[PDF] Anxious Bench eBook

Author : John Williamson Nevin
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 181 pages
File Size : 14,49 MB
Release : 2000-02-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1579104290

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In 1843, the first edition of Nevin's The Anxious Bench was published. It has been called the most probing critique of Finneyism ever written. The background to the treatise was Nevin's general dislike of Finneyism, and also a major schism in the German Reformed Church in 1830. In that year a Finneyite revivalist, John Winebrenner, had led a breakaway movement from the German Reformed Church to form a new denomination, the so-called Church of God. Finneyism had made big inroads into the German Reformed Church, much to Nevin's disgust--Banner of Truth.

Author : Andrea L. Turpin
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 35,82 MB
Release : 2016-08-25
Category : History
ISBN : 1501706853

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In A New Moral Vision, Andrea L. Turpin explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. In the decades before the Civil War, evangelical Protestantism provided the main impetus for opening the highest levels of American education to women. Between the Civil War and World War I, however, shifting theological beliefs, a growing cultural pluralism, and a new emphasis on university research led educators to reevaluate how colleges should inculcate an ethical outlook in students—just as the proportion of female collegians swelled. In this environment, Turpin argues, educational leaders articulated a new moral vision for their institutions by positioning them within the new landscape of competing men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities. In place of fostering evangelical conversion, religiously liberal educators sought to foster in students a surprisingly more gendered ideal of character and service than had earlier evangelical educators. Because of this moral reorientation, the widespread entrance of women into higher education did not shift the social order in as egalitarian a direction as we might expect. Instead, college graduates—who formed a disproportionate number of the leaders and reformers of the Progressive Era—contributed to the creation of separate male and female cultures within Progressive Era public life and beyond. Drawing on extensive archival research at ten trend-setting men's, women's, and coeducational colleges and universities, A New Moral Vision illuminates the historical intersection of gender ideals, religious beliefs, educational theories, and social change in ways that offer insight into the nature—and cultural consequences—of the moral messages communicated by institutions of higher education today.

Author : Aaron Griffith
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 31,28 MB
Release : 2020-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0674238788

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An incisive look at how evangelical Christians shaped—and were shaped by—the American criminal justice system. America incarcerates on a massive scale. Despite recent reforms, the United States locks up large numbers of people—disproportionately poor and nonwhite—for long periods and offers little opportunity for restoration. Aaron Griffith reveals a key component in the origins of American mass incarceration: evangelical Christianity. Evangelicals in the postwar era made crime concern a major religious issue and found new platforms for shaping public life through punitive politics. Religious leaders like Billy Graham and David Wilkerson mobilized fears of lawbreaking and concern for offenders to sharpen appeals for Christian conversion, setting the stage for evangelicals who began advocating tough-on-crime politics in the 1960s. Building on religious campaigns for public safety earlier in the twentieth century, some preachers and politicians pushed for “law and order,” urging support for harsh sentences and expanded policing. Other evangelicals saw crime as a missionary opportunity, launching innovative ministries that reshaped the practice of religion in prisons. From the 1980s on, evangelicals were instrumental in popularizing criminal justice reform, making it a central cause in the compassionate conservative movement. At every stage in their work, evangelicals framed their efforts as colorblind, which only masked racial inequality in incarceration and delayed real change. Today evangelicals play an ambiguous role in reform, pressing for reduced imprisonment while backing law-and-order politicians. God’s Law and Order shows that we cannot understand the criminal justice system without accounting for evangelicalism’s impact on its historical development.

Author : Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 289 pages
File Size : 45,33 MB
Release : 2015
Category : History
ISBN : 0190205644

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A work of history, biography, and historical theology, A New Gospel for Women tells the remarkable story of Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946), an internationally-known social reformer and author of God's Word to Women, a startling reinterpretation of the Christian Scriptures that even today stands as one of the most innovative and comprehensive feminist theologies ever written.

Author : John Williamson Nevin
Publisher :
Page : 104 pages
File Size : 23,91 MB
Release : 2017-10-06
Category :
ISBN : 9781549911187

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It is proposed to institute a free inquiry into the merits of the ANXIOUS BENCH, as it has been enlisted extensively of late years in the service of religion. My object will be to show, that the measure is adapted to obstruct rather than to promote the progress of true godliness, and that it deserves to be discouraged on this account.No one needs to be informed what is meant by the Anxious Bench. Its nature and design have come to be as familiar to most people, as the nature and design of the Pulpit itself. Even among those who dislike it, there are few perhaps, who have not had the opportunity, at one time or another, of witnessing its operation, while all are well acquainted with it at least in the way of description and report.It will be understood, that the Anxious Bench is made to stand, in this case, as the representative of the entire system of what are technically denominated in our day, "New Measures." It belongs to this system, and may be regarded as the door that opens the way to all the rest. If it be found unworthy of confidence, the whole system will be shorn of its title to respect at the same time. If any part of the system could claim indulgence, it would be the Anxious Bench. All beyond this is only something worse.

Author : John Williamson Nevin
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 428 pages
File Size : 43,58 MB
Release : 2017-08-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1498244920

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The mid-nineteenth century is a gold mine for contemporary scholars interested in American Protestant ecclesiology. There one will find the extensive writings of John Nevin who came to the notice of the theological world with The Anxious Bench, a critique of the "quackery" of Protestant revivalism. Influenced by a critical appropriation of cutting-edge contemporary German theology, he came to believe that the church was not "invisible," but the visible manifestation of Jesus Christ's incarnate life. Christians were to pursue unity, not in external institutional arrangements, but as unity of spiritual life. This compilation presents his theology of the catholicity of the church prior to his masterwork, The Mystical Presence, and a multifaceted, sophisticated critique of American sectarianism. This edition carefully preserves the original texts while providing extensive introductions, annotations, and bibliography. The Mercersburg Theology Study Series presents for the first time attractive, readable, scholarly modern editions of the key writings of the nineteenth-century movement known as the Mercersburg Theology. An ambitious multi-year project, it aims to make an important contribution to the academic community and to the broader public, who can at last be properly introduced to this unique blend of American and European Reformed and Catholic theology.

Author : Bill J. Leonard
Publisher : Abingdon Press
Page : 367 pages
File Size : 46,3 MB
Release : 2014-11-18
Category : History
ISBN : 1426756755

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For many people, knowing about God is not enough; they also want to feel God’s presence. Whether like St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus or like Wesley’s “strangely warmed heart,” people believe that nothing can substitute for religious experience. Even today, people go to church in order to encounter the Divine, by which they mean experience God in their midst. This desire to meet or be met by God is as old as humanity, but America especially has been the seed bed for what William James famously called “varieties of religious experience.” These experiences cover a wide spectrum from classic mysticism to revivalist conversion to a contemporary pursuit of spirituality. A Sense of the Heart traces the nature of religious experience from the colonial era to the present, attempting to define and describe the nature of religious experience and noting common and distinct approaches in the work of various scholars and practitioners. Following that, A Sense of the Heart offers a historical review of representative types of religious experience, the nature of such experiences and their impact on the American religious and cultural context as evident in awakenings, controversies, denominations, and new religious communities.