Growing up in the Christian church, I was aware that big personalities carried a lot of weight with congregants. But I also saw what happened when those figures became more significant than their proclaimed faith.
Beaty’s book provides an honest perspective on why some prominent Christian leaders refuse accountability within their ministry and why their followers allow them to do so. While the topic is sobering, Beaty projects a clear-eyed optimism that Christians do not have to, and should not, accept these violations of their faith.
"A must-read for anyone invested in the fate of evangelicalism."--Publishers Weekly
Many Christian leaders use their fame and influence to great effect. Whether that popularity resides at the local church level or represents national or international influence, many leaders have effectively said to their followers, "Follow me as I follow Christ." But fame that is cultivated for its own sake, without attendant spiritual maturity and accountability, has a shadow side that runs counter to the heart of the gospel. Celebrity--defined as social power without proximity--has led to abuses of power, the cultivation of persona, and a…
As someone who primarily writes about the Jacksonian era, I always enjoy reading a book that clearly explains the aftermath of the battles between Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, between the Democrats and the Whigs. It’s like having the postscript that tells you what happened to the characters after the main story is completed.
Haumesser not only accomplishes that feat, outlining how the Democratic Party disintegrated into factionalism; she also explains the role of gender in shaping the political rhetoric of these final few years leading up to the Civil War.
This fresh examination of antebellum politics comprehensively examines the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in the critical years between 1856 and 1861. Whereas the cultural politics of gender had bolstered Democratic unity through the 1850s, the Lecompton crisis and John Brown's raid revealed that white manhood and its association with familial and national protection meant disparate-and ultimately incompatible-things in free and slave society. In fierce debates over the extension of slavery, gendered rhetoric hardened conflicts that ultimately led to the outbreak of the Civil War.
I’ll confess, part of the reason I loved this book is because the author was my mentor during a pivotal time in my life. Imagining Eleanor and her family as they evolved and transformed into a significant force in global social justice brought to mind conversations we shared and advice she gave me as I began my academic career.
But even if I didn’t know Eleanor personally, her family’s story is captivating. It shows the positive ripple effects that family dynamics can have for generations, ripples that extend into the larger society.
When LeRoy ‘Roy”Dunfey called out “Hey...Dunfey” in his fried clam restaurant in the 1940s, at least seven of his twelve children would turn around. Then he’d point to the one he needed without having to remember names. Roy and Catherine ‘Kate’ Manning had met and married thirty years earlier as teenage workers in Lowell, Massachusetts textile mills. With little formal education or resources, but with a store of humor, entrepreneurial zest, and spiritual roots, they collared the American dream starting out in 1915 with Dunfey’s Orchestra, a luncheonette, and a baby every two years through the Great Depression to the…
An incumbent president kicked out of his party. A religious prophet assassinated in the middle of his campaign to win the White House. A former enslaver transformed by religious conversion into an abolitionist. A successful career politician who inexplicably failed every time he sought the presidency. A party stalwart whose political career appeared to be on the decline.
These were the contenders to become president in 1844 in a political climate increasingly consumed by xenophobia, imperialism, and sectional partisanship.
Who Is James K. Polk? The Presidential Election of 1844 explains how Andrew Jackson’s Tennessee protégé narrowly won the White House, putting the United States on an accelerated path to civil war.
