Showing titles in Fundamentalism

Defying both civil authorities and the Mormon establishment in Salt Lake City, the renegade leaders of these Taliban-like theocracies are zealots who answer only to God; some 40,000 people still practice polygamy in these communities. At the core of Krakauer’s book are brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, who insist they received a commandment from God to kill a blameless woman and her baby girl. Beginning with a meticulously researched account of this appalling double murder, Krakauer constructs a bone-chilling narrative of messianic delusion, polygamy, savage violence, and unyielding faith.

I was a rising star in the Seventh-day Adventist world—until I wasn’t. As a first-generation Adventist, no one expected much from me. But when I walked away from multiple degrees to serve as a volunteer missionary, I became something of an anomaly. While others raised funds for their missions, I refused to take money to do the Lord’s work. I poured everything I had into serving, traveling and living in Ukraine, Egypt, and the Washington Coast. Questioning Adventism never crossed my mind—we weren’t supposed to. Then one day, everything unraveled. A fringe offshoot of the church ...

Christianity believes every religion, faith and religious organization — aside from Christianity - is a cult. In actuality, by its very definition, every religion is a cult, including the religion — the cult - of Christianity. In his bold, yet controversial new book, The Cult of Christianity, Mike Williams takes on the religious dogmas, oral traditions, borrowed myths and outright lies that make up so much of what Christians believe, and from which they need to be freed.

Fundamentalism and American Culture has long been considered a classic in religious history, and to this day remains unsurpassed. Now available in a new edition, this highly regarded analysis takes us through the full history of the origin and direction of one of America's most influential religious movements.

Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside the C Street House, the Fellowship residence known simply by its Washington, D.C., address. The house has lately been the scene of notorious political scandal, but more crucially, it is home to efforts to transform the very fabric of American democracy. And now, after laying bare its tenants' past in The Family, Sharlet reports from deep within fundamentalism in today's world.

A “funny, gently touching, and brutally honest” memoir, I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation is a story about how to adjust when you realize that your life is built on false beliefs. In the 1990s, Evangelical culture was an outrageous mishmash of Christian ska concerts, sexual abstinence pledges, and mega-church worship services. Thrust into Christian leadership in his youth, Tim Mathis built his entire life around that sort of thing. By his twenties, religion provided his career path, his identity, and a tight-knit social circle of priests, missionaries, and evangelists. His only...

Brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty insist they were commanded to kill by God. In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer's investigation is a meticulously researched, bone-chilling narrative of polygamy, savage violence and unyielding faith: an incisive look inside isolated Mormon Fundamentalist communities in America, this gripping work of non-fiction illuminates an otherwise confounding realm of human behaviour.

What do we really know about modern practicing polygamists - not fictional ones like the Henrickson family on HBO’s Big Love? We’ve seen the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the news, the underage brides in pioneer dresses on a Texas ranch. But the FLDS is just one of many groups that have broken with mainstream Mormonism to follow those parts of Joseph Smith’s doctrine disavowed by the LDS Church. Gaining unprecedented access to these communities, journalist Sanjiv Bhattacharya reveals a shadow country....

In the late fall of 1095, Pope Urban II gave a speech in Clermont, France, and set all of Europe into motion. As many as 150,000 people eventually responded to the call, leaving everything they knew behind to undertake what appeared to be a fool's mission: marching several thousand miles into enemy territory to reconquer Jerusalem for Christendom.

Benjamin L. Corey thought he was suffering a crisis of faith, but it turned out to be a spiritual awakening. Corey became aware that the constant fear of hell and judgment that defined his Christian faith was out of sync with the idea that God acts from love and promises to deliver us from fear. In the wake of this realization came newfound insights - from reading the Bible to reexamining American life and the church's role in the wider world.

Almost lost over the centuries, the Book of Jubilees was retrieved from the Ethiopic language, translated into English by R. H. Charles, and was recently found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. It repeats the events of Genesis and Exodus from Creation to the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt. It recounts the events in sets of jubilees (sets of 49 years) and gives additional details such as the fall of the angels, and the creation and destruction of the Nephilim.

The story of five best-selling novels beloved by evangelicals, the book industry they built, and the collective imagination they shaped. Who are evangelicals? And what is evangelicalism? Those attempting to answer these questions usually speak in terms of political and theological stances. But those stances emerge from an evangelical world with its own institutions - institutions that shape imagination as much as they shape ideology.

In 2009, the Good News Club came to the public elementary school where journalist Katherine Stewart sent her children. The Club, which is sponsored by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, bills itself as an after-school program of "Bible study." But Stewart soon discovered that the Club's real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their "unchurched" peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.

A priest, a scientist, and a psychologist walk into a bar. This isn’t the beginning of a joke. It’s the start of a long-overdue conversation about how mainstream religion has handed down a God that only a sadomasochist could love.

When police raided the Short Creek compound of the Fundamental Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1953, it soon became a political and publicity nightmare and eventually cost the governor of Arizona his job. From that point on, skittish public officials allowed the polygamist sect to practice its tenants unmolested for the next 50 years and turned a blind eye to child abandonment, kidnapping, statutory rape, incest, and massive tax and welfare fraud. But then Warren Jeffs, a new FLDS prophet, escalated the sect’s crimes to near madness.

Evangelical Theology: Audio Lectures, a companion to the textbook Evangelical Theology, presents systematic theology from the unique perspective of a biblical scholar. Author and scholar Michael Bird contends that the center, unity, and boundary of the evangelical faith is the evangel, or gospel, as opposed to doctrines like justification by faith or inerrancy.

A third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah had devoted her life to sounding God's warning of impending Armageddon. She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. Here, she had some distance from her community for the first time. Immersion in a foreign language and culture - and a whole new way of thinking - turned her world upside down, and eventually led her to lose all that she had been sure was true.

In the late 20th century, fundamentalism has emerged as one of the most powerful forces at work in the world, contesting the dominance of modern secular values and threatening peace and harmony around the globe. Yet it remains incomprehensible to a large number of people. In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong brilliantly and sympathetically shows us how and why fundamentalist groups came into existence and what they yearn to accomplish.

The revealing and inspiring memoir of a woman forced into polygamous marriage in FLDS Church and her brave struggle to protect others from the same fate. Rebecca Musser grew up in fear, concealing her family's polygamous lifestyle from the "dangerous" outside world. Covered head-to-toe in strict, modest clothing, she received a rigorous education at Alta Academy, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' school headed by Warren Jeffs.

These truths will come alive in your studies and excite you with fundamental principles of holiness as taught in the Scriptures.