A shrewd synthesizer, gifted popularizer, and inspiring founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance movement, A.B. Simpson (1843-1919) was enmeshed in the most crucial threads of evangelical Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century. Daryn Henry presents Simpson's life and ministry as a vivid, fascinating, and paradigmatic study in evangelical religious culture, during a time when the conservative wing of the movement has often been overlooked. Simpson's ministry, Henry explains, fused the classic evangelical emphasis on revivalist conversion with the intensification of that sensibility in the quest for the deeper Christian life of holiness. Recovering the practice of divine healing, Simpson emphasized a dynamically empowered and supernaturally animated Christianity that would spill over into nascent Pentecostalism. His encouragement of cross-cultural missions was part of a trend that unleashed the dramatic rise of world Christianity across the Global South. All the while, his Biblical literalism, antagonism to modernist theology, campaigns against evolution, and views on premillennialism, Biblical prophecy, and the role of Israel in the end times made Simpson a precursor of the fundamentalist melees of subsequent decades. From his upbringing in rural Canada and confessional Scottish Presbyterianism, Simpson journeyed into the heart of American evangelicalism revolving around his base in New York City. Against most previous writing on Simpson, Henry's biography presents both continuities and discontinuities in the development of modern interdenominational evangelicalism out of the denominational evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.

A shrewd synthesizer, gifted popularizer, and inspiring founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance movement, A.B. Simpson (1843-1919) was enmeshed in the most crucial threads of evangelical Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century. Daryn Henry presents Simpson's life and ministry as a vivid, fascinating, and paradigmatic study in evangelical religious culture, during a time when the conservative wing of the movement has often been overlooked. Simpson's ministry, Henry explains, fused the classic evangelical emphasis on revivalist conversion with the intensification of that sensibility in the quest for the deeper Christian life of holiness. Recovering the practice of divine healing, Simpson emphasized a dynamically empowered and supernaturally animated Christianity that would spill over into nascent Pentecostalism. His encouragement of cross-cultural missions was part of a trend that unleashed the dramatic rise of world Christianity across the Global South. All the while, his Biblical literalism, antagonism to modernist theology, campaigns against evolution, and views on premillennialism, Biblical prophecy, and the role of Israel in the end times made Simpson a precursor of the fundamentalist melees of subsequent decades. From his upbringing in rural Canada and confessional Scottish Presbyterianism, Simpson journeyed into the heart of American evangelicalism revolving around his base in New York City. Against most previous writing on Simpson, Henry's biography presents both continuities and discontinuities in the development of modern interdenominational evangelicalism out of the denominational evangelicalism of the nineteenth century.

A fascinating history of dispensationalism and its influence on popular culture, politics, and religion In The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism, Daniel G. Hummel illuminates how dispensationalism, despite often being dismissed as a fringe end-times theory, shaped Anglo-American evangelicalism and the larger American cultural imagination. Hummel locates dispensationalism’s origin in the writings of the nineteenth-century Protestant John Nelson Darby, who established many of the hallmarks of the movement, such as premillennialism and belief in the rapture. Though it consistently faced criticism, dispensationalism held populist, and briefly scholarly, appeal—visible in everything from turn-of-the-century revivalism to apocalyptic bestsellers of the 1970s to current internet conspiracy theories. Measured and irenic, Hummel objectively evaluates evangelicalism’s most resilient and contentious popular theology. As the first comprehensive intellectual-cultural history of its kind, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism is a must-read for students and scholars of American religion.

The concept of vocation in an early modern setting calls to mind the priesthood or religious life in a monastery or cloister; to be “called” by God meant to leave the concerns of the world behind. Beginning in the mid-seventeenth century, French Catholic clergy began to promote the innovative idea that everyone, even an ordinary layperson, was called to a vocation or “state of life” and that discerning this call correctly had implications for one’s happiness and salvation, and for the social good. In Callings and Consequences Christopher Lane analyzes the origins, growth, and influence of a culture of vocation that became a central component of the Catholic Reformation and its legacy in France. The reformers’ new vision of the choice of a state of life was marked by four characteristics: urgency (the realization that one’s soul was at stake), inclusiveness (the belief that everyone, including lay people, was called by God), method (the use of proven discernment practices), and liberty (the belief that this choice must be free from coercion, especially by parents). No mere passing phenomena, these vocational reforms engendered enduring beliefs and practices within the repertoire of global Catholic modernity, even to the present day. An illuminating and sometimes surprising history of pastoral reform, Callings and Consequences helps us to understand the history of Catholic vocational culture and its role in the modernizing process, within Christianity and beyond.

Emerging as a spiritual renewal movement in Antebellum America with ties to Methodism and the reform ethos of the era, it grew rapidly and spread internationally during the last three decades of the 19th century. Women including the increasingly well-known Phoebe Palmer were central actors in the Movement and from its origins Blacks were prominent in all aspects of the Movement. Although its most familiar expression is found in the Salvation Army, the movement established a thriving international network of periodicals, camp meetings, rescue missions, and congregations birthing new denominations such as the Church of God (Anderson), the Church of the Nazarene, and the Korea Evangelical Holiness Church while continuing to profoundly shape older Protestant denominations. In the process playing a crucial role emergence of Pentecostalism and even shaping the piety of popular evangelicalism. Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement, Third Edition contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has more than 500 cross-referenced entries on leaders, personalities, events, facts, movements, and beliefs of the Holiness Movement. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Holiness Movement.

In the early twentieth century, a new, American scripture appeared on the scene. It was the product of a school of theological thinking known as Dispensationalism, which offered a striking new way of reading the Bible, one that focused attention squarely on the end-times. That scripture, The Scofield Reference Bible, would become the ur-text of American apocalyptic evangelicalism. But while the Scofield took hold in the United States, the belief system from which it emerged, Dispensationalism, was not primarily a homegrown American phenomenon. In The Americanization of the Apocalypse: Creating America's Own Bible Donald Harman Akenson examines the creation and spread of Dispensationalism. The story is a transnational one: created in southern Ireland by evangelical Anglicans, who were terrified by the rise of Catholicism, then transferred to England, where it was expanded upon and next carried to British North America by "Brethren" missionaries and then subsequently embraced by American evangelicals. Akenson combines a respect for individual human agency with an equal recognition of the complex and persuasive ideational system that apocalyptic Dispensationalism presented. For believers, the system explained the world and its future. For the wider culture, the product of this rich evolution was a series of concepts that became part of the everyday vocabulary of American life: end-times, apocalypse, Second Coming, Rapture, and millennium. The Americanization of the Apocalypse is the first book to document, using direct archival evidence, the invention of the epochal Scofield Reference Bible, and thus the provenance of modern American evangelicalism.

In June 1949 the Soviet state arrested seven farmers from the village of Bila Tserkva. Not wealthy or powerful, the men were unknown outside their community, and few had ever heard of their small, isolated village on the southwestern border of Soviet Ukraine. Nevertheless, the state decided they were dangerous traitors who threatened to undermine public order, and a regional court sentenced them to twenty-five years of imprisonment for treason. In To Make a Village Soviet Emily Baran explores why a powerful state singled out these individuals for removal from society. Bila Tserkva had to become a space in which Soviet laws and institutions reigned supreme, yet Sovietization was an aspiration as much it was a reality. The arrested men belonged to a small and misunderstood religious minority, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and both Witnesses and their neighbours challenged the government’s attempts to fully integrate the village into socialist society. Drawing from the case file and interviews with the families of survivors, Baran argues that what happened in Bila Tserkva demonstrates the sheer ambition of the state’s plans for the Sovietization of borderland communities. A compelling history, To Make a Village Soviet looks to Bila Tserkva to explore the power and the limits of state control – and the possibilities created by communities that resist assimilation.

Tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism dominated politics in nineteenth-century Canada, occasionally erupting into violence. While some liberal politicians and community leaders believed that equal treatment of Protestants and Catholics would defuse these ancient quarrels, other Protestant liberals perceived a battle for the soul of the nation. Protestant Liberty offers a new interpretation of nineteenth-century liberalism by re-examining the role of religion in Canadian politics. While this era’s liberal thought is often characterized as being neutral toward religion, James Forbes argues that the origins of Canadian liberalism were firmly rooted in the British tradition of Protestantism and were based on the premise of guarding against the advance of supposedly illiberal faiths, especially Catholicism. After the union of Upper Canada with predominantly French-Catholic Lower Canada in 1840, this Protestant ideal of liberty came into conflict with a more neutral alternative that sought to strip liberalism of its religious associations in order to appeal to Catholic voters and allies. In a decisive break from their Protestant heritage, these liberals redefined their ideology in secular-materialist terms by emphasizing free trade and private property over faith and culture. In tracing how the Confederation generation competed to establish a unifying vision for the nation, Protestant Liberty reveals religion and religious differences at the centre of this story.

As the first single-volume work to present a national picture of Baptist engagement with the fundamentalist movement in Canada in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism fills an important gap in the historiography. It explores the contributions of well-known fundamentalists, such as T. T. Shields, William "Bible Bill" Aberhart, and J. J. Sidey, while also introducing the reader to several lesser-known figures, including Joshua Denovan, E. J. Stobo, and T. A. Meister. Together, these studies demonstrate the diversity of the fundamentalist movement as it emerged and developed across Canada. By drawing on material from across the country, Canadian Baptist Fundamentalism addresses old themes in new ways--and, in the process, raises a variety of questions and possibilities for new avenues of study.

So how do I know what I am supposed to do with my life? I hear from my pastor and the things I read that God calls people to be pastors and missionaries. Some people even talk about being called to be a doctor or a teacher. I think I remember my mom saying she felt called to be a mom. But what am I supposed to do with my life? Has God actually called me to be a high school science teacher? Should I be looking for something else? How will I know if and when he does call me or is that just for people going into ministry, after all? Not Called draws on church history, the evolution of Western societal norms, and biblical revelation to answer these and other related questions in an effort to determine if calling, as it is understood today, retains the meaning it was intended to carry from the beginning. In addition to a biblical and historical assessment of the evolution of the concept, Not Called raises both cultural and practical challenges to the contemporary meaning and use of the concept which all but excludes Christians from a non-Western, first-world cultural context.