Subduing Satan

The Praying South and the Fighting South are two of our most popular images of white southern culture. In Subduing Satan, Ted Ownby details the tensions between these complex--and often opposing--attitudes. "Ownby's re-creation of male recreation is rich and fascinating. He paints the saloon and the street, the cockfighting and dogfighting rings as realms of distinctly male vices, enjoyed lustily by men seeking to escape the sweet virtue of the Southern Christian home.--Nation "A bold new thesis. . . . [Ownby] gives us guideposts in the ongoing search for the meaning of southern history.--Journal of Southern History "I suspect that for many years ahead Ted Ownby's Subduing Satan will serve as the standard guide on how to write religious social history.--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida "This is one of the freshest and most interesting books written about the American South in years. By focusing on the cultural conflicts of everyday life, Ownby gets us right to the heart of white culture in the South between Reconstruction and the 1920s.--Edward L. Ayers, University of Virginia

This issue of The Ministry of the Word contains the first eight of the sixteen messages given during the fall 2021 term of the full-time training in Anaheim, California. The general subject of this series of messages is "Chapters Five through Eight of Romans--the Kernel of the Bible." These first eight messages and the subsequent eight messages (published in an upcoming issue) will focus on Romans 5 and 6. This general subject will then be continued in the messages of the spring 2022 term and will focus on Romans 7 and 8. The life and death form two contrasting lines in chapters 5 through 8, showing that man is at the center of a triangular situation between God and Satan, that is, between life and death. The tree of life and the tree of knowledge (the tree of death) issue in two lines--the line of life and the line of death--that run through the entire Bible and consummate in the book of Revelation. The line of life begins with the tree of life in Genesis 2 and issues in the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22 as the city of the water of life with the tree of life, the light of life, and the glory of life. Similarly, the line of death begins with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2 and ends with the lake of fire in Revelation 20. The kernel of the Bible is that Christ has been revealed into us as life and that we live, have our being, and exist by Christ as the divine life. God put us into Christ with the desire that we would be transformed and conformed to the image of His Son so that we might be thoroughly one with Christ. In this way we are built up together as the living Body of Christ to contain and express Christ for the Father's glory and for our glorification in Christ. Romans 5 reveals that the result of our justification is the full enjoyment of God in Christ as our life.

As the nineteenth century ended in Hunt County, Texas, a way of life was dying. The tightly knit, fiercely independent society of the yeomen farmers--"plain folk," as historians have often dubbed them--was being swallowed up by the rising tide of a rapidly changing, cotton-based economy. A social network based on family, religion, and community was falling prey to crippling debt and resulting loss of land ownership. For many of the rural people of Hunt County and similar places, it seemed like the end of the world. In Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists historian Kyle G. Wilkison analyzes the patterns of plain-folk life and the changes that occurred during the critical four decades spanning the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Political protest evolved in the wake of the devastating losses experienced by the poor rural majority, and Wilkison carefully explores the interplay of religion and politics as Greenbackers, Populists, and Socialists vied for the support of the dispossessed tenant farmers and sharecroppers. With its richly drawn contextualization and analysis of the causes and effects of the epochal shifts in plain-folk society, Kyle G. Wilkison's Yeomen, Sharecroppers, and Socialists will reward students and scholars in economic, regional, and agricultural history.

In Life-study of Romans, Witness Lee opens up the gospel of God according to the apostle Paul. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John reveal Christ in the flesh as He lived among us and carried out God’s judicial redemption through His death on the cross. The gospel in Romans concerns Christ in resurrection indwelling us as the Spirit to carry out God’s organic salvation. This complete salvation of God is for the producing of the church as the organic Body of Christ, and this one, universal Body of Christ is expressed as the many local churches. Romans is an all-inclusive book, a summary both of the Christian life and of the church life, and this life-study unlocks its riches for the practical experience of the believers unto the building up of the Body of Christ.

Religion has always been crucial to the cultural identity of the South. Religion in the Contemporary South is the first book to fully address the emerging religious pluralism in the South today.

At a public picnic in the South in the 1890s, a young man paid five cents for his first chance to hear the revolutionary Edison talking machine. He eagerly listened as the soundman placed the needle down, only to find that through the tubes he held to his ears came the chilling sounds of a lynching. In this story, with its blend of new technology and old hatreds, genteel picnics and mob violence, Edward Ayers captures the history of the South in the years between Reconstruction and the turn of the century. Ranging from the Georgia coast to the Tennessee mountains, from the power brokers to tenant farmers, Ayers depicts a land of startling contrasts. Ayers takes us from remote Southern towns, revolutionized by the spread of the railroads, to the statehouses where Democratic Redeemers swept away the legacy of Reconstruction; from the small farmers, trapped into growing nothing but cotton, to the new industries of Birmingham; from abuse and intimacy in the family to tumultuous public meetings of the prohibitionists. He explores every aspect of society, politics, and the economy, detailing the importance of each in the emerging New South. Central to the entire story is the role of race relations, from alliances and friendships between blacks and whites to the spread of Jim Crows laws and disfranchisement. The teeming nineteenth-century South comes to life in these pages. When this book first appeared in 1992, it won a broad array of prizes and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. The citation for the National Book Award declared Promise of the New South a vivid and masterfully detailed picture of the evolution of a new society. The Atlantic called it "one of the broadest and most original interpretations of southern history of the past twenty years.