This edited volume explores the intersection of spirituality with childbirth from 1800 to the present day from a comparative perspective. It illustrates how over this time period in much of the world, traditional practices, home births, and midwives have been overshadowed and undermined by male dominated obstetrics, hospitalization, and ultimately the medicalization of the birthing process itself.

*Secular Societies, Spiritual Selves?*is the first volume to address the gendered intersections of religion, spirituality and the secular through an ethnographic approach.The book examines how ‘spirituality’ has emerged as a relatively ‘silent’ category with which people often signal that they are looking for a way to navigate between the categories of the religious and the secular, and considers how this is related to gendered ways of being and relating. Using a lived religion app...

This book explores the entanglements of gender and power in spiritual practices and analyzes strategies used by spiritual practitioners to attain what to social scientists might seem an impossible goal: creating spiritual communities without creating gendered hierarchies.What strategies do people within these networks use to attain gender equality and gendered empowerment? How do they try to protect and develop individual freedom? How do gender and power nevertheless play a role? T...

In 2001, Kathy Baldock, a straight conservative evangelical Christian, met Netto Montoya, a lesbian Native American, on a local hiking trail near her home in the Sierra Nevada. Their developing friendship challenged Baldock’s cultural and religious beliefs about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.In Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach Between the Church and the LGBT Community, Baldock constructs a narrative timeline, including fascinating storie...

Winner of the Distinguished Book Award from American Sociology Association Sociology of Religion Section Winner of the Richard Kalish Best Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America Few things are more likely to cause heartache to devout parents than seeing their child leave the faith. And it seems, from media portrayals, that this is happening more and more frequently. But is religious change between generations common? How does religion get passed down ...

Updated in 2020. Understanding Revival and Addressing The Issues It Provokes guides us through centuries of God’s Divine visitations and reveals what we can expect to see, as God rends the heavens and pours out His Spirit. Read about revivals from the Bible and Church history, Divine paradoxes and times of solemn commotion – revived Christians, saved communities, churches on fire and transformed nations.What happens in true heaven-sent revivalThe theology and practi...

From an esteemed scholar of American religion and sexuality, a sweeping account of the century of religious conflict that produced our culture warsGay marriage, transgender rights, birth control -- sex is at the heart of many of the most divisive political issues of our age. The origins of these conflicts, historian R. Marie Griffith argues, lie in sharp disagreements that emerged among American Christians a century ago. From the 1920s onward, a once-solid Christia...

This groundbreaking book examines the anarchic aspects of Jesus' message, and suggests that the demise of the church as pillar of social order gives it a fresh opportunity to exercise its prophetic role - challenging injustice, shaking institutions and undermining some of the central values and norms on which post-Christian society is built.

With the current economic crisis and the general rigors of life, we all face struggles. Regardless of race, gender, income, or age, we face challenges daily. Even countries face struggles—the main one being the inability to pay their mounting debts. In his book How to Cope with Life’s Struggles: Practical Advice for Victorious Christian Living, author Sherman Stevens describes some of the struggles we face and how the Lord has provided for us to successfully make it through. Among the stru...

Pilar Hogan Closkey and John Hogan have brought together the annual Archbishop Oscar Romero Lectures (2001-2007) to consider the life and death of Archbishop Romero and the daily struggles of the poor in our world, especially in the city of Camden, New Jersey-one of America's poorest cities. Romero's 'dangerous memory' provides the background, while urban poverty and the option for the poor are the foreground. Romero's commitment to the poor compels us to look at ourselves, and the authors...

Contemporary pilgrim Peter Stanford visits some of the most ancient religious sites in Britain, taking the spiritual temperature of our apparently secular and sceptical age.

International Best Seller"I agree with Naskar that the path of tolerance is the only way." - Daniel C. DennettTwo Hundred Thousand years ago, we the sapiens were just a newly evolved species in a corner of Africa. Eventually we transformed ourselves into the master of the entire planet. We tamed our surroundings, increased food production, built civilizations and established empires.Unfortunately, despite a...