are half men, half heroes, defying the ghetto's limitations with their flights to the basket.

For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism.

To ArcelorMittal Steel, Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the listener inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place.

For the first time in more than twenty-five years, Greg Sarris—whose novels are esteemed alongside those of Louise Erdrich and Stephen Graham Jones—presents a book about his own life. In Becoming Story he asks: What does it mean to be truly connected to the place you call home—to walk where innumerable generations of your ancestors have walked?

The book reveals the universal and cosmic love of the Red Road. The Red Road is the philosophy/worldview/religion of the native Indian tribes/pueblos of North and South America. This worldview promotes integration with Mother Earth and the cosmos to achieve harmony within eternally evolving existence. Using the Chicano as an example, the book explores the human lifetime as a cosmic being with eternal cycles of reincarnation and integration. This cosmic journey is examined from the perspective of the Red Road.

Charles Coffin's The Story of Liberty, originally published in 1879, is not America's story alone. It belongs to all those who are enjoying freedom and liberty in any part of the world. And it belongs to all nations that will yet serve Him. As we reach back into the records of history to observe the hand of the Great Author of all liberty, we will find direction for the days ahead and discover the keys we need to understand and interpret the future.

In 1831 Virginia, Nat Turner led a band of Southampton County slaves in a rebellion that killed 55 whites, mostly women and children. After more than two months in hiding, Turner was captured, and quickly convicted and executed. In the Matter of Nat Turner penetrates the historical caricature of Turner as befuddled mystic and self-styled Baptist preacher to recover the haunting persona of this legendary American slave rebel.