Product Code: H890
ISBN: 9780881465006
Price: $35.00
This study of church discipline cases describes a system of subjection with obligations for all--men, women, parents, children, masters, and servants. Although many historians have mistaken this for "oppression," most Southerners accepted the idea of "subjection," regarding it as a divinely ordained system for their mutual governance and benefit.
Complete with a map and statistical tables, this book argues that church discipline bound everyone together in mutual subjection to a shared code of conduct rather than empowering white men exclusively with a position of authority over others.
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Product Code: P499
ISBN: 9780881465174
Price: $15.00
Surviving the Stained-Glass Jungle is a compelling and positive look at the parish ministry through the eyes of a veteran pastor of more than fifty-three years. The book directly confronts the issues of burnout, conflict, stress, and social concerns. It gives strategy and practical help in navigating through these difficult currents. Self addresses the usual themes of preaching, administration, and pastoral care, but also gives practical help with the issues of the pastor's own mental health and self-care. This material is written for parish leaders of all mainline denominations and will become a standard for the practice of ministry. The general theme of the book is that the church is worth the effort. The target audience is seminarians and veteran pastors alike in order to encourage them in the task. Laymen would also benefit significantly by reading this book, gaining a better understanding of the ministry. Self has a national reputation as a gifted preacher, pastor, author, lecturer, motivational speaker for corporate America, and innovator in church growth.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H906
ISBN: 9780881465402
Price: $35.00
The essays in BETWEEN FETTERS AND FREEDOM explore a number of issues bearing on post-Civil War African American Baptists. With limited resources at their disposal, precisely what did freedom mean? Would African American Baptist organizations be recognized as legitimate by white peer organizations? What sort of internal stress would African American organizations face as they gained traction in the black community, and what sort of stress would a rapidly changing culture place on those organizations and the people who made them what they were? Through it all, preachers and lay people alike wondered how their voices would be heard above the din.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P516
ISBN: 9780881465433
Price: $30.00
Should high-tech prosthetic limbs be permissible in elite sports competitions? Why are caffeine and altitude tents usually acceptable while some cold medications are not? What will happen as we engineer new enhancing options such as genetic modification technologies that increase muscle strength, or individualized nutritional genomic programs for elite athletes? The ethics debate about the use of enhancements in elite sport is becoming increasingly complex. Yet we are not asking what relevance sports’ religious dimension has to this debate.
Through an examination of literature on the relationship between sport, religion and spirituality, hope emerges as a compelling feature of sport and a significant part of what makes sport meaningful. Trothen explores four main locations of hope in sport: winning, losing, and anticipation; star athletes; perfect moments; and relational embodiment, and examines how these locations intersect with the enhancement debate.
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Product Code: H909
ISBN: 9780881465457
Product Format: Book
Price: $35.00
Houston Hartsfield Holloway (1844–1917) was born enslaved in upcountry Georgia, taught himself to read and write, learned the blacksmith trade, was emancipated by Union victory in 1865, and served as an ordained traveling preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1870 to 1883. He devoted the remainder of his life to his family, his blacksmith trade, and his local church. Holloway’s 24,000-word autobiography offers a rare working-class perspective on life during some of the most transformative years of US history.
Footnotes provide supplementary biographical information for nearly two hundred relatives, neighbors, friends, and coworkers named in Holloway’s narrative. An appendix includes nineteen extended biographical sketches. The book is illustrated with photographs and three detailed maps of Holloway’s home neighborhoods and preaching assignments.
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Product Code: P519
ISBN: 9780881465488
Price: $28.00
Baptists lack a single central figure in their origins that Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and Methodists have with Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, and John Wesley.
Additionally, Baptists focus so heavily on the Bible for authority and key beliefs or practices like religious liberty, social justice, missions, and preaching that sometimes Baptists and other Christians forget the significant role that people play in forging and promoting those ideas and practices.
This book seeks to address this shortcoming by providing an introductory text of Baptist biographies.
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Product Code: H911
ISBN: 9780881465570
Price: $25.00
This ground-breaking work will change the way we understand religion. Period.
This is the first comprehensive theory of the psychology of religion that can be scientifically verified. Reiss proposes a peer-reviewed, original theory of mysticism, asceticism, spiritual personality, and hundreds of religious beliefs and practices.
Written for serious readers and anyone interested in psychology and religion (especially their own), this eminently readable book will revolutionize the psychology of religious experience by exploring the motivations and characteristics of the individual in their religious life.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P524
ISBN: 9780881465631
Price: $24.00
THE MOST SACRED FREEDOM includes eight essays that were first presented at the 2014 A.V. Elliott Conference on Great Books and Ideas, the seventh annual conference sponsored by Mercer University’s Thomas C. and Ramona E. McDonald Center for America’s Founding Principles. Together, these essays explore the great principle of religious liberty by charting its development in the Western tradition and reconsidering its place at America’s founding.
The major themes addressed include the theological and epistemological preconditions of religious liberty, the chief challenges to securing this liberty, the problematic but necessary role of religion in a free society, and the constitutional framework that has been handed down to us to help preserve this most sacred freedom.
Contributors to the volume are Steven Grosby, Jeremiah H. Russell, Maura Jane Farrelly, Daniel Cullen, John Witte, Jr., Scott Yenor, David Ramsey, and Michael Novak.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P532
ISBN: 9780881465761
Price: $20.00
In a world composed of almost seven billion people, about 2.2 billion of them claim to be Christian. And while Christianity is continuing to grow at a modest rate, other religions are growing at a faster pace. Some scholars predict that Islam will overtake Christianity as the world’s largest religion by the middle of the twenty-first century. Predictions aside, religions are competing for the world stage, and in the competition, Christians seem certain that God is on their side. Christians often think and behave as though God is a Christian.
This book is written to ask if that assumption is true and to foster a more open conversation about other world religions. The world has grown too small and the stakes for mankind have grown too high for any of us to engage our faith as if our understanding of God represents the only way God’s presence may be known in the world.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H919
ISBN: 9780881465853
Price: $20.00
The expansion of human knowledge that springs from the inquiries of science can become a profound resource for our faith traditions. We need not choose between faith and reason as the rejection of reason often leads to a failure of faith. The high calling of the scientific community is to bring the realities of our universe into sharper focus. Our faith traditions enable us to discern meaning and understanding in our lives that cannot be realized by examining facts alone. Both the knowledge we are gaining from science along with the deep insights that we gain from our faith stories provide light and encouragement for navigating our human journeys.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: P536
ISBN: 9780881465921
Price: $30.00
Amidst a proliferation of scholarly literature about Islam in the United States, very little attention has been given to sports among Muslim Americans. While books about professional Muslim athletes can be found, this is the first book to investigate Muslim American sports at the local level, looking at Muslim basketball leagues, sports programs at mosques and Islamic schools, and sports events hosted by Muslim organizations.
Drawing upon personal interviews and observations as well as scholarly sources, this book demonstrates that participation in sports activities plays a vital role in strengthening Islamic piety and fellowship, and in connecting Muslims with non-Muslims in post-9/11 America.
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Publisher: Mercer University Press
Product Code: H922
ISBN: 9780881465884
Price: $60.00
Baptists in Early North America—Newport, Rhode Island, Seventh Day Baptists , Volume III covers the period 1664 to 1808, from the date some members of Newport’s first Baptist church began meeting for worship on the seventh-day Sabbath (Saturday) through the first 137 years of their life as the Newport Seventh Day Baptist Church.
Transcriptions of the church’s first three record books (1692–1808) are preceded by extensive excerpts from the manuscripts and letters of Samuel Hubbard, one of the founding members; these document the origins in John Clarke’s Newport Baptist church and the influences from Sabbathkeeping Baptists in mid-seventeenth century England.
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