More Money, More Ministry: Money and Evangelicals in Recent North American History - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802847773 ISBN 13: 9780802847775

Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000

Synopsis

More Money, More Ministry explores the role that money has played in the growth of North American evangelicalism over the last 150 years - including its uneasy, sometimes ambivalent place in evangelical consciousness. Experts on the contemporary religious scene discuss how evangelicals have recently thought about, used, and raised money, looking in particular at Christian nonprofit organizations, fund-raising strategies, advertising and consumerism, evangelical higher education, financial scandals, and the connection between money and theology. As engaging to read as it is incisive, More Money, More Ministry provides a provocative view of the relation of finance and faith.

About this title

About the Author:

Eskridge is associate director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College.

Mark A. Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, Illinois, and the author and editor of many bestselling books and articles, including "Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind," and "A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada," His most recent book is "Protestants in America," In 1998 he inaugurated the McDonald Family Visiting Chair in Evangelical Theological Studies at the Harvard Divinity School.

From Publishers Weekly:

Over the last century and a half, Eskridge and Noll assert in the introduction to this fine collection, evangelical Protestants have displayed at least "two attitudes toward money and its role in believers' lives." Some have depended with such confidence on divine providence that they haven't bothered to save, plan or be otherwise financially prudent; others have embraced the market, believing that God will provide through soaring stocks. These essaysAmost of which were first presented at a 1998 Wheaton College conferenceAexplore both strategies. Many evangelicals, argues Gary Scott Smith in a scintillating look at evangelicals' encounter with corporate capitalism from 1880 to 1930, criticized consumerism and responded to it by advocating "biblical stewardship." Peter Dobkin Hall says that early 20th-century economic transformations contributed as much to the breaking of American Protestants into liberal and conservative camps as, say, the Scopes trial. In "Unpaid Debts," the collection's most creative essay, Ted Ownby asks whether Southern sectarian groups, composed of "people who were self-consciously plain and in many cases relatively poor," offered religiously based critiques of capitalism. The sleeper of the bunch is Robert Burkinshaw's comparison of how Canadians and Americans funded Christian colleges and universities after World War II. (The editors may have been straining too much to get "North" in the subtitle.) This collection fills a gulch in our understanding of American evangelicalism; it should be read by every Christian, and every capitalist. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0802847773
• ISBN 13: 9780802847775
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 440
• Editor: Eskridge Larry, Noll Mark A.