How do Christians make relationships with land central to their faith? How have the realities of materiality, geography, and ecology shaped Christian territories of belonging and theologies of territory? What social-economic-political conditions surround exchanges between religion and nature? This book explores how Christianity intersects with nature to create unique religious landscapes. Case studies range from the Mormon Trail across the USA completed by thousands every year, to the Catholic devotional cult of and shrine to St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Contributors examine the entangled forms of agency between nature and culture that are at work as Christians produce, consume, experience, imagine, inhabit, manage, and struggle over formations of land. Focusing on Christian engagements with land forms in the early 21st century, this book advances the spatial turn in the study of religion, contributes to the anthropology of religion and the study of global Christianities, as well as our understanding of the relationship between Christianity, space and place.

John Charles Ryle became the undisputed leader and spokesman of the evangelical party within the Church of England in the last half of the nineteenth century, and his works continue to be read by evangelicals of various denominational stripes more than a century after his death. Accordingly, he is often portrayed as "an old soldier" of a heroic cause. While this view of Ryle holds some merit, it often obscures the complexity and dynamism of a most remarkable man. In this intellectual biography, Bennett Wade Rogers analyzes the complicated life and times of a man variously described as traditional, moderate, and even radical during his fifty-eight-year ministry. Ryle began his ministerial career as a rural parish priest; he ended it as a bishop of the second city of the British Empire. In the time between, he became a popular preacher, influential author, effective controversialist, recognized party leader, stalwart church defender, and radical church reformer. Table of Contents: 1. Christian and Clergyman 2. Preacher 3. Pastor 4. Controversialist 5. A National Ministry 6. Bishop 7. Who Was J. C. Ryle?

Over the course of nearly forty-five years of pastoral ministry, Octavius Winslow (1808–1878) effectively demonstrated the practice of applying doctrine to life through his experimental preaching. In Heart to Heart: Octavius Winslow’s Experimental Preaching , Tanner G. Turley surveys Winslow’s life and ministry and demonstrates how a strong theology of preaching provided the foundation for his preaching methodology. Turley highlights the doctrinal precision and Christological focus of Winslow’s preaching, revealing an aim at holistic change in hearers through the use of application, discrimination, inquiry, illustration, exhortation, and persuasion. By introducing us to this influential preacher of the past, this study shows the significance of Winslow’s homiletic for the church of today. Table of Contents: 1. Life and Ministry 2. Theology and Method of Preaching 3. Preaching Grounded in Doctrine 4. Preaching Centered in Christ 5. Theory and Practice 6. Contemporary Significance Appendix 1: Sermon on Psalm 130:3 Appendix 2: Sermon on Galatians 2:20 Appendix 3: Annotated Bibliography of Winslow’s Works