Holding On to the Faith

Douglas A. Sweeney is Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought and Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Center for Theological Understanding at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. A specialist in American Christian history and theology, he has published books on the eighteenth-century minister Jonathan Edwards, the New England Theology, and evangelicalism. Charles Hambrick-Stowe, Academic Dean and Professor of Christian History at Northern Seminary, is the author of several books and numerous articles on American religious history from the colonial period through the nineteenth century.

• Chapter 1 Introduction: Confessional Traditions in AmericaChapter 2 "Passing Through Many a Hard School and Test": Confessions, Piety, Liberty and the Lutheran Experiences in the United StatesChapter 3 Contesting the Faith: The Internal Struggle of American LutheranismChapter 4 Presbyterian Confessional Identity and its DilemmasChapter 5 Eternally True, Variably Useful: How Confessions Worked in Some American Reformed ChurchesChapter 6 After Establishment, What? The Paradox of the History of the Episcopal Church in AmericaChapter 7 Who's Got the Spirit in the Episcopal Church? A Case Study of the "Connecticut Six"Chapter 8 Mennonites and Democracy: Shaped by War and Rumors of WarChapter 9 Rome in America: Transnational Allegiances and AdjustmentsChapter 10 Tammany Catholicism: The Semi-Established Church in the Immigrant CityChapter 11 The Eastern Orthodox Christian Church in North America: Continuity and Change in the Twenty-First CenturyChapter 12 Conclusion: Holding Onto the Faith? The Complexity of American Confessionalism

Underrepresented in the canon of American religious historiography, confessional traditions have yet to receive sufficient critical consideration for the role they have played in the narrative of Christianity in the United States. This noteworthy collection of essays opens up that dialogue and provides a superb entry point into the developing conversation about what it means to be "confessional" in America.