The first ever trade history of a landmark of American letters--Martin Luther King Jr's legendary Letter from Birmingham Jail.

In the decades after World War II, Protestant missionaries abroad were a topic of vigorous public debate. From religious periodicals and Sunday sermons to novels and anthropological monographs, public conversations about missionaries followed a powerful yet paradoxical line of reasoning, namely that people abroad needed greater autonomy from U.S. power and that Americans could best tell others how to use their freedom. In The Gospel of Freedom and Power, Sarah E. Ruble traces and analyzes these public discussions about what it meant for Americans abroad to be good world citizens, placing them firmly in the context of the United States' postwar global dominance. Bringing together a wide range of sources, Ruble seeks to understand how discussions about a relatively small group of Americans working abroad became part of a much larger cultural conversation. She concludes that whether viewed as champions of nationalist revolutions or propagators of the gospel of capitalism, missionaries--along with their supporters, interpreters, and critics--ultimately both challenged and reinforced a rhetoric of exceptionalism that made Americans the judges of what was good for the rest of the world.

2018 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalists - Multicultural "I am a man torn in two. And the gospel I inherited is divided." Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove grew up in the Bible Belt in the American South as a faithful church-going Christian. But he gradually came to realize that the gospel his Christianity proclaimed was not good news for everybody. The same Christianity that sang, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound" also perpetuated racial injustice and white supremacy in the name of Jesus. His Christianity, he discovered, was the religion of the slaveholder. Just as Reconstruction after the Civil War worked to repair a desperately broken society, our compromised Christianity requires a spiritual reconstruction that undoes the injustices of the past. Wilson-Hartgrove traces his journey from the religion of the slaveholder to the Christianity of Christ. Reconstructing the gospel requires facing the pain of the past and present, from racial blindness to systemic abuses of power. Grappling seriously with troubling history and theology, Wilson-Hartgrove recovers the subversiveness of the gospel that sustained the church through centuries of slavery and oppression, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. When the gospel is reconstructed, freedom rings both for individuals and for society as a whole. Discover how Jesus continues to save us from ourselves and each other, to repair the breach and heal our land.

The Gospel of Slavery: A Primer of Freedom is an anti-slavery poem by Abel C. Thomas, an American evangelist, minister, journalist, and historian. In this poem, Thomas criticizes slavery, proving that all people are equal Lord's creatures independent of race and origin. Every verse is accompanied by a commentary giving a historical reference related to the abolition of slavery in the United States.

There's Good News for the Weary Call it burnout, a spiritual breakdown, or a personal crisis, the toll of Bill Tell's decades of successful ministry finally caught up with him. Incapacitated and depressed, he found that the road to recovery began at the cross. To his delight, healing opened new freedoms as he embraced the gospel in new ways. Lay It Down: Living in the Freedom of the Gospel is a bold declaration of the overwhelming grace of God. More than merely saving us in our sin, by grace God delivers us from it, making us new creations and treating us accordingly--no matter what. For a generation of Christians who have learned a gospel of performance and striving, Lay It Down offers the good news of the grace that is already ours in Christ.

It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Many people have been taught that Christianity is a religion in which you must do certain things in order to receive certain benefits, and that you must do more and try harder to be accepted. The truth is, faith in Jesus is enough. Any attempt to add anythingeven good works to this simple good news is to lose the Gospel completely. Blue and Swan look at Paul's letter to the Galatians and how his passionate case for the simple gospel of grace applies to many of the issues facing the church today. As one reviewer stated, "'The Gospel Uncensored' is a fervent book on the grace of God and how this gracious work of Christ leads to freedom. It is a heartfelt plea to the reader to get over 'Jesus plus religion' and come back to 'Jesus plus nothing.' For it is in Jesus and Him alone that we have freedom." Its time to be free.