Sociology Religion

Texas businessman Mike Fechner had it all. Money. Investments. Prestige. Until he did the unthinkable. He sold his company and poured his life's earnings into a ministry for the poor. With a strong faith in God at his core, this millionaire turned missionary envisioned a long future serving the urban Dallas poor and the people of poverty-stricken Africa.

Inspired in seminary by American Muslimahs who wear the hijab for feminist reasons, Lauren Shields took off what she calls the Beauty Suit - the "done" hair, the tasteful and carefully applied makeup, the tight clothes and foot-binding shoes - for nine months. She'd really only wanted to do an experiment. Instead, her life - especially her views on what constitutes "liberation" - changed forever. Rooted in feminist theory and religious history, and guided by a snappy personal narrative, The Beauty Suit unpacks modern American womanhood: a landscape where the female body is still so often the battleground for male ideals and where we struggle with our rights as human beings to define and exercise our freedom.

In a series of 10 essays, spanning five centuries of history, beginning with the conquest of Mexico by Hermán Cortés and ending in 1992 San Francisco, Rodriguez explores the conflicts of race, religion, and cultural identity for Mexican-Americans across the landscape of his beloved California.

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutiny—scrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. i>Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives.

A movement is rumbling through the body of Christ - a revolutionary army of people giving hope to a hurting world through practical, personal acts of service. In Servolution, Dino Rizzo shares the story of his relentless pursuit of ways to bless the lost, poor, and hurting people of his community in Jesus' name. You'll be amazed and inspired by the incredible ways God has used Healing Place Church to meet the needs of thousands of people.

In this brilliantly analytical yet personal book, nondemocratic societies are put under a microscope to reveal the mechanics of tyranny that sustain them. In exposing the inner workings of a "fear society", the authors explain why democracy is not beyond any nation's reach, why it is essential for our security, and why there is much that can be done to promote it around the world.

Charles Colcock Jones, Sr. (1804-1863) was a Presbyterian clergyman, educator, missionary, and planter of Liberty County, Georgia. Jones’ book The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842) is an extended plea to White ministers and slave owners to attend to the spiritual needs of slaves and free Blacks. Part one provides a history of slavery and religion in the United States from 1620 to 1842. Part two discusses the moral and religious conditions of slaves and free blacks, while Part three calls on the Christian church to address these conditions.

Re-issued in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the mass suicides at Jonestown, this revised edition of David Chidester's path-breaking book features a new prologue that considers the meaning of the tragedy for a post-Waco, post-9/11 world.

In this graphic, thought-provoking book, Ed Griffin-Nolan depicts the experiences of Witness for Peace (WFP), a group of Americans who bore witness to the war in Nicaragua - an event that resulted in the killing and wounding of many innocent Central American civilians. Griffin-Nolan explains how WFP participants spent weeks in the war zones in order to understand the impact of U.S. policy on simple people living, as one member of the group phrased it, "at the end of a gun barrel."

Bringt uns die Medizin das ewige Leben? Wollen wir das überhaupt? Während die Religion von jeher ein Leben nach dem Tod anbietet, hat die Heilkunde dafür keinen Plan. Deshalb lautet das oberste Gebot der Medizin: Der Tod muss um jeden Preis bekämpft, das Sterben mit allen Mitteln verzögert werden. Die Gesundheitsindustrie dominiert unser Leben von der Zeugung bis zum Tod. Nun erweiterte sie ihr Angebot von der Heilung zum Versprechen der ewigen Instandhaltung.

Randall Balmer was a late convert to sports talk radio, but he quickly became addicted, just like millions of other devoted American sports fans. As a historian of religion, the more he listened, Balmer couldn't help but wonder how the fervor he heard related to religious practice. From baseball to basketball and football to ice hockey, Balmer explores the origins and histories of big-time sports from the late nineteenth century to the present, with entertaining anecdotes and fresh insights into their ties to religious life.

Since 2000, America's most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College in Virginia, a small Christian school that has earned the nickname "God's Harvard". Most of these students are home-schoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. The school grooms them to become the Christian elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science to wage the battle to take back a godless nation.

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of "Bible study." But Stewart soon discovered that the Club's real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their "unchurched" peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.

Seen as godless by the religious and weak by the atheists, secularism mostly has been misunderstood. In How to Be Secular, Berlinerblau argues for a return to America’s hard-won secular tradition; the best way to protect religious diversity and freedom lies in keeping an eye on the encroachment of each into the other. Berlinerblau passionately defends the virtues of secularism, reminds us what it is and what it can protect, and urges us to mobilize around its cause, which is for all Americans to continue to enjoy freedom for - and from - religion.

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

This insightful history explores the stereotype of Dallas Theological Seminary as an anti-intellectual stronghold of fundamentalism and dispensational premillennialism. The tenures of the schools five presidents reveal the tensions that DTS, a blend of differing heritages and of opposing traditions, has experienced amid changes in American religious and cultural life.

In Stop the Islamization of America, the renowned activist Pamela Geller lays bare the chilling details of the Muslim Brotherhood's strategy of steady subversion and erosion of our freedoms, while offering a practical guide for how to fight back.

Shishyashram, a community of Christians stewarding their skills and minds to glorify God, has the unique opportunity of reaching out to the red-light district of GB Road in New Delhi to share the love of Christ with the women who reside there. The Holy Spirit led us to go there and revealed to us how our Lord Jesus walked on this earth, choosing to meet people no one else wanted to see. If we were to follow in the steps of Jesus, then our path was destined to cross GB Road.

Ever since Jesus' commission to make disciples in his name, Christianity has transformed lives and the world at large. To those watching, it must have looked like an upstart religion led by a group of men, most of whom were martyred for their beliefs. The voice of secular culture today is no louder and no more indulgent than it was in those days. And yet much of the Western church has settled for becoming just another mass media market that's adding to the noise, instead of a movement that continues to turn the world upside down.

Millionen Muslime leben unter uns, doch wir wissen fast nichts über sie. Wie viele Muslime gibt es eigentlich in Deutschland und wie und wo gehen sie ihrem Glauben nach? Constantin Schreiber hat sich dafür auf die Suche gemacht und liefert den ersten deutschen Moschee-Report: Wo gibt es überall Moscheen und was predigen Imame beim Freitagsgebet? Wie wird über Deutschland gesprochen, wenn keine Kamera dabei ist und man sich unbeobachtet fühlt?