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This remarkable biography features a white American pacifist minister whose tireless work for justice and human rights helped reshape Black civil rights in the U.S. and Africa.

George M. Houser (1916–2015) was one of the most important civil rights and antiwar activists of the twentieth century. A conscientious objector during World War II, in 1942 Houser cofounded and led the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), whose embrace of nonviolent protest strategies and tactics characterized the modern American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning in the 1950s, Houser played a critical role in pan-Africanist anticolonial movements, and his more than thirty-year dedication to the cause of human rights and self-determination helped prepare the ground for the toppling of the South African apartheid regime.

Throughout his life, Houser shunned publicity, preferring to let his actions speak his faith. Sheila Collins’s well-researched biography recounts the events that informed Houser’s life of activism—from his childhood experiences as the son of missionaries in the Philippines to his early grounding in the Social Gospel and the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi. In light of the corruption the U.S. and the world face today, Houser’s story of faith and decisive action for human rights and social justice is one for our time.

The definitive account of how conservative Southern Baptists came to dominate the nation's largest Protestant denomination

In 1979 a group of conservative members of the Southern Baptists Convention (SBC) initiated a campaign to reshape the denomination’s seminaries and organizations by installing new conservative leaders who made belief in the inerrancy of the Bible a condition of service. They succeeded. This book is a definitive account of that takeover.

Barry Hankins argues that the conservatives sought control of the SBC not or not only to secure the denomination's orthodoxy but to mobilize Southern Baptists for a war against secular culture. The best explanation of the beliefs and behavior of Southern Baptist conservatives, Hankins concludes, lies in their adoption of the culture war model of American society. Believing that "American culture has turned hostile to traditional forms of faith,” they sought to deploy the Southern Baptist Convention in a "full-scale culture war" against secularism in the United States. Hankins traces the roots of this movement to the ideas of such post-WWII northern evangelicals as Carl F. H. Henry and Francis Schaeffer. Henry and Schaeffer viewed America's secular culture as hostile to Christianity and called on evangelicals to develop a robust Christian opposition to secular culture. As the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, SBC positions on divisive cultural issues like abortion have remade the American political landscape, most notably in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. 

Hankins also argues, however, that Southern Baptist conservatives sought more than orthodox adherence to Biblical inerrancy. They also sought an identity that was authentically Baptist and Southern. Hankin’s excellent and prescient work will fascinate readers interested in contemporary American religion, culture, and public policy, as well as in the American South.

Before the Second Vatican Council, America’s Catholics operated largely as a coherent voting bloc, usually in connection with the Democratic Party. Their episcopal leaders generally spoke for Catholics in political matters; at least, where America’s bishops asserted themselves in public affairs there was little audible dissent from the faithful. 

More than occasionally, the immigrant Church’s eagerness to demonstrate its patriotic bona fides furthered its tendency to speak with one voice about national matters, and in line with the broader societal consensus. And, notwithstanding the considerable conflict which Catholics encountered, and generated, in American political life, there was before the Council broad agreement in American culture about the centrality of Biblical morality to the success of Americans’ experiment with republican government.

In other words: before the Council, American Catholics’ relationship to the political common good was mediated, somewhat uncritical, and insulated from conflict (both within and without the Church) over such fundamental matters as protection of innocent life, marriage and family life, and (to a lesser extent) religious liberty.

This has all changed since the mid-1960s. For the first time in the Church’s pilgrimage on these shores, controversial questions about the basic moral requirements of the political common good are front and center for America’s Catholics. These questions require Catholics to confront matters which heretofore they either took for granted, read off from the background culture, or which they left to the bishops to handle. But the Council Fathers rightly recognized that Jesus calls upon a formed and informed laity to act as leaven in the public realm, to bring Gospel values to the temporal sphere. In this book of essays touching upon Catholic social doctrine, the truth about human equality and political liberty, and religious faith as it bears upon public life and the public engagement of lay Catholics, Gerard Bradley supplies indispensable aid to those seeking to answer Jesus’ call.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Max Frankel characterized Unsecular Media as a book that "leaves you thinking about the saintly role that religion has acquired in our allegedly irreligious media."

Mark Silk's book is the first to offer a comprehensive description and analysis of how American news media cover religion.
 

In Unveiling Traditions Anouar Majid issues a challenge to the West to reimagine Islam as a progressive world culture and a participant in the building of a multicultural and more egalitarian world civilization. From within the highly secularized space it inhabits, a space endemically suspicious of religion, the West must find a way, writes Majid, to embrace Islamic societies as partners in building a more inclusive and culturally diverse global community.
Majid moves beyond Edward Said’s unmasking of orientalism in the West to examine the intellectual assumptions that have prevented a more nuanced understanding of Islam’s legacies. In addition to questioning the pervasive logic that assumes the “naturalness” of European social and political organizations, he argues that it is capitalism that has intensified cultural misunderstanding and created global tensions. Besides examining the resiliency of orientalism, the author critically examines the ideologies of nationalism and colonialist categories that have redefined the identity of Muslims (especially Arabs and Africans) in the modern age and totally remapped their cultural geographies. Majid is aware of the need for Muslims to rethink their own assumptions. Addressing the crisis in Arab-Muslim thought caused by a desire to simultaneously “catch up” with the West and also preserve Muslim cultural authenticity, he challenges Arab and Muslim intellectuals to imagine a post-capitalist, post-Eurocentric future. Critical of Islamic patriarchal practices and capitalist hegemony, Majid contends that Muslim feminists have come closest to theorizing a notion of emancipation that rescues Islam from patriarchal domination and resists Eurocentric prejudices.
Majid’s timely appeal for a progressive, multicultural dialogue that would pave the way to a polycentric world will interest students and scholars of postcolonial, cultural, Islamic, and Marxist studies.

Trevor S. Luke tackles some of the major issues of the history of the Late Republic and the transition to the empire in a novel way. Taking the perspective that Roman elites, even at this late date, took their own religion seriously as a way to communicate meaning to their fellow Romans, the volume reinterprets some of the most famous events of that period in order to highlight what Sulla, Caesar, and figures of similar stature did to make a religious argument or defense for their actions. This exploration will be of interest to scholars of religion, political science, sociology, classics, and ancient history and to the general history enthusiast. While many people are aware of the important battles and major thinkers of this period of Roman history, the story of its theological discourse and competition is unfolded here for the first time.