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Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of other non-Western religions have become a significant presence in the United States in recent years. Yet many Americans continue to regard the United States as a Christian society. How are we adapting to the new diversity? Do we casually announce that we \"respect\" the faiths of non-Christians without understanding much about those faiths? Are we willing to do the hard work required to achieve genuine religious pluralism?

Children’s ministry leaders who evaluate which curriculum to use for their Sunday school quickly discern vast differences in curriculum design philosophy. In spite of calls for integration, the debate between content-centered and learner-centered children’s Sunday school curricula has not been settled. This article examines a foundational doctrine of the Reformation, the doctrine of Sola Scriptura, in order to apply it to the design and evaluation of children’s Sunday school curricula. After briefly describing the meaning of Sola Scriptura, the article details the implications of Sola Scriptura for children’s Sunday school curriculum design. It then offers an evaluative grid for children’s ministry leaders to use when evaluating curriculum.

A qualitative study was conducted to explore the lived experiences of parents of children with special needs who had a desire for their children to learn about Jesus in a separate Sunday school classroom but did not have a church home. Twenty-one separate Sunday school classes for children with special needs were taught and observed. The ten parents of children with disorders were asked questions to explore their perceptions of spiritual needs and concerns regarding their children.

Much has been written about the profound impact the post-World War II baby boomers had on American religion. But the lifestyles and beliefs of the generation that has followed--and the influence these younger Americans in their twenties and thirties are having on the face of religion--are not so well understood. It is this next wave of post-boomers that Robert Wuthnow examines in this illuminating book.

In 1854, American Presbyterian missionaries arrived in Egypt as part of a larger Anglo-American Protestant movement aiming for worldwide evangelization. Protected by British imperial power, and later by mounting American global influence, their enterprise flourished during the next century. American Evangelicals in Egypt follows the ongoing and often unexpected transformations initiated by missionary activities between the mid-nineteenth century and 1967--when the Six-Day Arab-Israeli War uprooted the Americans in Egypt. Heather Sharkey uses Arabic and English sources to shed light on the many facets of missionary encounters with Egyptians. These occurred through institutions, such as schools and hospitals, and through literacy programs and rural development projects that anticipated later efforts of NGOs. To Egyptian Muslims and Coptic Christians, missionaries presented new models for civic participation and for women's roles in collective worship and community life. At the same time, missionary efforts to convert Muslims and reform Copts stimulated new forms of Egyptian social activism and prompted nationalists to enact laws restricting missionary activities. Faced by Islamic strictures and customs regarding apostasy and conversion, and by expectations regarding the proper structure of Christian-Muslim relations, missionaries in Egypt set off debates about religious liberty that reverberate even today. Ultimately, the missionary experience in Egypt led to reconsiderations of mission policy and evangelism in ways that had long-term repercussions for the culture of American Protestantism.

The 1814 memoir of missionary wife Harriet Newell was important for awakening the early nineteenth-century American Evangelical imagination on behalf of the burgeoning missionary cause. As young women ‘read the self’ and patterned their lives according to the literary examples they encountered, Newell's memoir used the language of ‘usefulness’ as a powerful theological plot. This article hopes to address the lacuna of scholarship regarding the theological aspects of Newell's writing and how it was those aspects in particular which subsequent generations venerated in the creation of missionary wife memoirs.

This paper explores the impact of the Great War (1914–1918) on Christianity in Scotland. This includes the attitudes of various denominations to the war, the rise and fall of religious attendance, and the impact of the war on Sabbatarianism, Sunday schools, church attendance, theology, and social and moral issues in Scottish society.

On January 29, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. This action marked a key step toward institutionalizing an idea that emerged in the mid-1990s under the Clinton administration--the transfer of some social programs from government control to religious organizations. However, despite an increasingly vocal, ideologically charged national debate--a debate centered on such questions as: What are these organizations doing? How well are they doing it? Should they be supported with tax dollars?--solid answers have been few.

The article addresses the family language policies of multilingual families (FLPs) with Ukrainian roots, describing, among others, the language practices of families in different areas. The analysis of the study is based on semi-structured interviews with newly arrived Ukrainian immigrants living in Tallinn. The language ideologies of families in relation to the choice of languages of education are examined. The secondary objective is to find the reasons why some families manage to maintain their national language and culture and others do not. The article shows that the desire to integrate into Estonian society has influenced the choice of language of instruction of the school among newly arrived immigrant parents, whereas, depending on different cases, the choice was both Estonian and Russian-language school. The article also shows the language management of parents of the studied families implemented with a view to maintaining their language of origin, among which, for example, participation in the Sunday school for the study of Ukrainian language and culture is also in focus alongside the language of instruction in a general education school.

This article focuses on religious pedagogies as an essential part of the practice and the making of modern religion. It takes the case of the Syrian Orthodox communities in Kerala, South India to examine how shifts in pedagogical models and practice have reframed their understanding of knowledge and God. The paper highlights two moments of transformation—the nineteenth-century missionary reforms and twenty-first-century Sunday school reforms—that brought “old” and “new” pedagogies into conflict, redefining the modes of knowing and religious subjectivities they presuppose. For this I draw from historical and pedagogical materials, and ethnographic fieldwork in churches and Sunday schools. The paper diverges from widespread narratives on the missionary encounter by showing how colonial efforts to replace ritual pedagogies with modern schooling were channeled into a textbook culture that remained close to Orthodox ritualism. The “new” pedagogy turned learning into a ritualized practice that continued to emphasize correct performance over interiorized belief. Contrasting this with todays’ curriculum revisions, I argue that educational reforms remain a privileged mode of infusing new meanings into religious practice and shaping new orthodoxies, especially under the threat of heterodoxy. This reflects a broader dynamic within Orthodox Christianity that takes moments of crisis or change as opportunities to turn orthopraxy into orthodoxy and renew the faith. The paper engages with postcolonial debates on religion, education, and modernity, and points to more pervasive assumptions about what makes Orthodox Christianity and the modes of knowing and ethical formation in Eastern Christianity.