Illustrates the hidden challenges embedded within the evangelical adoption movement. For over a decade, prominent leaders and organizations among American Evangelicals have spent a substantial amount of time and money in an effort to address what they believe to be the “Orphan Crisis” of the United States. Yet, despite an expansive commitment of resources, there is no reliable evidence that these efforts have been successful. Adoptions are declining across the board, and both foster parenting and foster-adoptions remain steady. Why have evangelical mobilization efforts been so ineffective? To answer this question, Samuel L. Perry draws on interviews with over 220 movement leaders and grassroots families, as well as national data on adoption and fostering, to show that the problem goes beyond orphan care. Perry argues that evangelical social engagement is fundamentally self-limiting and difficult to sustain because their subcultural commitments lock them into an approach that does not work on a practical level. Growing God’s Family ultimately reveals this peculiar irony within American evangelicalism by exposing how certain aspects of the evangelical subculture may stimulate activism to address social problems, even while these same subcultural characteristics undermine their own strategic effectiveness. It provides the most recent analysis of dominant elements within the evangelical subculture and how that subculture shapes the engagement strategies of evangelicals as a group.
Grandpa Wouldn't Lie is the heartwarming story of a boy's relationship with his grandparents. Through stories told by his grandfather, the author learns, not only his family heritage, but important lessons about personal values and the meaning of life. Although essential reading for members of the author's family, this book has appeal for the general reader, too. The stories contained within it take the reader back to a time when life in the southern Appalachians was harsh and, sometimes,brutal. However, through the stories told by his grandfather, the author learns that integrity and family honor can triumph in the face of unrelenting difficulties. This is a book that will be read again and again, by both young and old. The reader will be long in forgetting it.
In Religion for Realists, Samuel L. Perry argues that, as people in the West self-sort into partisan tribes, we need the scientific study of religion--the rational, data-driven analysis of religious life--now more than ever. This book presents a practical roadmap for ensuring that its insights are widely available, accessible, and impactful.
Why do so many conservative Christians continue to support Donald Trump despite his many overt moral failings? Why do many Americans advocate so vehemently for xenophobic policies, such as a border wall with Mexico? Why do many Americans seem so unwilling to acknowledge the injustices that ethnic and racial minorities experience in the United States? Why do a sizeable proportion of Americans continue to oppose women's equality in the workplace and in the home? To answer these questions, Taking America Back for God points to the phenomenon of "Christian nationalism," the belief that the United States is-and should be-a Christian nation. Christian ideals and symbols have long played an important role in American public life, but Christian nationalism is about far more than whether the phrase "under God" belongs in the pledge of allegiance. At its heart, Christian nationalism demands that we must preserve a particular kind of social order, an order in which everyone--Christians and non-Christians, native-born and immigrants, whites and minorities, men and women recognizes their "proper" place in society. The first comprehensive empirical analysis of Christian nationalism in the United States, Taking America Back for God illustrates the influence of Christian nationalism on today's most contentious social and political issues. Drawing on multiple sources of national survey data as well as in-depth interviews, Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry document how Christian nationalism shapes what Americans think about who they are as a people, what their future should look like, and how they should get there. Americans' stance toward Christian nationalism provides powerful insight into what they think about immigration, Islam, gun control, police shootings, atheists, gender roles, and many other political issues-very much including who they want in the White House. Taking America Back for God is a guide to one of the most important-and least understood-forces shaping American politics.
As the first African American president, Barack Obama faced unique challenges and obstacles when addressing issues of race. While rhetorical attacks on the basis of race directed at Obama were not unexpected, many of the most consistent racially-motivated criticisms of Obama were associated with his religious identity. The Jeremiah Wright controversy gave way to the birther and ‘secret Muslim’ conspiracy theories, while anxieties about Obama’s identity proved particularly potent as modes of political attack in the context of the war on terror. This book examines the ways in which those attacks often originated in the rhetoric of the Christian Right and the ways in which these theories circulated amongst the Christian Right. Perry argues that the intersections of race and religion in American politics produced rhetoric that often caricatured Obama as un-American, anti-Christian, and an enemy of the state. By exploring the arguments used to cultivate these characterizations and tracing the roots of conspiracies that worked to delegitimize Obama’s religious identity through racial claims and stereotypes, a clearer picture emerges of what is at stake when people can no longer separate religious convictions from political arguments.
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Coleridge was one of the Romantic Age's most enigmatic figures and author of some of the most famous poems in the English language. He confided his thoughts and emotions to his notebooks, a selection of which are presented in this text.
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