One of the most significant developments within contemporary American Christianity, especially among younger evangelicals, is a groundswell of interest in the Reformed tradition. In Reformed Resurgence, Brad Vermurlen provides a comprehensive sociological account of this phenomenon--known as New Calvinism--and what it entails for the broader evangelical landscape in the United States. Vermurlen develops a new theory for understanding how conservative religion can be strong and thrive in the hypermodern Western world. His paradigm uses and expands on strategic action field theory, a recent framework proposed for the study of movements and organizations that has rarely been applied to religion. This approach to religion moves beyond market dynamics and cultural happenstance and instead shows how religious strength can be fought for and won as the direct result of religious leaders' strategic actions and conflicts. But the battle comes at a cost. For the same reasons conservative Calvinistic belief is experiencing a resurgence, present-day American evangelicalism has turned in on itself. Vermurlen argues that in the end, evangelicalism in the United States consists of pockets of subcultural and local strength within the "cultural entropy" of secularization, as religious meanings and coherence fall apart.

This book examines the lives of two leading Irish ecclesiastics, James Ussher (1581-1656) and John Bramhall (1594-1663). Both men were key players in the religious struggles that shook the British Isles during the first half of the seventeenth century, and their lives and works provide important insights into the ecclesiastical history of early modern Europe. As well as charting the careers of Ussher and Bramhall, this study introduces an original and revealing method for examining post-Reformation religion. Arguing that the Reformation was stimulated by religious impulses that pre-date Christianity, it introduces a biblical concept of 'Justice' and 'Numinous' motifs to provide a unique perspective on ecclesiastical development. Put simply, these motifs represent on the one hand, the fear of God's judgement, and on the other, the sacred conception of the fear of God. These subtle understandings that co-existed in the Catholic church were split apart at the Reformation and proved to be separate poles around which different interpretations of Protestantism gathered. By applying these looser concepts to Ussher and Bramhall, rather than rigid labels such as Arminian, Laudian or Calvinist, a more subtle understanding of their careers is possible, and provides an altogether more satisfactory method of denominational categorisation than the ones presently employed, not just for the British churches but for the history of the Reformation as a whole.