Search results for ""Author George M. Marsden""

The life and times of C. S. Lewis's modern spiritual classicMere Christianity, C. S. Lewis's eloquent defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and inspiring book. George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an atheist to a committed Anglican—famously converting to Christianity in 1931 after conversing into the night with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugh Dyson—and how his plainspoken case for Christianity went on to become one of the most beloved spiritual books of all time.

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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. In the twenty-first century, militantly conservative white evangelicals have become more prominent than ever in American life. Marsden's volume, which now takes the history through the end of the Trump administration, remains the essential starting point for understanding the degree to which that militancy has been shaped by the fundamentalist heritage of the twentieth century. For Marsden, fundamentalists are, in the broadest sense, conservative evangelicals who are willing to take a stand and to fight. Yet their militancy needs to be understood in the light of some specific aspects of their heritage. In the late nineteenth-century, American Protestantism was gradually dividing between liberals who were accepting new scientific and higher critical views that contradicted the Bible and defenders of the more traditional evangelicalism. Often the “traditionalists” were also innovators in affirming apocalyptic prophesies of the imminent destruction of modern civilization and the return of Christ. By the 1920s, a full-fledged "fundamentalist" movement had developed in protest against theological changes in the churches, the teaching of biological evolution in schools, and changing mores in the culture. Fundamentalists often were conflicted by impulses to separate from condemned modern culture or to take back America as a Christian nation. Even with such tensions, fundamentalists built networks of evangelists, Bible conferences, Bible institutes, and mission agencies. These coalesced into major religious movements that proved to have remarkable staying power. Beginning in the 1970s, fundamentalist impulses led to increasing overt political mobilization and the rise of the religious right. In the twenty-first century, militant fundamentalist zeal to preserve Biblicist doctrinal and behavioral purity in churches remained strong, but often was overshadowed by more widely popular impulses of Christian nationalism and political partisanship.

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Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis's eloquent and winsome defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and much-beloved book. George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an atheist to a committed Anglican--famously converting to Christianity in 1931 after conversing into the night with his friends J. R. R. Tolkien and Hugh Dyson--and how Lewis delivered his wartime talks to a traumatized British nation in the midst of an all-out war for survival. Marsden recounts how versions of those talks were collected together in 1952 under the title Mere Christianity, and how the book went on to become one of the most widely read presentations of essential Christianity ever published, particularly among American evangelicals. He examines its role in the conversion experiences of such figures as Charles Colson, who read the book while facing arrest for his role in the Watergate scandal. Marsden explores its relationship with Lewis's Narnia books and other writings, and explains why Lewis's plainspoken case for Christianity continues to have its critics and ardent admirers to this day. With uncommon clarity and grace, Marsden provides invaluable new insights into this modern spiritual classic.

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A finalist for the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and winner of the 2004 Bancroft Prize and of the American Society of Church History's Philip Schaff Prize "The finest biography of this towering figure. . . . Marsden guides readers through Edwards’s profoundly alien world with authority and fluidity."—Benjamin Schwarz, Atlantic Monthly A controversial theologian and the author of the famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) ignited the momentous Great Awakening of the eighteenth century. In this definitive and long-awaited biography, Jonathan Edwards emerges as both a great American and a brilliant Christian. George Marsden evokes the world of colonial New England in which Edwards was reared—a frontier civilization at the center of a conflict between Native Americans, French Catholics, and English Protestants. Drawing on newly available sources, Marsden demonstrates how these cultural and religious battles shaped Edwards’s life and thought. Marsden reveals Edwards as a complex thinker and human being who struggled to reconcile his Puritan heritage with the secular, modern world emerging out of the Enlightenment. In this, Edwards’s life anticipated the deep contradictions of our American culture. Meticulously researched and beautifully composed, this biography offers a compelling portrait of an eminent American.

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