Studies In Church History

In their acclaimed, much-used Church History, James Bradley and Richard Muller lay out guidelines, methods, and basic reference tools for research and writing in the fields of church history and historical theology. Over the years, this book has helped countless students define their topics, locate relevant source materials, and write quality papers. This revised, expanded, and updated second edition includes discussion of Internet-based research, digitized texts, and the electronic forms of research tools. The greatly enlarged bibliography of study aids now includes many significant new resources that have become available since the first edition's publication in 1995. Accessible and clear, this introduction will continue to benefit both students and experienced scholars in the field.

January 1977

Brings together the work of a wide range of scholars to explore the history of churches and education.

A master historian traces the flourishing of organized religion in Manhattan between the 1880s and the 1960s, revealing how faith adapted and thrived in the supposed capital of American secularism. In Gilded Age Manhattan, Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant leaders agonized over the fate of traditional religious practice amid chaotic and multiplying pluralism. Massive immigration, the anonymity of urban life, and modernity's rationalism, bureaucratization, and professionalization seemingly eviscerated the sense of religious community. Yet fears of religion's demise were dramatically overblown. Jon Butler finds a spiritual hothouse in the supposed capital of American secularism. By the 1950s Manhattan was full of the sacred. Catholics, Jews, and Protestants peppered the borough with sanctuaries great and small. Manhattan became a center of religious publishing and broadcasting and was home to august spiritual reformers from Reinhold Niebuhr to Abraham Heschel, Dorothy Day, and Norman Vincent Peale. A host of white nontraditional groups met in midtown hotels, while black worshippers gathered in Harlem's storefront churches. Though denied the ministry almost everywhere, women shaped the lived religion of congregations, founded missionary societies, and, in organizations such as the Zionist Hadassah, fused spirituality and political activism. And after 1945, when Manhattan's young families rushed to New Jersey and Long Island's booming suburbs, they recreated the religious institutions that had shaped their youth. God in Gotham portrays a city where people of faith engaged modernity rather than floundered in it. Far from the world of "disenchantment" that sociologist Max Weber bemoaned, modern Manhattan actually birthed an urban spiritual landscape of unparalleled breadth, suggesting that modernity enabled rather than crippled religion in America well into the 1960s.

Chadwickʹs Early Church covers, as the book cover suggests, "the story of emergent Christianity from the apostolic age to the dividing of the ways between the Greek East and the Latin West." The story unfolds with the Jewish and Roman background within which the beginning church was nourished. It then goes on to show how important it is for the church to establish order and unity amidst threats of persecution and heresy. The emergence of apologists helps not only the expansion of the church but also the construction of Christian doctrine. At the same time, controversies abound as the church encountered many different cultural and sociological challenges while trying out in reaction a variety of ideas. With chapter seven, the relation between church and state changes, resulting in a stronger influence of the state upon the church while accelerating the split between the Latin West and the Greek East. The Arian controversy shows a period of instability between state and church, and also deepens the split of East and West. But within the turmoil, ascetic practice, papacy, liturgy, and art are established, helping to transmit a common European culture while the Roman Empire begins to degenerate.

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