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Few other cultural issues alarm conservative Protestant families and communities more than the seemingly ubiquitous threat of pornography. Thanks to widespread access to the internet, conservative Protestants now face a reality in which every Christian man, woman, and child with a smartphone can access limitless pornography in his or her bathroom, at work, or at a friend’s sleepover. Once confident of their victory over pornography in society at large, conservative Protestants now fear that “porn addiction” is consuming even the most faithful. How are conservative Protestants adjusting to this new reality? And what are its consequences in their lives? Drawing on over 130 interviews, as well as numerous national surveys, Addicted to Lust shows that, compared to other Americans, pornography shapes the lives of conservative Protestants in ways that are uniquely damaging to their mental health, spiritual lives, and intimate relationships. Samuel Perry demonstrates how certain pervasive beliefs within the conservative Protestant subculture unwittingly create a context in which those who use pornography are often overwhelmed with shame and discouragement, sometimes to the point of depression or withdrawal from faith altogether. Conservative Protestant women who use pornography feel a “double shame,” both for sinning sexually and for sinning “like a man,” while conflicts over pornography in marriages are escalated with patterns of lying, hiding, blowing up, or threats of divorce. Addicted to Lust shines new light on one of the most talked-about problems facing conservative Christians.

The evil of the holocaust demands a radical rethink of the traditional Christian understanding of Judaism. This is because the anti‐Judaism of the Christian Church prepared the way for the holocaust. This rethink includes looking at theological responses to the holocaust and examining which, if any, are adequate. It also means looking at issues of suffering and forgiveness in both Judaism and Christianity. On examination, the approach of the two religions is not as far apart as is sometimes suggested. The basic covenant is not with either Judaism or Christianity but with humanity. These, like other religions, are different, distinctive voices in response to God's primal affirmation of human life, which for Christians is achieved and given in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians should not set out to convert Jews. Jesus is, traditionally, a highly divisive figure for the two religions but modern scholarship, including Jewish scholarship, has revealed some common ground. In addition to the common ground here, there is a shared hope and a common task though contentious questions still remain on questions such as Israel and Jerusalem. The church has a particular responsibility to ensure that its teaching and preaching is not implicitly anti‐Judaic.

This book demonstrates how Christian leaders and AIDS activists in the United States have posited HIV/AIDS as a religious and moral epidemic and asks how this understanding has informed cultural and political debates about prevention, healthcare, and sex education all over the world. Drawing upon archival research, oral histories, and textual analysis, this book maps the moral language regarding sexuality–and especially homosexuality–through which evangelicals, mainline Protestants, Catholic leaders, and gay and lesbian AIDS activists made sense of and responded to the epidemic. Moving beyond the politics of the culture wars and the focus on the Christian Right, After the Wrath of God tracks how mainstream religious understandings of sexual morality and AIDS have shaped national and global public health discourse about prevention and care. It also situates the AIDS crisis alongside competing moral concerns, such as those surrounding abortion, drug use, and race, in delineating American religious responses to the epidemic. This history illustrates in turn how the AIDS epidemic has transformed American Christianity by allowing religious leaders and organizations a new way in which to articulate their understandings of sexuality, health, and social activism and to advance new boundaries for national moral citizenship.

Against Harmony traces the history of progressive and radical experiments in Japanese Buddhist thought and practice from the mid-Meiji period through the early Shōwa period (1885–1935), when historical events coalesced to eliminate all such experiments. It is a work of both intellectual history and of critical, comparative thought. Perhaps the two best representations of progressive Buddhism during this period were the New Buddhist Fellowship (1899–1915) and the Youth League for Revitalizing Buddhism (1931–1936). Both were nonsectarian, lay movements comprising young men with education in classical Buddhist texts as well as Western literature, philosophy, and religion. Their work effectively collapses commonly held distinctions between religion, philosophy, ethics, politics, and economics. Unlike many others of their day, these “New Buddhists” did not regard the novel forces of modernization as problematic and disruptive, but rather, as an opportunity to explore and expand the possibilities of the dharma. Moreover, these and similar Buddhist and Buddhist-inspired movements experimented with novel, alternative forms of modernity, rooted in variations on what might be called “dharmic materialism.” In short, they did not simply inherit or mimic the dominant Western model(s). For this reason, their work remains of relevance in the early twenty-first century.

Explores the history and doctrines of Traditionalism, a movement established by Ren” Gu”non in the 1920s, and later developed further by Julius Evola (in politics), Frithjof Schuon (in religion), and Mircea Eliade (in academia). Traditionalism sees modernity as terminal decline from traditional metaphysical truth, and attempts to remedy this at both a personal and societal level. All responses depend on the recovery of lost tradition, notably of the “perennial philosophy.” Personal responses are generally religious, and Sufism (mystical Islam) was the most important of these, followed by Freemasonry. Societal responses range from Eliade’s scholarly investigation of archaic religion to Evola’s ultra fascism, by 2000 a major stream in far-right thought. The book examines the origins of Traditionalism in the Renaissance, and then traces the development of the groups and movements that resulted, as well as modification in doctrine. The final chapter looks at Traditionalism’s possible influence in the future, and asks why so many intellectuals found this anti-modernist movement so attractive.

In Agents of God, sociologist Jeffrey Guhin describes his year and a half spent in two Sunni Muslim and two Evangelical Christian high schools in the New York City area. At first, these four schools could not seem more different, yet they are linked by much: these are all schools with conservative thoughts on gender and sexuality, with a hostility to the theory of evolution, and with a deep suspicion of secularism. And they are all also hopeful that America will be a place where their children can excel, even as they also fear the nation’s many temptations might lead their children astray. Guhin shows how these school communities use boundaries of politics, gender, and sexuality to distinguish themselves from the outside world, both in school and online. Within these boundaries, these communities have developed “external authorities” like Science, Scripture, and Prayer, each of which is felt and experienced as a real power with the ability to make commands and coerce action. For example, people can describe Science itself as showing something or the Bible itself as making a command. By offloading coercion to these external authorities, leaders in these schools are able to maintain a commitment to religious freedom while simultaneously reproducing their moral commitments in their students. Drawing on extensive classroom observation, community participation, and interviews with students, teachers, and staff, this book makes an original contribution to religious studies, sociology, and education.

In this work of qualitative sociology, Anna Strhan offers an in-depth study of the everyday lives of members of a conservative evangelical Anglican church in London. ‘St John’s’ is a vibrant church, with a congregation of young and middle-aged members, one in which the life of the mind is important, and faith is both a comfort and a struggle—a way of questioning the order of things within society and for themselves. The congregants of St John’s see themselves as increasingly countercultural, moving against the grain of wider culture in London and in British society, yet they take pride in this, and see it as a central element of being Christian. This book reveals the processes through which the congregants of St John’s learn to understand themselves as ‘aliens and strangers’ in the world, demonstrating the precariousness of their projects of staking out boundaries of moral distinctiveness. Through focusing on their interactions within and outside the church, Strhan shows how the everyday experiences of these evangelicals are simultaneously shaped by the secular norms of their workplaces and other city spaces and by the moral and temporal orientations of their faith that rub against these. Thus their self-identification as ‘aliens and strangers’ both articulates and constructs an ambition to be different from others around them in the city, rooted in a consciousness of the extent to which their hopes, concerns, and longings are simultaneously shaped by their being in the world.

The National Shrine in Washington, D.C., has been deeply loved, blithely ignored, and passionately criticized. It has been praised as a “dazzling jewel” and dismissed as a “towering Byzantine beach ball.” This book shows that the Shrine is also an illuminating site from which to tell the story of 20th-century Catholicism. It organizes the narrative around six themes that characterize U.S. Catholicism, and ties these themes to the Shrine's material culture—to images, artifacts, or devotional spaces. Thus, the book begins with the Basilica's foundation stone, weaving it into a discussion of “brick and mortar” Catholicism, the drive to build institutions. To highlight the Church's inclination to appeal to women, the book looks at fund-raising for the Mary Memorial Altar, and focuses on the Filipino oratory to Our Lady of Antipolo to illustrate the Church's outreach to immigrants. Throughout, the book employs painstaking detective work to shine a light on the many facets of American Catholicism reflected in the shrine.

This book examines the Catholic participation in the “Long Sixties” in the United States, a decade that, for Catholic Americans, began in 1964 (the year the first reforms mandated by the Second Vatican Council began to be implemented) and continued into the 1970s. The book argues that the most important result of that era was the emergence of the awareness among many of the Catholic faithful that everything in history changes, including the Church. This seemingly obvious insight generated considerable turmoil within the American Catholic community, which was accustomed to thinking of their religious beliefs and practices as timeless. The battles generated by that insight largely shaped the debates within the community during the final quarter of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the process of narrating those turbulent events, the book offers a new master narrative of American Catholicism during the 1960s that seeks to displace the older politicized narrative of “liberals versus conservatives.”

This book answers what, how much, who, where, and why questions of generous activities. This book takes an interdisciplinary approach that defines generosity as expressed through multiple forms of giving. The focus is on three primary forms of giving: donating money, volunteering time, and taking political action. Also explored are participation in giving blood, bodily organs, material possessions, relational attention, and participating in environmental sustainability. All findings are based on data from the Science of Generosity Initiative, combining a nationally representative survey of adult Americans with in-depth interviews and ethnographies of a subsample of survey respondents. From the interviews case studies were selected to narratively illustrate core themes. The analyses examine multiple dimensions of resources, social status characteristics, regional cultural norms, different approaches to giving processes, social psychological orientations, and relational contexts of generosity. The conclusion presents a theoretical model of resource-, norm-, and identity-supported “circles of generosity,” which ripple outward in their reach to different targets of giving. Practical implications include tips for readers who are interested in increasing their giving, parents modeling giving to children, spouses desiring giving alignment, and friends and community members wanting to support other people’s giving. Also offered are fundraising ideas for nonprofit, foundation, and religious leaders, as well as scholars of generosity.

This book examines contemporary American religious culture through the themes of a “consuming convert’s republic,” “the haunted present,” and “the therapeutic.” The work argues that US religious culture in the twenty-first century can be characterized as immersed in and constitutive of an era of possessions–of both consumer goods and spirit entities such as ghosts and demons–and that these “possessions” are thoroughly saturated with the reverberations of therapeutic discourse. Third Wave evangelicalism and its practice of spiritual warfare provide a case study through which these three tropes converge. The book provides a description and analysis of religion in the contemporary United States. Second, it offers an extended examination of Third Wave evangelicalism, a small but influential movement in both the United States and in Christian mission fields around the world. Third, it maps some of the multiple and often conflicting connections among contemporary American religious forms, consumer capitalism, neoliberalism, and globalization.

Academics across America are rethinking the place of religion on college and university campuses, and religion has become a hot topic of conversation. Some conversations focus on religious literacy, while others contrast religion with spirituality; some understand religion in light of specific traditions or communities of faith, while others focus attention on concerns such as personal meaning and civic engagement. The American University in a Postsecular Age brings together these divergent conversations. Three of the fourteen essays in the volume are written by the editors, including an introductory essay that explains the term “postsecular,” another on church‐related higher education, and a concluding essay that suggests a framework for talking about religion in the academy. The other authors represented in the book are all well known scholars in the fields of religion and higher education including, for example, Amanda Porterfield, past president of the American Society of Church History, Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and Robert Wuthnow, the prolific sociologist of religion from Princeton. The volume is divided into two parts: a first group of essays focuses on religion, institutions, and faculty roles; the second group deals with the place of religion in the curriculum and in student learning. The book as a whole assumes that increased attention to religion will enhance the work of the academy, but a wide variety of perspectives are included.

In the modern world, angels perhaps seem to be no more than a symbol—something encountered only on the top of Christmas trees, or seemingly emblematic of Christian beliefs at their most traditional and unchanging. But in the Middle Ages men and women thought differently. Some offered prayers intended to secure angelic assistance for the living and the dead; others erected stone monuments carved with images of winged figures; and still others made angels the subject of poetic endeavour and theological scholarship. This wealth of material has never been fully explored, and was once dismissed as the detritus of a superstitious age. This book offers a different perspective, by using angels as a prism through which to study the changing religious culture of an unfamiliar age. Focusing on one corner of medieval Europe which produced an abundance of material relating to angels, Richard Sowerby investigates the way that ancient beliefs about angels were preserved and adapted in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. Between the sixth century and the eleventh, the convictions of Anglo-Saxon men and women about the world of the spirits underwent a gradual transformation. This book is the first to explore that transformation, and to show the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons tried to reconcile their religious inheritance with their own perspectives about the world, human nature, and God.

This book examines the problem of evil, given animal suffering, disease, and extinction and the violence of the evolutionary process. Evolutionary theory has deconstructed the primary theodicy of historic Christianity, the Adamic Fall, while scientific work on animals has only increased our appreciation of animal sentience and their capacity for suffering. The book responds to this new theodic challenge in three ways. First, it argues that nature can be understood as an interrelated mix of the perfect and the corrupted—the wheat and the tares; at times the good is glimpsed, but never easily or unequivocally. Second, it argues that humans are not to blame for all evil because so much evil preceded human becoming. Third, it argues that faith requires a confidence that when believers look at nature the work of God is visible, albeit the infinitely subtle and almost infinitely hidden work of God. Thus this third aspect depends upon an affirmation that there are other ways of seeing the evolutionary process that are not just “nature red in tooth and claw.: The conclusion of the book includes an ethical response to animals stemming directly out of the book’s theological understanding of the world, its history, evolution, and relationships.

This book focuses on core religious teachings that explain how human beings ought to behave in relation to other animals, with the intent that this information be considered in light of contemporary practices and consumer choices. The book explores sacred literature, the lives of religious exemplars, and core ethics to expose animal-friendly teachings in indigenous, Vedic, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religious traditions. Each chapter explores specific topics, such as sacred nature, key philosophical concepts (such as oneness of being, universal peace, and the afterlife), core ethics (on subjects such as compassion, humility, and diet), rightful relations between human beings and animals (kinship), and the activist nature of religious commitment, introducing famous figures such as Gandhi, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Tolstoy, as well as contemporary animal advocates from within each religious tradition. A thoughtful introduction and conclusion outline the parameters of the book, as well as the intent of the author, and provide focus for this landmark publication. Finally, the appendix explains industrial farming and fishing—including the environmental degradation associated with both—and explores terms such as ”free-range,” ”cruelty-free,” and ”organic.”

This groundbreaking book examines the means by which the Muslim Brotherhood was reconstituted during the years of Anwar al-Sadat’s presidency. By including an analysis of structural, ideological, and social developments during this period in the history of the Islamic movement, a more accurate picture of the so-called Islamic resurgence develops, one that represents the rebirth of an old idea in a new setting. The Muslim Brotherhood’s success in rebuilding its organization rested in large part on its ability to attract a new generation of Islamic activists who had transformed Egypt’s colleges and universities into a hub for religious contention against the state. Led by groups such as al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyyah (the Islamic Society), the student movement exhibited a dynamic and vibrant culture of activism that found inspiration in a multitude of intellectual and organizational sources, of which the Muslim Brotherhood was only one. By the close of the 1970s, however, internal divisions over ideology and strategy led to the rise of factionalism within the student movement. A majority of student leaders opted to expand the scope of their activist mission by joining the Muslim Brotherhood, rejuvenating the struggling organization, and launching a new phase in its history.

The hope that we might one day upload our minds into robots and, eventually, cyberspace has become commonplace and now affects life across a broad spectrum of western culture. Popular science books on robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) by Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, and others argue that one day advances in robotics, AI and neurobiology will enable us to copy our conscious selves into machines, which will take over the cosmos and live eternally in a perfect world of supremely intelligent Mind. Such views borrow from the apocalyptic traditions of Judaism and Christianity and influence the politics of research grants, life in online virtual reality environments, and conversations within philosophical, legal and theological circles. Apocalyptic AI is important to scientific research because it promotes public and private funding for robotics and AI. In addition, residents of the online world Second Life have adopted it as a worldview that gives meaning to their activities and many already wish to live in Second Life or a similar environment forever, just as Moravec and Kurzweil promise they will. Finally, several of the claims of Apocalyptic AI have become a serious topic of debate for philosophers of mind, legal scholars and theologians. The successful integration of religion, science and technology in Apocalyptic AI creates a powerful worldview with considerable influence in modern life and challenges many of our long held assumptions about the relationship between religion and science.

In present-day America, the topic of certitude is much debated. On one side, commentators like Charles Krauthammer urge us to achieve “moral clarity”. On the other, those like George Will contend that the greatest present threat to civilization is an excess of certitude. This book points out that Europe in the 16th century was preoccupied with similar concerns. Both the desire for certainty, especially religious certainty, and warnings against certainty permeated this earlier era. The book analyzes the pervading questions about certitude and doubt in the terms and contexts of a wide variety of thinkers during this time of competing truths. The Protestant Reformation was the wellspring of this debate, which expressed itself in terms of questions about salvation, authority, the rise of skepticism, the outbreak of religious violence, the discernment of spirits, and the ambiguous relationship between appearance and reality. Repeatedly, the book says, we find the recurring fear of deception. It examines the history of theological polemics and debates as well as other genres to shed light on the progress of this controversy. Among the texts the book draws on are Montaigne's Essays, the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila, the diary, letters, and treatises of St. Ignatius, and the dramas of Shakespeare. The result is not a book about theology, but rather a book about the way in which the concern with certitude determined the theology, polemics, and literature of the age.

This book champions vocation and calling as key elements of undergraduate education. It offers a historical and theoretical account of vocational reflection and discernment, as well as suggesting how these endeavors can be implemented through specific educational practices. Against the backdrop of the current national conversation about the purposes of higher education, it argues that the undergraduate years can provide a certain amount of relatively unfettered time, and a “free and ordered space,” in which students can consider their callings. The book is divided into four parts: first, an exploration of broader contexts within which undergraduate vocational reflection takes place; second, an examination of the contours of vocation from historical, theological, and philosophical perspectives, with particular attention to narrative as a key factor; third, consideration of the relationship between vocation and virtue, both of which encourage habits that undergird a fulfilled and fulfilling life; and finally, an investigation of vocational discernment beyond the classroom (student development and co-curricular activities, community engagement initiatives, and attention to a campus’s physical features). The book’s epilogue summarizes the various pedagogies of vocation that are developed throughout the book, while also suggesting that vocation may itself serve as a kind of pedagogy; it can provide an organizing principle that encourages undergraduates to examine larger questions of meaning and purpose.

This book examines the growth and development of organized atheism and humanism in the United States from a sociological perspective. This book is based on interviews with atheist leaders and participants as well as observations and analysis of secular gatherings and media. This book finds that the new atheist outspokenness—as seen in the best-selling “new atheist” books—is a response to the resurgence of religious involvement in politics during the past thirty years. Feeling themselves excluded from public life, secularists (the authors’ term for atheists and humanists) have revised their strategies to wage both a defensive and offensive battle against their ideological and political antagonists. The book also examines how atheists are forming a collective identity and building a community through the use of rituals as well as engaging in activism. Throughout, the book discusses the role of the media in providing connection to one another and creating a virtual community.