Classics, Philosophy, and Religion Books

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  Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

  Jennifer Barry

  Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fled were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fl ed and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time.

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  Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars

  Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

  By presenting African American Protestantism in the context of white Protestant fundamentalism, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism between the Wars demonstrates that African American Protestants were acutely aware of the manner in which white Christianity operated and how they could use that knowledge to justify social change. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews’s study scrutinizes how white fundamentalists wrote blacks out of their definition of fundamentalism and how blacks constructed a definition of Christianity that had, at its core, an intrinsic belief in racial equality. In doing so, this volume challenges the prevailing scholarly argument that fundamentalism was either a doctrinal debate or an antimodernist force. Instead, it was a constantly shifting set of priorities for different groups at different times.

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  Rethinking Zion: How the Print Media Placed Fundamentalism in the South

  Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews

  Long before the red state/blue state divide, Americans have tended to think of the South as a natural home to and birthplace of Christian fundamentalism. Despite historical evidence and scholarly research to the contrary, the view of the South as a fundamentalist center persists. Rethinking Zion documents the process by which the South received its fundamentalist label and chronicles the forces at work in creating the image of the South as the Bible Belt.