Modern Christianity

Christianity and cultural aspirations are inevitably in tension: the combination invites a suspicion that temporal pursuits have slackened a quest for divine approbation. Nevertheless, as Christians generally believe that worldly success may be a position of influence worth seeking for noble reasons, it is truly an area of tension, rather than merely temptation. This volume explores this lively juxtaposition in the context of modern Britain and America. In fifteen original essays, a range of well-respected scholars examine the cultural aspirations of a broad spectrum of Christians, including Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, and Anglicans, as they were expressed in arenas as diverse as politics, education, arthitecture, and sport.

Religions teach their adherents how to see and feel at the same time; learning to see is not a disembodied process but one hammered from the forge of human need, social relations, and material practice. David Morgan argues that the history of religions may therefore be studied through the lens of their salient visual themes. The Forge of Vision tells the history of Christianity from the sixteenth century through the present by selecting the visual themes of faith that have profoundly influenced its development. After exploring how distinctive Catholic and Protestant visual cultures emerged in the early modern period, Morgan examines a variety of Christian visual practices, ranging from the imagination, visions of nationhood, the likeness of Jesus, the material life of words, and the role of modern art as a spiritual quest, to the importance of images for education, devotion, worship, and domestic life. An insightful, informed presentation of how Christianity has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, this work is a must-read for scholars and students across fields of religious studies, history, and art history.

The issues that these authors address in this book are some of the most salient in American society. It is imperative that Americans today address these issues and establish an appropriate world view. There is little question that how people resolve these issues will have a long-lasting impact on the future of civilization.

Many Christians today tend to view the story of medieval faith as a cautionary tale. Too often, they dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of corruption and decay in the church. They seem to assume that the church apostatized from true Christianity after it gained cultural influence in the time of Constantine, and the faith was only later recovered by the sixteenth-century Reformers or even the eighteenth-century revivalists. As a result, the riches and wisdom of the medieval period have remained largely inaccessible to modern Protestants. Church historian Chris Armstrong helps readers see beyond modern caricatures of the medieval church to the animating Christian spirit of that age. He believes today's church could learn a number of lessons from medieval faith, such as how the gospel speaks to ordinary, embodied human life in this world. Medieval Wisdom for Modern Christians explores key ideas, figures, and movements from the Middle Ages in conversation with C. S. Lewis and other thinkers, helping contemporary Christians discover authentic faith and renewal in a forgotten age.

Peter Kreeft believes that Blaise Pascal is the first post-medieval apologist. No writer in history, claims Kreeft, is a more effective Christian apologist and evangelist to today's uprooted, confused, secularized pagans (inside and outside the Church) than Pascal. He was a brilliant man--a great scientist who did major work in physics and mathematics, as well as an inventor--whom Kreeft thinks was three centuries ahead of his time. His apologetics found in his Pens褳 are ideal for the modern, sophisticated skeptic. Kreeft has selected the parts of Pascal's Pens褳 which best respond to the needs of modern man, and offers his own comments on applying Pascal's wisdom to today's problems. Addressed to modern skeptics and unbelievers, as well as to modern Christians for apologetics and self-examination, Pascal and Kreeft combine to provide a powerful witness to Christian truth.

The roots of an insidious Religious Humanism have for some time now steadily been growing deeper and deeper and taking a firm hold in the modern Christian Church in America and across the world. The lethality of this rooting is that Religious Humanism is filled with false teachings which are historically known as heresies.

“Modern Christianity in the Holy Land” is a modest contribution to the documentation of the history of our country. In the nineteenth century, the structure of the Churches underwent change. Christian institutions developed in the light of the Ottoman Firmans and the international relations forged by the Ottoman Sultanate. At that time, the systems of the millet, capitulation, international interests and the Eastern Question were all interlocked in successive and complex developments in the Ottoman world. Changes to the structure of the Churches had local and international dimensions, which need to be understood to comprehend the realities governing present-day Christianity. At a local level, the first law governing the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate was promulgated and the Orthodox Arab issue surfaced. Moreover, the Latin Patriarchate was re-established and the Anglican Bishopric was formed. Most of these events occurred in Jerusalem and their consequences necessarily extended to the various parts of Palestine and Jordan. This history is not restricted to the Churches and the study touches on public, political, social and economic life, Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations, the history of the clans and ethnic groups, the ties that neighboring countries forged with the Holy Land, and the pilgrimage to the Holy Places. This pilgrimage is one of the most prominent features of the Holy Land. Indeed, the Lord has blessed this land and chosen it from everywhere else in the world for his great monotheistic revelations as God, Allah, Elohim. The sources and references of this book are diverse in terms of color, language and roots. One moment they take the reader to Jerusalem, Karak, Nazareth, and Salt and at other times to Istanbul, Rome, London and Moscow.