God seeks devoted soldiers to be in His army--men and women who are "on fire" for the Lord, standing for Christ before a wicked world. This is a study for mature Christians who want to get serious about their walk with God as effective and confident soldiers in God's army. It's for those who want to equip themselves for spiritual battle and stand in the gap in a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to God. Written in a militaristic boot-camp, army-training style, Soldiers for Christ is a how-to guide for becoming a ready and capable soldier of Jesus Christ. Sarah's scripture-saturated narrative includes lessons about trusting and obeying God in the midst of battle, identifying the enemy, leveraging the whole armor of God, waiting on the Lord, and more. Now, more than ever, we need Christian soldiers prepared for the battle. It is time to get serious about our walk with God. It is time to be on fire for God!

She reconstructs popular attitudes about such issues as original sin, free will, purgatory, the devil, the sacraments, and the magical arts.

A retrospective look at Alberta's Prairie Bible Institute and the influence of American fundamentalism on the school's teachings.

Completely revised and updated, this new edition incorporates the events of September 11, 2001 into Mark Juergensmeyer's landmark study of religious terrorism.

Throughout the history of the church, many excellent books have been written addressing the theological significance of Christian identity. Such works have delineated important doctrines such as adoption, justification, and sanctification. While these studies of being "in Christ" have been fruitful, and numerous, they have often neglected one of the most useful tools in understanding Christian identity, namely, the use of metaphor. A search of Scripture reveals that Jesus and his apostles frequently utilized images from everyday life to illustrate spiritual truths about our identity. In this fresh work, Knowing Who You Are invites the reader to explore eight lesser-known images of Christian identity found in the New Testament. Among others, the author investigates how being a Christian is like being a boxer in ancient Corinth, a citizen in Philippi, a farmer in Galilee, and a sheep in a flock. This engaging assessment of first-century images will draw the reader in and leave them challenged, encouraged, and often surprised as they discover afresh what it means to be "Christian."

Written across the disciplines of law, literature, philosophy, and theology, this volume represents wide-ranging approaches to and understandings of evil and wickedness. Consisting of three sections - Grappling with Evil, Justice, Responsibility, and War and Blame, Murder, and Retributivism, - all the essays are inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary in focus.

This book carries an ethnographic signature in approach and style, and is an examination of a small Brooklyn, New York, African-American, Pentecostal church congregation and is based on ethnographic notes taken over the course of four years. The Pentecostal Church is known to outsiders almost exclusively for its members’ “bizarre” habit of speaking in tongues. This ethnography, however, puts those outsiders inside the church pews, as it paints a portrait of piety, compassion, caring, love—all embraced through an embodiment perspective, as the church’s members experience these forces in the most personal ways through religious conversion. Central themes include concerns with the notion of “spectacle” because of the grand bodily display that is highlighted by spiritual struggle, social aspiration, punishment and spontaneous explosions of a variety of emotions in the public sphere. The approach to sociology throughout this work incorporates the striking dialectic of history and biography to penetrate and interact with religiously inspired residents of the inner-city in a quest to make sense both empirically and theoretically of this rapidly changing, surprising and highly contradictory late-modern church scene. The focus on the individual process of becoming Pentecostal provides a road map into the church and canvasses an intimate view into the lives of its members, capturing their stories as they proceed in their Pentecostal careers. This book challenges important sociological concepts like crisis to explain religious seekership and conversion, while developing new concepts such as “God Hunting” and “Holy Ghost Capital” to explain the process through which individuals become tongue-speaking Pentecostals. Church members acquire “Holy Ghost Capital” and construct a Pentecostal identity through a relationship narrative to establish personal status and power through conflicting tongue-speaking ideas. Finally, this book examines the futures of the small and large, institutionally affiliated Pentecostal Church and argues that the small Pentecostal Church is better able to resist modern rationalizing forces, retaining the charisma that sparked the initial religious movement. The power of charisma in the small church has far-reaching consequences and implications for the future of Pentecostalism and its followers.