An up-to-date portrait of a defining moment in the Christian story—its beginnings, worldview, and cultural significance. Winner of the Dale W. Brown Book Award of the Young Center for Anabaptists and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College An Introduction to German Pietism provides a scholarly investigation of a movement that changed the history of Protestantism. The Pietists can be credited with inspiring both Evangelicalism and modern individualism. Taking into account new discoveries in the field, Douglas H. Shantz focuses on features of Pietism that made it religiously and culturally significant. He discusses the social and religious roots of Pietism in earlier German Radicalism and situates Pietist beginnings in three cities: Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle. Shantz also examines the cultural worlds of the Pietists, including Pietism and gender, Pietists as readers and translators of the Bible, and Pietists as missionaries to the far reaches of the world. He not only considers Pietism's role in shaping modern western religion and culture but also reflects on the relevance of the Pietist religious paradigm of today. The first survey of German Pietism in English in forty years, An Introduction to German Pietism provides a narrative interpretation of the movement as a whole. The book's accessible tone and concise portrayal of an extensive and complex subject make it ideal for courses on early modern Christianity and German history. The book includes appendices with translations of German primary sources and discussion questions.

In shock after her husband was killed by a drunk driver while living in Thailand, Janelle Shantz Hertzler began searching for a way through the pain. Her struggle to make sense of her loss and find peace resulted in this moving collection. Told through heartfelt poetry and inspiring photography, Seasons of Solace expresses the spiritual journey of a grieving woman moving toward acceptance.Though written from one person's perspective, Hertzler's poems and photographs reflect the universal experience of losing a loved one. Within the narrative lie broader truths of life and death, love and sorrow, allowing each reader to find his or her own story in its pages.

It is widely understood that the burdens of ecological destruction are borne disproportionately by working-class and poor communities, both through illness and disease caused by pollutants and through the depletion of natural resources from which they make a living. Yet, consistently, the voices of the working class are the most marginalized, excluded, and silenced when discussing how to address ecological concerns and protect the environment from future destruction. Both mainstream environmental groups, such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, and radical environmentalists, such as EarthFirst!, are reluctant to engage with working-class and poor communities, often viewing blue-collar workers as responsible for the destruction these groups are trying to prevent. In Green Syndicalism, Shantz issues a call to action to the environmental movement and labor activists, particularly rank and file workers, to join forces in a common struggle to protect the environment from capitalism, corporate greed, and the extraction of resources. He argues for a major transformation to address the "jobs versus the environment" rhetoric that divides these two groups along lines of race and class. Combining practical initiatives and theoretical perspectives, Shantz offers an approach that brings together radical ecology and revolutionary unionism in a promising vision of green politics. Green syndicalists work as coalitions to increase community-based economics and productive decision making that encourages the participation of all stakeholders in the process. Drawing, in part, on his own experiences growing up in a working-class family and organizing within radical ecology and labor movements, Shantz charts a path that accesses the commonalities between these groups in an effort to take on the forces that destroy the environment, exploit people, and harm their communities.

This is an age of crisis: economic, political, environmental, and social. Yet the nature of contemporary crisis is often misunderstood. Crisis, rather than being accidental or episodic - as is too often assumed - has been a regular feature of state practice in the neoliberal austerity regimes of contemporary capitalism. In this timely work Jeff Shantz gives special attention to the particular manufactured crises associated with austerity regimes and conditions of precarity within contemporary capitalism, and how Crisis States differ from other forms of state practice.Crisis is a powerful weapon of states and capital in the pursuit of accumulation, exploitation, and control. Engaging insights from anarchism and autonomous Marxism, Shantz lays bare the real nature and character of crisis as political and social pursuits of state and capital under precarious capitalism.Attention is also given to social resistance under crisis state conditions. Contemporary capitalism renders the oppressed and exploited precarious at the same time as opportunities are opened to render the system itself precarious. Understanding Crisis States and precarious capitalism is crucial in considering prospects for resistance.

This is the first monograph to examine the complex life of the Reformed Philadelphian court preacher Conrad BrAske (1660-1713). Chapters consider his experiences as a student at Marburg University, as educational traveler, as proponent of a millenarian mindset and his conflicts with Johann Konrad Dippel and the Elberfeld Classis.

Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned. /Cyber Disobedience/ provides the most engaging and detailed analysis of online civil disobedience and anarchism today.

Joshua Lexington had it all. Wealth, a beautiful wife and a perfect lifestyle everyone envied. One day while sitting behind the mahogany desk in his corporate office he noticed a down and out homeless veteran, Timothy Ducket, sitting on his office steps and challenged him to make something of himself using what he termed the black commandments, his personal handbook in achieving anything in life. Known as the Wolf Of Lexington Heights, he quickly found there may be more to down and out Timothy's low self esteem and lack of self worth than he'd first recognized, ending in a psychological duel to the finish in which the winner may mean you've lost everything.