Stephens, which explores the rise and reputation of Jones and the reception of his book.

Samuel Porter Jones (1847–1906)—“or just plain Sam Jones,” as he preferred to be called—was the foremost southern evangelist of the nineteenth century. With his high-spirited, often coarse, humor and his hyperbolic style, he excited audiences around the country and became a key influence on Billy Sunday, “Gypsy” Smith, and scores of lesser known evangelists. A leading political activist, he played an important role in the selling of a new industrialized South and was thus a clerical counterpart to his friend Henry Grady. In Laughter in the Amen Corner, the first scholarly biography of Jones, Kathleen Minnix reveals a figure of fascinating contradictions. Jones was an alcoholic who became a pivotal supporter of the prohibition movement. He advocated women's rights when most men preferred to keep women on pedestals, yet he followed the South in its drift towards malignant racism. He praised Catholics in an age that feared the “Romish heresy,” and he embraced Jews as fellow children of God when many saw them as Christ-killers. Even so, he was shrill in his insistence that Americans worship a Protestant God, and like many nativists, he called for the deportation of the “trash” who had landed at Ellis Island. Progressive in some respects and reactionary in others, he was, in the words of one contemporary, “a sanctified circus in full swing.” Deftly written and exhaustively researched, Laughter in the Amen Corner offers the first in-depth assessment of Sam Jones's impact on revivalism, the progressive movement, and the history of the South.

“In Jesus’ Name” tells the story of the third stream of Pentecostalism, which emerged during the formative years of the Pentecostal Revival. This is the first comprehensive study of the origins, history and theology of Oneness Pentecostalism, the heterodox movement expelled from the Assemblies of God in 1916 for its rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity and insistence on water baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Reed traces the movement, now estimated at 14 million world wide, to its Pietist and Evangelical roots. Its distinctive doctrine is a radical trajectory of a christocentric reaction that had already begun in early Pentecostalism. Reed’s study shows the inadequacy of the label of heresy in light of its thoroughgoing Pentecostal identity and theology of the Name of God. This title was granted the PNEUMA award for 2009.

This book examines the immensely popular turn-of-the-twentieth-century big tent revivals. By showing how these revivals combined the Protestant ethic of salvation with the emerging consumer ethos, McMullen sheds light on the way in which the United States became the most consumer-driven and yet one of the most religious societies in the western world.