The Native American drive for self-governance is the most important civil rights struggle of our time - a struggle too often covered up. In Native Americans, The Mainline Church, and the Quest for Interracial Justice, David Phillips Hansen lays out the church's role in helping America heal its bleeding wounds of systemic oppression. While many believe the United States is a melting pot for all cultures, Hansen asserts the longest war in human history is the one Anglo-Christians have waged on Native Americans. Using faith as a weapon against the darkness of injustice, this book will change the way you view how we must solve the pressing problems of racism, poverty, environmental degradation, and violence, and it will remind you that faith can be the leaven of justice.

The Native American drive for self-governance is the most important civil rights struggle of our time - a struggle too often covered up. In Native Americans, The Mainline Church, and the Quest for Interracial Justice, David Phillips Hansen lays out the church's role in helping America heal its bleeding wounds of systemic oppression. While many believe the United States is a melting pot for all cultures, Hansen asserts the longest war in human history is the one Anglo-Christians have waged on Native Americans. Using faith as a weapon against the darkness of injustice, this book will change the way you view how we must solve the pressing problems of racism, poverty, environmental degradation, and violence, and it will remind you that faith can be the leaven of justice.

When the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement burst into dynamic action following the shooting death of young Michael Brown in the fall of 2014 in Ferguson, MO, a good number of clergy and lay leaders in greater St. Louis sprang to action and learned anew what it took to “put some feet to their prayers.” However, as improvisational efforts continued to rally and organize churches toward the enduring work of confronting the insidious violence of systemic social injustices in their own backyard, these religious leaders ran head-on into a familiar yet perplexing wall: the incapacity and unwillingness of their faith communities to respond. In many cases, the resistance was (and still is) fierce, eerily reminiscent of the stand-offs that divided religious communities and leadership in the 1960s Civil Rights era. If the Church’s teaching, learning, and practice of faith is purportedly transformative, then where was/is that faith when it was/is needed most? If good religious formation had been happening - or had it? - then why the enduring signs of indifference, paralysis, apathy, exasperation, resistance, symptoms of anesthetized moral consciousness and debilitated hope in the face of pervasive social-cultural violence? The answer may come in a searing indictment: that in an emerging cultural-religious era in which religious identity, expression, and experience are increasingly pluralistic, yet also politicized, polarizing, and racialized, Christian faith communities—even those of progressive theological persuasions—are still held under dominant cultural captivity, and fashioned by colonizing teaching strategies of “disimagination” – such that the stories (theologies) and rituals (practices) of the faith have effectively become obstacles that anesthetize moral agency and debilitate courageous action for hope and change. This book addresses the above practical concerns with three paradigmatic questions: 1. What does it mean to educate for faith in a world marked by violence? 2. How are Christian faith communities complicit in the teaching and learning of violence? 3. What renewed practices of faith and educational leadership yield potential for the unlearning and unmaking of violence? An organizing thesis drives the inquiry: Thinking and teaching for violence-resisting action as Christians requires an on-purpose setting of our hearts in a world that violates and harms with impunity. Against violent “disimagination”and its conscience-numbing instruments, Christian religious communities are being challenged to regenerate radical forms of prophetic, protested faith, the skills and instincts of which must be honed deliberately. This occurs through intentional and strategic forms of public consciousness raising for the sake of participation and action - an action that moves toward and is fueled by critical, insurrectional, resurrectional, hope.

Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics continues the Routledge Advances in the History of Bioethics series by exploring approaches to the bioethics of extinction from disparate disciplines, from literature, to social sciences, to history, to sustainability studies, to linguistics. Van Rensselaer Potter coined the phrase “Global Bioethics” to define human relationships with their contexts. This and subsequent volumes return to Potter’s founding vision from historical perspectives, and asks, how did we get here from then? Extinction can be understood in terms of an everlasting termination of shape, form, and function; however, until now life has gone on. Where would we humans be if the dinosaurs had not become extinct? And we still manage to communicate, only not in proto-Indo-European, but in a myriad of languages, some more common than others. The answer is simple, after extinction events, evolution continues. But will it always be so? Has the human race set planet earth on a collision course with nothingness? This volume explores areas of bioethical interpretation in relation to the complex concept of extinction.

Equipping pastors to address racism faithfully from the pulpit. Of all the activities that come with being a minister, sermon preparation can loom largest - especially when racism is the subject. You've got to address racism with your white congregation from the pulpit. But, truthfully, you can't wrap your head around how to preach about this topic thoughtfully and sensitively. In Preaching about Racism, preaching professor and pastor Carolyn Helsel speaks directly to other faith leaders about how to address racism from the pulpit. In her first book, Anxious to Talk about It: Helping White Christians Talk Faithfully about Racism, Helsel addressed the anxiety white Christians experience around conversations about race. In this follow-up, Helsel provides strategies and a theoretical framework for crafting biblical and theological sermons that incorporate insights from social sciences and psychology, gleaned from more than a decade of writing and teaching about racism. Written for the busy pastor, several chapters are quick reads - helpful reminders as you prepare a thoughtful and sensitive sermon - while others dig deeper on the theory behind the crucial work of dismantling racism.

A mix of thematic essays, reference entries, and primary source documents covering the role of religion in American history and life from the colonial era to the present. Often controversial, religion has been an important force in shaping American culture. Religious convictions strongly influenced colonial and state governments as well as the United States as a new republic. Religious teachings, values, and practices deeply affected political structures and policies, economic ideology and practice, educational institutions and instruction, social norms and customs, marriage, and family life. By analyzing religion's interaction with American culture and prominent religious leaders and ideologies, this reference helps readers to better understand many fascinating, often controversial, religious leaders, ideas, events, and topics. The work is organized in three volumes devoted to particular periods. Volume one includes a chronology highlighting key events related to religion in American history and an introduction that overviews religion in America during the period covered by the volume, and roughly 10 essays that explore significant themes. These essays are followed by approximately 120 alphabetically arranged reference entries providing objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion in America. Each volume presents nearly 50 primary source documents, each introduced by a contextualizing headnote. A selected, general bibliography closes volume three.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A meditation on sense-making when there’s no sense to be made, on letting go when we can’t hold on, and on being unafraid even when we’re terrified.”—Lucy Kalanithi “Belongs on the shelf alongside other terrific books about this difficult subject, like Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal.”—Bill Gates NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY REAL SIMPLE Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God’s disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward “blessing.” She is thriving in her job, married to her high school sweetheart, and loves life with her newborn son. Then she is diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. The prospect of her own mortality forces Kate to realize that she has been tacitly subscribing to the prosperity gospel, living with the conviction that she can control the shape of her life with “a surge of determination.” Even as this type of Christianity celebrates the American can-do spirit, it implies that if you “can’t do” and succumb to illness or misfortune, you are a failure. Kate is very sick, and no amount of positive thinking will shrink her tumors. What does it mean to die, she wonders, in a society that insists everything happens for a reason? Kate is stripped of this certainty only to discover that without it, life is hard but beautiful in a way it never has been before. Frank and funny, dark and wise, Kate Bowler pulls the reader deeply into her life in an account she populates affectionately with a colorful, often hilarious retinue of friends, mega-church preachers, relatives, and doctors. Everything Happens for a Reason tells her story, offering up her irreverent, hard-won observations on dying and the ways it has taught her to live. Praise for Everything Happens for a Reason “I fell hard and fast for Kate Bowler. Her writing is naked, elegant, and gripping—she’s like a Christian Joan Didion. I left Kate’s story feeling more present, more grateful, and a hell of a lot less alone. And what else is art for?”—Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love Warrior and president of Together Rising