George Bell remains one of only a handful of twentieth-century English bishops to possess a continuing international reputation for his involvement in political affairs. His insistence that Christian faith required active participation in public life, at home and abroad, established an eminent, and often provocative, contribution to Christian ethics at large. Bell's participation in the tragic history of the German resistance against Hitler has earned him an enduring place in the historiography of the Third Reich; his February 1944 speech protesting against the obliteration bombing of Germany, made in the House of Lords, is still often considered one of the great prophetic speeches of the twentieth century. Throughout his long career, Bell became a leading light in the burgeoning ecumenical movement, a supporter of refugees from dictatorships of all kinds, a committed internationalist and a patron of the Arts. This book draws together the work of leading international historians and theologians, including Rowan Williams, and makes an important contribution to a range of ongoing political, ecumenical and international debates.

Transforming Faith Communities draws upon a model for the church that combines congregationalism with a constructive approach to church-state relationships within a vision for a renewed Christendom, commended as a viable option for Christian missionin the twenty-first-century world. Michael Ian Bochenski uses two movements to make his case: sixteenth-century Anabaptism and late twentieth-century Latin American liberation theology. Each movement is held up as a mirror to the other in a vision for the transformation of church and society that resonates powerfully with contemporary culture. Outlining the development of radical religious communities, Bochenski examines some of the factors that create world-affirming Christian faith communities, and explores many examples of effective and constructive engagement with church and society across the centuries.

This is a scholarly treatment of 19th century Christianity which discusses the subject in a global context. It analyses the responses of the church to European modernity, the relationship between church and nationalism and the expansion as it responded to European colonialism.--Résumé de l'éditeur.

Indexes the Times, Sunday times and magazine, Times literary supplement, Times educational supplement, Times educational supplement Scotland, and the Times higher education supplement.

During the colonial period, Africans told each other terrifying rumors that Africans who worked for white colonists captured unwary residents and took their blood. In colonial Tanganyika, for example, Africans were said to be captured by these agents of colonialism and hung upside down, their throats cut so their blood drained into huge buckets. In Kampala, the police were said to abduct Africans and keep them in pits, where their blood was sucked. Luise White presents and interprets vampire stories from East and Central Africa as a way of understanding the world as the storytellers did. Using gossip and rumor as historical sources in their own right, she assesses the place of such evidence, oral and written, in historical reconstruction. White conducted more than 130 interviews for this book and did research in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In addition to presenting powerful, vivid stories that Africans told to describe colonial power, the book presents an original epistemological inquiry into the nature of historical truth and memory, and into their relationship to the writing of history.