The Spiritual Baptist Faith is the name given to the Christian religious group emerging among the Africans in the 19th century in Trinidad. In 1917 the group was outlawed as "too noisy" and "too African" and therefore uncivilized and unacceptable. This book explores the development and the practices of the faith, its relationship with African religion and with Christianity, and its tenets. (Social Issues)

The Spiritual Baptist Faith is the name given to the Christian religious group emerging among the Africans in the 19th century in Trinidad. In 1917 the group was outlawed by the Shouter Prohibition Ordinance against its mode of worship which was considered "too noisy" and "too African" and therefore uncivilized and unacceptable. It suffered legal persecution and prosecution until the ordinance was repealed in 1951. Syncretism and secretism are fundamental features of its growth. Its survival is a tribute to the resilience and faith of its adherents. The absence of written records of those early years facilitated the perpetuation of misconceptions about the Faith among the citizenry. This book explores the development and the practices of the Spiritual Baptist Faith, its relationship with African religion and with Christianity, and reveals the essential tenets of the much maligned and misunderstood indigenous religious community in a clear and concise manner.

The book, a research paper, reveals and analyzes misconceptions about the Spiritual Baptist Faith, an indigenous religious expression of Christianity in Trinidad and Tobago. It highlights the academic bias to the Faith, which is maligned and misunderstood because of its humble beginnings amidst ex-plantation slaves of African descent and its history of persecution and prosecution by the colonial authorities of the early 20th century.The research provided answers to some of the troubling questions about the Faith and served as the source for the book My Faith, Spiritual Baptist Christian by the same author.

This study traces the history of the growth of the Spiritual Baptist Faith not only from a historical/theoretical viewpoint, but also from that of the practitioners who were themselves victims of colonial proscription in the early to middle parts of this century.

In this frank, funny, and often challenging memoir about life in and out of the church, twenty-something Patton Dodd reveals his quest for an authentic experience of God. On his journey he attempts to pinpoint and justify his belief in God, first with the fervent absolutes that characterize a new believer’s faith but then with a growing awareness of the cultural complexities that define his faith and encompass his understanding of Christianity. When a spiritual awakening in his last year of high school wrenches Dodd out of his rebellious party days, he embarks on a quest for God. He exchanges pot smoking for worship dancing, gives up MTV for Christian pop, and enrolls at a Christian university. Soon, however, he finds himself ill at ease with the other Christians around him and with the cloying superficiality of the Christian subculture. Dodd tells his story in contradictory terms—conversion and confusion, acceptance and rejection, spiritual highs and psychological lows. With painstaking honesty, he tries to negotiate a relationship with his faith apart from the cultural trappings that often clothe it. Dodd’s moving story paints a nuanced and multilayered portrait of an earnest quest for God: the hunger for genuine faith, the bleak encounters with doubt, and the consuming questions that challenge the intellect and the soul. This is a story that will resonate with the emerging generation of young adults attempting to break new ground within their own faith tradition.

"I can't imagine a college student—skeptic, doubter, Christian, struggler—who wouldn't benefit from this book." —Kevin DeYoung For many young adults, the college years are an exciting period of selfdiscovery full of new relationships, new independence, and new experiences. Yet college can also be a time of personal testing and intense questioning— especially for Christian students confronted with various challenges to Christianity and the Bible for the first time. Drawing on years of experience as a biblical scholar, Michael Kruger addresses common objections to the Christian faith—the exclusivity of Christianity, Christian intolerance, homosexuality, hell, the problem of evil, science, miracles, and the reliability of the Bible. If you're a student dealing with doubt or wrestling with objections to Christianity from fellow students and professors alike, this book will equip you to engage secular challenges with intellectual honesty, compassion, and confidence—and ultimately graduate college with your faith intact.

Henlee Barnette's life has spanned most of the twentieth century. His life in the rural South eventually led to his becoming a Christian. He graduated from Wake Forest College in 1940, and then attended seminary, taking the Ph.D. in 1948. For the next 50 years he taught Christian ethics, but not just in the classroom. In this remarkable memoir, he stresses Christianity as a pilgrimage, a way of life undergirded by faith in God. Such faith is active in love and calls for justice in personal and social relations. One's journey in the world needs a spiritual compass: the Christian's personal responsibility to do faith active in love, that is, agape love. Such love includes justice. Love without justice is subjective and sentimental. Love that Jesus taught provides concreteness and structure. Agape love makes justice just. Christian faith that is purely personal is suspect. In his own pilgrimage he became aware of the demonic forces that dehumanize us. Among these was the denial of basic human rights to minority groups. Love and justice motivated him to join the Civil Rights Movement as a means of achieving more just interpersonal relations. His relationships with blacks and whites during the Civil Rights Movement fill the pages of this wonderful narrative. But Barnette also fought against unjust wars, ecological abuse, poverty, violence, and a multitude of other issues which confront and challenge both Christian and church.