So strongly associated is the Salvation Army with its modern mission of service that its colorful history as a religious movement is often overlooked. In telling the story of the organization in America, Lillian Taiz traces its evolution from a working-class, evangelical religion to a movement that emphasized service as the path to salvation. When the Salvation Army crossed the Atlantic from Britain in 1879, it immediately began to adapt its religious culture to its new American setting. The group found its constituency among young, working-class men and women who were attracted to its intensely experiential religious culture, which combined a frontier-camp-meeting style with working-class forms of popular culture modeled on the saloon and theater. In the hands of these new recruits, the Salvation Army developed a remarkably democratic internal culture. By the turn of the century, though, as the Army increasingly attempted to attract souls by addressing the physical needs of the masses, the group began to turn away from boisterous religious expression toward a more "refined" religious culture and a more centrally controlled bureaucratic structure. Placing her focus on the membership of the Salvation Army and its transformation as an organization within the broader context of literature on class, labor, and women's history, Taiz sheds new light on the character of American working-class culture and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The nonviolent ways orthodox religious groups achieve social power and influence: a “brilliant” study of four movements in the US and abroad (Wendell Bell, Yale University). Gold Medal Winner, Independent Publisher Book Awards Claiming Society for God focuses on common strategies used by religiously orthodox (what some would call “fundamentalist”) movements around the world. Rather than using armed struggle or terrorism, as much of post-9/11 thinking suggests, these movements use a patient, under-the-radar strategy of taking over civil society. Claiming Society for God tells the stories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Sephardi Torah Guardians or Shas in Israel, Comunione e Liberazione in Italy, and the Salvation Army in the United States, showing how these movements, grounded in a communitarian theology, are building massive grassroots networks of religiously based social service agencies, hospitals and clinics, rotating credit societies, schools, charitable organizations, worship centers, and businesses. These networks are already being called states within states, surrogate states, or parallel societies, and in Egypt brought the Muslim Brotherhood to control of parliament and the presidency. This bottom-up, entrepreneurial strategy is aimed at making religion the cornerstone of society. “Sociology at its very best…professionally researched and analyzed, both pragmatic and theoretical, overwhelmingly convincing, and an important corrective to a lot of current beliefs…a great read—fascinating from beginning to end.”—Wendell Bell, Yale University, author of Foundations of Futures Studies

- "Fascinating, resourceful, and thoughtful from beginning to end." - David Morgan, Duke University - "Deftness and discerning insight." - Leigh Eric Schmidt, Washington University in St. Louis "Brilliantly researched and intellectually nuanced... In sum: a pleasure to read and to ponder." - Sally M. Promey, Yale University

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR Based on an unprecedented eighteen-year study, the center of this riveting book are three engaging streetwise brothers who provide powerful testimony to the exigencies of life lived on the social and economic margins. With profound lessons regarding the intersection of social forces and individual choices, Black succeeds in putting a human face on some of the most important public policy issues of our time.

In this groundbreaking book, William Kostlevy presents a fascinating study of the Metropolitan Church Association (MCA), a religious community founded in Chicago in the early 1890s. The MCA was one of the most controversial societies of the era. Its members were called "jumpers" because of their acrobatic worship style, and "Burning Bushers" after their caustic periodical, the Burning Bush. They objected to the concept of private property, rejected "elite" denominations, and professed an alternative, radical vision of Christianity, using modern music and folk art to spread their message. A product of the holiness revival of the late nineteenth century and a catalyst for Pentecostalism, the MCA played a vital role in the twentieth century growth of evangelical Christianity, yet it has long been ignored in studies of American radicalism, of communal societies, and even of holiness and Pentecostal Christianity. Kostlevy rectifies this omission, providing a valuable new context for understanding the origins of Pentecostalism. He investigates the internal struggles of the Holiness Movement, showing how radically divergent theological currents came to dominate a major segment of the American evangelical community. He also shows how deeply the MCA impacted the lives of twentieth century evangelists Bud Robinson and Seth C. Rees, self-designated first woman bishop Alma White, and Pentecostal evangelists A. G. Garr and Glenn Cook. As Holy Jumpers demonstrates, Holiness Christians, and the MCA in particular, played a profoundly formative role in the development of modern evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity.

The preacher's body is a tool for proclamation, a vehicle by which a sermon comes to life. Female preachers, engaged in a task not long their own, know well the added attention directed to their physicality. They can experience ordinary decisions about attire, accessories, hairstyles, and movement as complex, and occasionally precarious, choices around how to bring flesh to their sermons. They can also experience the extraordinary power of their bodies, when materiality weighs in on the message. McCullough explores the every-Sunday bodily decisions of contemporary female preachers, with an eye to uncovering the meanings about body, preaching, and God alive underneath. Ultimately, she argues for a renewed understanding of embodiment, in which one's living body, inescapably intertwined with her preaching, becomes the avenue for greater knowledge about how to preach and deeper insight into the faith professed.

This international volume provides a comprehensive account of contemporary research, new perspectives and cutting-edge issues surrounding religion and spirituality in social work. The introduction introduces key themes and conceptual issues such as understandings of religion and spirituality as well as definitions of social work, which can vary between countries. The main body of the book is divided up into sections on regional perspectives; religious and spiritual traditions; faith-based service provision; religion and spirituality across the lifespan; and social work practice. The final chapter identifies key challenges and opportunities for developing both social work scholarship and practice in this area. Including a wide range of international perspectives from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA, this Handbook succeeds in extending the dominant paradigms and comprises a mix of authors including major names, significant contributors and emerging scholars in the field, as well as leading contributors in other fields of social work who have an interest in religion and spirituality. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Spirituality and Social Work is an authoritative and comprehensive reference for academics and researchers as well as for organisations and practitioners committed to exploring why, and how, religion and spirituality should be integral to social work practice.