Michael Bruxvoort Religion

In the 1800s a Market Revolution began, changing the way in which America operated and in the midst of all that was a Second Great Awakening, causing people to once again, question their religious beliefs and practices. Paul Johnson and Sean Wilentz tell the story of Robert Matthews, or the Prophet Matthias and his followers. Matthias had an unconventional childhood, he became an orphan at a young age and was raised by church elders. He worked under one of the elders to learn the carpenter’s craft. He easily found work but had trouble keeping it because he was always preaching at his fellow workers about their sinful ways. Matthias was eager to make good but continually fell into misfortunes, “which led him on a prolonged and erratic religious journey” (49). The Kingdom of Matthias gained and lost members, had changes in beliefs, and was full of ever changing marriages. Although looking back on it now, Matthias’s messages and beliefs seem almost laughable, but at they time his followers found his message, ministry, and lifestyle very compelling.

The first articles, for example, have already opened my eyes to the movement of Christianity’s popularity. It fractured the cornerstone of my stereotypical idea of what a Christian looks like. A Christian may be anybody and, sadly, I was surprised by this. This led me to wonder how much any religion may differ among its followers when the ethnicity and regions are changed. I had not even cared to contemplate the ideas already presented in class but enjoyed the experience of knowledge being thrust upon me. As with biblical heritage, in which, I have used my knowledge of the bible long after the class finished, I am enthusiastic to the idea of learning something that could be applied to my everyday life. This class may differ, though, as the concepts learned may be applied to other religions, whereas, studying the bible was only good for

America’s economic success brought about a series of societal and cultural changes which impacted many aspects of citizens lives, ranging from family life, gender roles, social class, and religion. At the time of the Second Great Awakening, Americans turned to religious revivalists to provide them with resolutions to these fundamental problems facing the United States. While most of these revivalists preached of constructive changes, Johnson and Wilentz highlight the dangers behind our nation’s tolerance of fundamentalists, enthusiasts and visionaries of all sorts. They display our nation's susceptibility to volatile cults and revivals. Motivated by his desire to protect the “ancient truth” and "Despite all of his protestations of faith, [Matthews] was violating the most basic precepts of evangelical manhood, with his unsteady work habits, his self-glorification, and his domestic tyranny" (Johnson and Wilentz

Molloy, M. (2012). Experiencing the World’s Religions. Tradition, Challenge, and Change (6th ed.)Chapter 5. Retrieved from https://newclassroom3.phoenix.edu/Classroom

**Describe and explain the continuities and changes in religious beliefs and practices in ONE of the following regions from 1450 to the

Existing in this book are fifteen essays, all written by Flynt, and all are relative to the South, religion, and diversity. His essays review southern history, politics, southern regionalism, evangelicalism, traditionalism, fundamentalism, social history, labor history, two case studies; one on the Southern Baptists in Appalachia and of modernization and community; the second one of twentieth-century politics and religion in Florida. Asserts the complexity of social issues and the reforms Baptists felt were necessary to change. He expounds a minister’s battle within a church to not display the American flag because of the death involved behind it and to not be willing for his church life to be separated from his personal convictions. Flynt

David Edwin Harrell, Jr.’s “The Agrarian Myth and the Disciples of Christ in the Nineteenth Century” as well as “The Sectional Origins of the Churches of Christ” magnificently provide readers with a thoroughly researched historical context relevant to Southern religious history in particular. In the former article, Harrell discusses, “At the heart of the myth of the garden,” or the agrarian myth, “was the conviction that rural life was superior to urban life.” For many in the Christian Church, Harrell demonstrates that they sought to initiate the “millennial hope” via the garden myth ideology, but in time, “The most fervent millennialists in the movement by the end of the century were the supporters of the new industrial order. Many still believed that the American farmer was a specially prepared instrument of God, but it was perfectly obvious that he was neither gaining in influence nor improving his status in society.” Harrell, elsewhere, delved further into this urban versus rural idea, and how it, along with class and geographical contentions, affected the schism that divided the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church) into two major factions, one conservative, leading to the “Church of Christ,” and the other liberal, retaining the Disciples of Christ name. As helpful as Harrell’s article on sectionalism is, he also explained how Virginia was a bit of an anomaly in the South, where liberals “won virtually all of the churches,” when

In his essay “Of Christians and Indian Loggers” author Tom Swift Bird uses rich imagery and figures of speech to detail the cultural and religious differences between the Indian people and American Christians, as well as state his views on modern Christianity. He speaks to the people who live outside of Reservations in a strong attempt to get them to understand the importance of culture in his life and the lives of his fellow Native Americans. He uses a narrative focused on the tale of three Indian loggers, hired by Christian men, in order to convey his message of cultural erasure.

As of today, religion still maintains an impact throughout the domain of the South. Religion in the South supports infrastructure educational and social services. It also inhibits the growth of the traditional denominations to prosper, ranging from Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran and even Catholic. Baptist make about 50% of church affiliation population in the south while Methodist is about a quarter and Presbyterian around 10% or so ( Wison 1).Throughout the entire range of life of many religious denominations since they were first introduced to the South, they have been able to preserve their culture even during the social changes. To fully understand the southern religious establishments, we must compromise motives, interaction and movements

The North American community in today’s worlds has embraced Christianity, Muslim and other popular religious beliefs. Finding the ancient religious practices in action is rare, but not impossible. The communities had their own believes concerning gods and philosophies of good and evil before they were colonized. The communities have lost most of their beliefs and practices as they took place in the earlier community to popular religions which were introduced during and after the colonialism periods (Bonvillain and Porter 23-43).

In the African American community, a major component of our history is the institution of religion. It has been with us since our time in Africa, and it still affects us today. The sad realization is many African Americans today never learned the history to understand how much religion affected us, so people of the current generation did not appreciate its importance. Now, there is a social conflict between generations of Blacks in regards to how they see religion. In this paper, I plan to show how religion has molded the African American community into what it is today, and how African Americans’ perspective of religion is changing in the community.

Throughout our readings and discussions these past few weeks, we have seen many cases where Muslims and Christians were faced with the pressure to assimilate to the American culture, but many of these groups overcame these pressures and achieved a hybrid identity. In Globalizing the Sacred, we are analyzing the Doraville church the Sagrada Familia Lutheran Church. In Doraville, there is a large immigrant population while many townspeople moved away round the time a surge of the immigrants came in (Vasquez 147). The immigrant community is challenged often by the locals and casted out with things like banning soccer from parks, therefore being faced with finding somewhere to play or to stop playing (Vasquez 151). The church encourages learning

In The Unconverted Self, author Jonathan Boyarin reexamines the relationship between Christian Europe and the world around it, especially in the context of interreligious dialogue as a means of defining Christian identity. The common school of thought, as presented in this book, is that European identity reaches modernity after 1492 with the discovery of the radically different culture of Indigenous Americans (p. 9). Boyarin argues that this is untrue, as this belief operates under the incorrect assumption that the European people were a homogenous population (p.9). Instead, Boyarin “seeks to move beyond the concept of two separate Europes,” and proposes instead that this “othering” that was so critical to define Christian identity was already occurring in pre contact Europe (p. 1). For this, Boyarin looks to the Jewish and Muslim populations of Europe as a replacement for the Indigenous American peoples. He asserts that this sense of the “other” threatening Christendom existed far before 1492, and outlines the ways in which this conflict in religious dimensionality was vital to the formation of Christian identity. Boyarin’s volume presents a concise read that reexamines existing scholarship and recontextualizes historical events to create a convincing argument, as well as provide questions for future scholarship to build upon. However, there were aspects in this book that were lacking, causing it to be an almost tedious read at parts.

Religion has existed for countless centuries. Christianity is one of the major religions in this world, which had people be criticized, battle in wars, and killed for, but it still survived to this day. The purpose of this paper is to study the source of the religion, recognize the teachings, observe its spread throughout the world, and to identify how it stands among people today. Approaching this paper by a factual report I will explain these major points and why we need to know about this religion and other religions that existed before our generation.

The objective of this report is to contrast and compare the culture of the Calvary Church with Catholicism, which is the religion that I practice. A field trip was taken to the Calvary Chapel in Rancho Cucamonga On February 12 of 2013, in which a clear observation of its services was