The chapter demonstrates how religious freedom and robust pluralism can be catalysts for social healing – benefiting individuals and communities, building social capital, and encouraging solidarity. The chapter concludes with four case studies of bridging religious divides to achieve positive change, address injustice, reach compromise, and overcome adversity.

Chapter 4 provides a demographic and historical overview of Protestantism in the United States, describing how it has shaped civil religion and examining the political and cultural influence of Mainline Protestantism, Evangelical Protestantism, and the historic Black church.

This chapter traces the influence of Christianity on politics and society in the first two centuries of the American experiment. It offers an overview of the religion in the original colonies, the religious revivals associated with the First Great Awakening, the role of Christianity shaping the United States Constitution, the Second Great Awakening in an era of westward expansion, religious diversity, and the theological debates surrounding slavery and the Civil War.

This chapter traces the history of Roman Catholicism in American politics and society, beginning with an overview of the tenets of the Catholic faith. The chapter then discusses historic tensions and division between Protestants and Catholics, tracing patterns of assimilation and eventual acceptance of Catholicism into American civil religion.

Luke’s prologue presses the question raised in Part I (“What is a Gospel?”) into new territory: what about the many other writings that variously recorded Jesus’s life and/or teachings not included in the New Testament canon? Many of them also accrued the title “Gospel,” generally conformed to the definition outlined in Part I, and populated the literary landscape of early Christianity into Origen’s own day. This chapter considers how, in Origen’s view, one may distinguish the four received Gospels from the many others, and how he understands Luke (in particular) to have participated in this process of discernment in the way he hands on the traditions he receives. Origen cannot accept that Luke’s own language allows one to reduce his intent with these narratives to matters of plain facticity. Something, as Luke says, had “come to pass among us,” something of which he and his tradents had become fully convinced, something that had made of them all servants of its proclamation: “attendants of the word.” In other words, the very writing of these stories becomes, in Origen’s view, a form of “spiritual reading” of Jesus’s early life.

9.1 [603] So then, by taking up our shield a longside the doctrines of the truth with the utmost endurance, so it seems to me, we have held our own against the nonsensical words of those who know only how to disparage our doctrines.1 But because our opponent bears down upon the ineffable glory with all his sails unfurled and dares, as it were, to lead forth his profane ideas in unbearable assaults, expending his most effective resources on the task of stripping the nature of God the Father of his progeny and stripping the true Son, who came from his nature, of his hypostasis2 (for he does away with his existence and engages in such extremely perilous undertakings), come now, “putting on the breastplate of justice,” while also lifting up “the shield of faith” and whetting against him “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God,”3 let us show that he is a liar and in his extreme arrogance all but kicks against the goads4 and leaps down into the deep pit of destruction.5 [604]

1 The successes of your holy empire are noteworthy, remarkable, and cannot be expressed in words, and the incomparability of your piety, which is like an inheritance come to you from above, you have successfully defended from the arrows of envy, thanks to the skill in all things excellent that you received from your father and also your grandfather,1 as is obvious in this instance.2

In the 1890s and 1900s, theologian and activist Jabez T. Sunderland became a keen follower of the Brāhmos, conceding that the Brāhmo movement and the Unitarian movement to which he belonged form parallel tracks in the reconstruction of religion. These parallel tracks manifest in both the rise of Indian religious reformers in the USA from the second half of the nineteenth century as well as North American religious reformers and theorists deepening their interest, and commitment, to, Indian religion. One of these Indian reformers who visited the United States was none other than the Brāhmo missionary and intellectual P.C. Mozoomdar, who lectured and wrote a great deal about Jesus, social service as a form of service to God, as inspirations for the new, Brāhmo religion. Mozoomdar argued that this new religion, keeping in faith and standards of worship, born out by the comparative method. The linkages between the USA and India in the realm of religion continued through the end of the century, with the rise of one Narendra Nath Datta, known from the 1890s as Swami Vivekananda in the USA in 1893. This final chapter includes a variety of critical engagements after the death of Keshab Chandra Sen and the appreciation of his ideas by the American parallel to the Brāhmo Samaj, the Free Religious Association, which began in the 1870s. These new conceptions of Indian religion preceded and paralleled the rise of Vivekananda by the 1890s. This chapter ends with a consideration of Vivekananda, a figure whose definitions of religion become dominant by the end of the century.

Sacra: Letter omicron, concerning conceit and appearance, and that being is better than seeming; for this is a hindrance to virtue2

There has never been a time when the life of Jesus has not presented some occasion for scandal. Although the primordial scandal of the Christian Gospel unfolded around the figure of a crucified Messiah, this book takes as its principal subject a derivative scandal: the scandal of the Christian Gospels; namely, the impediments – even offenses – to literary, historical, and logical sense that only seem to multiply in proportion to one’s intimacy with the narratives of the four Evangelists. The suggestion of such things will itself be scandalous to some.