The YMCA and the YWCA have been an integral part of America's urban landscape since their emergence almost 150 years ago. Yet the significant influence these organizations had on American society has
John Henderson examines the relationship between religion and society in late medieval Florence through the vehicle of the religious confraternity, one of the most ubiquitous and popular forms of lay
This 1995 book analyses the social, political and religious roles of the confraternities - the lay groups through which Italians of the Renaissance expressed their individual and collective religious beliefs - in Bologna in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These confraternities shaped the civic religious cult through charitable activities, public shrines and processions. This civic religious role expanded as the confraternities became politicised: patricians used the confraternities increasingly in order to control the civic religious cult, civic charity, and the city itself. The book examines in detail how confraternities initially provided laypeople of the artisanal and merchant classes with a means of expressing a religious life separate from, but not in opposition to, the local parish or mendicant house. By the mid-sixteenth century, artisans and merchants had few options beyond parochial confraternities which were controlled by parish priests.
In 1955 an American family moved into a chalet on the side of a steep Swiss alp. They did not know exactly why God had brought them there, what He wanted them to do, or even where the money to live on
The New England Fellowship, one of the first non-denominational organizations of evangelicals in the U.S., was founded by J. Elwin Wright. With his assistant, Elizabeth Evans, he tirelessly promoted c
This book is a celebration of the Catholic Worker Movement fifty years after its founding; an inquiry into the lives of those who choose for a week, a year, or a lifetime to follow in the footsteps of
