Evangelicalism, also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being "born again", in which an individual experiences personal conversion, the authority of the Bible as God's revelation to humanity, and in spreading the Christian message. The word evangelical comes from the Greek (euangelion) word for "good news".
Left Behind is a multimedia franchise that started with a series of 16 bestselling religious novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. It focuses on a seven-year conflict between the Tribulation Force, an underground network of converts, and the New World Order-esque Global Community and its leader, Nicolae Carpathia, who is also the Antichrist. The primary element is a Christian dispensationalist view of the End Times; the pretribulation, premillennial, Christian eschatological interpretation of the Biblical apocalypse.
Nondenominational Christianity consists of churches which typically distance themselves from the confessionalism or creedalism of other Christian communities by not formally aligning with a specific Christian denomination. Many non-denominational churches have a congregationalist polity, which is self-governing without a higher church authority.
John Gordon Melton is an American religious scholar who was the founding director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion and is currently the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, where he resides. He is also an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church.
Craig L. Blomberg is an American New Testament scholar. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of the New Testament at Denver Seminary in Colorado where he has been since 1986. His area of academic expertise is the New Testament. This includes parables, miracles, historical Jesus, Luke-Acts, John, 1 Corinthians, James, the historical trustworthiness of Scripture, financial stewardship, gender roles, Latter Day Saint movement, hermeneutics, New Testament theology, and exegetical method. Blomberg has written and edited multiple books. He is married to Frances Fulling Blomberg and has two grown daughters, Elizabeth Little and Rachel Blomberg.
Stephen H. Webb was a theologian and philosopher of religion.
Richard Price was co-founder of the Esalen Institute in 1962 and a veteran of the Beat Generation. He ran Esalen in Big Sur for many years, sometimes virtually single-handed. He developed a practice of hiking the Santa Lucia Mountains and developed a new form of personal integration and growth that he called Gestalt Practice, partly based upon Gestalt therapy and Buddhist practice.
Francis J. "Frank" Beckwith is an American philosopher, professor, scholar, speaker, writer, and lecturer.
Jeffrey John Kripal is an American college professor. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The academic study of new religious movements is known as new religions studies (NRS). The study draws from the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, history, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and theology. Eileen Barker noted that there are five sources of information on new religious movements (NRMs): the information provided by such groups themselves, that provided by ex-members as well as the friends and relatives of members, organizations that collect information on NRMs, the mainstream media, and academics studying such phenomena.
Randall Herbert Balmer is an American historian of American religion. He taught at Barnard College and Columbia University for twenty-seven years before moving to Dartmouth College in 2012, where he was named the Mandel Family Professor in the Arts & Sciences. He is also an Episcopal priest. He earned his PhD from Princeton University in 1985. He has been a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and at Rutgers, Princeton, Drew University, Emory University, Yale and Northwestern universities and at Union Theological Seminary, where he was also adjunct professor of church history. He has also taught in the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was visiting professor at Yale Divinity School from 2004 until 2008.
Edwin Scott Gaustad was a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside. He achieved fame with his study of the genealogy of religion in the United States, Historical atlas of religion in America. The 1972 edition of this work has been used in secular histories of Mainline Protestantism and the Emergent church movement (denominationalism) for decades, and his a Religious History of America was a standard text for college students. A graduate of Baylor University and Brown University, Gaustad dedicated his career to sharing his expansive research on religious history. Gaustad was president of the American Society of Church History. Gaustad died March 25, 2011, in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the age of 87.
Gary John Dorrien is an American social ethicist and theologian. He is the Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York and Professor of Religion at Columbia University, both in New York City, and the author of 18 books on ethics, social theory, philosophy, theology, politics, and intellectual history.
Protestantism is a form of Christianity that follows the tenets of the Protestant Reformation: a major movement within Western Christianity that began in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to be errors, abuses, innovations, discrepancies, and theological novums within the medieval Catholic Church.
Protestantism is the largest grouping of Christians in the United States, with its combined denominations collectively comprising about 43% of the country's population in 2019. Other estimates suggest that 48.5% of the U.S. population is Protestant. Simultaneously, this corresponds to around 20% of the world's total Protestant population. The U.S. contains the largest Protestant population of any country in the world. Baptists comprise about one-third of American Protestants. The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest single Protestant denomination in the U.S., comprising one-tenth of American Protestants. Twelve of the original Thirteen Colonies were Protestant, with only Maryland having a sizable Catholic population due to the Lord of Baltimore's religious tolerance.
David E. Garland served as the interim president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas. His term began in June 2016 amid the Baylor sexual assault scandal and resignation of former president Ken Starr. Garland's term concluded on May 31, 2017.
David Michael Lindsay is an American sociologist and president of Taylor University. He was also president of Gordon College, a private, Evangelical Christian liberal arts college on Boston's North Shore from 2011 to 2021. Before arriving at Gordon, Lindsay was on faculty for five years at Rice University and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. He is known as a scholar in the study of leadership, elites, evangelicalism, and higher education.
Amir Hussain is a scholar of religion who specializes in the study of Islam. Currently, he is chair of the Department of Theological Studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. In 2020 he was elected as Vice President of the American Academy of Religion. He has done significant publishing work with Oxford University Press, including editing the fifth editions (2018) of two of their main textbooks, World Religions: Western Traditions and World Religions: Eastern Traditions, and the third edition of A Concise Introduction to World Religions.
The John Templeton Foundation is a philanthropic organization that reflects the ideas of its founder, John Templeton, who became wealthy via a career as a contrarian investor, and wanted to support progress in religious and spiritual knowledge, especially at the intersection of religion and science. He also sought to fund research on methods to promote and develop moral character, intelligence, and creativity in people, and to promote free markets. In 2008, the foundation was awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 2016 Inside Philanthropy called it "the oddest—or most interesting—big foundation around."
The believers' Church is a theological doctrine of Evangelical Christianity that teaches that one becomes a member of the Church by new birth and profession of faith. Adherence to this doctrine is a common feature of defining an Evangelical Christianity church.
