Civil War Religion

They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin's haunting account of the women of Camp Etna - an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning her narrative in 1848 with two sisters who claimed they could speak to the dead, Ptacin reveals how Spiritualism first blossomed into a national practice during the Civil War, yet continues - even thrives - to this very day.

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

Book five begins almost one year from the fateful release of the drug that started it all. Wage war alongside Shaun and Ellie with the rest of the group as the threats increase and the threatened fight back! Lives will be lost but those that refuse to back down will have to fight harder than ever before to see one more day.

Fact-based research in Elmira, New York, shows it has a long, rich history that is both dark and glowing with the spirits of yesteryear. From being a stop on the Underground Railroad to housing Camp Rathbun–a Union Army barracks turned Civil War Prison Camp–to harboring the various spirits of those lives taken involuntarily and those who took their own lives, Elmira and her surrounding cities offer more than a couple mysterious and haunting locations to explore.

NISH is a historical novel based on the life of Abraham Dionysius Chenault, a minister and physician from Lincoln County, Georgia, who lived from the 1830s-1880s. Nish, as folks called him, is perhaps best-known for being tortured by a fanatical Union general in his search for the booty from the robbery of a wagon train of gold following the Civil War in the summer of 1865. The beloved planter was an outspoken supporter of secession and a popular preacher at Methodist camp meetings, despite lacking formal religious training. After relocating to Northeast Georgia, Chenault became a ...

The Bishops’ Wars: The History of the Religious Conflicts that Engulfed Britain and Led to the First English Civil War examines one of the most tumultuous periods in England’s history. Along with pictures depicting important people, places, and events, you will learn about the Bishops’ Wars like never before.

We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is and what it isn't have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe to our present day. Defining the term is acutely political, for ideas about what makes a war "civil" often depend on whether one is a ruler or a rebel, victor or vanquished, sufferer or outsider.

Award-winning storyteller and Methodist pastor, Tom Letchworth, retells some of the most fascinating stories from the American Civil War. War Ain't No Picnic is an entertaining and easy-to-understand collection of Civil War stories. Here are some of the interesting stories Tom Letchworth discovered in his research of the American Civil War. And since he's a United Methodist minister, it's only natural that he saw the spiritual analogies.

America's political landscape is experiencing dangerous polarization and fragmentation, with the extremes pulling the country apart. Voices on the left and right clash over different worldviews, narratives, definitions of America, and what it means to be an American citizen. The levels of incivility and hostility lead some to invoke the language of a cold civil war or even a looming civil war, one that could split the country in two. Is there any way to step back from this dangerous precipice?

In 1986, Ken and Julie Vaughan were living the American dream: good education, interesting career, nice home, and healthy, bright children. When God called them to teach in Africa, they turned their backs on financial and physical security to accept the challenge of living in a third world country. Through a series of God-initiated events, the Vaughans found themselves living in Cote d’Ivoire, teaching at an international boarding school. In 1997, Ken faced a bout with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. After completing treatment, Ken and Julie returned to Africa to resume the life they loved.

SOMETHING'S DIFFERENT ABOUT JONAH Other Civil War re-enactors thought all along there was something different about Jonah the way he corrected the placement of a line of Confederate riflemen, the way he took apart and reassembled an old cannon with ease, the way he walked over the battlefield like he'd been there before. Their suspicions were confirmed when he started firing live ammo into the Yankee lines. Find out if there are any additional casualties at the Battle of Brice's Crossroads more than 150 years after the last shots were fired. WHERE DID HE COME FROM? In the deepest mud at the...

In early November 1834, an aristocratic young couple from Savannah and South Carolina sailed from New York and began a seventeen-year odyssey in West Africa. Leighton and Jane Wilson sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline, visited cities and villages, and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths.

Darius vaporized the Cygnian home world to end the war before it began. It didn’t work. Little does he know, he's been played for a sucker from the start. Terrible as the Cygnians are, there is a more ruthless enemy manipulating the Union to tear itself apart in a bloody war between the Revenants and the Cygnians. Darius is surging up the ranks in the Revenant fleet, winning victory after victory, but they're all hollow with his daughter, Cassandra, frozen in cryo and no way to safely wake her.

It has been famously pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, but it was also not an empire in the sense people expect when hearing the term. In theory, the emperor was the highest prince in Christendom, and his dominion extended the length and breadth of Western Europe. The empire had been created by the papacy in 801 when Pope Leo III famously crowned the supposedly unwitting Charlemagne in Saint Peter’s Basilica, intending to recreate the Western Roman Empire. In truth, the imperial power did not extend beyond central Europe.

The Dunker Church is one of the most iconic structures of the American Civil War. Surprisingly, few people know much if anything about its fascinating story or the role it played within the community of Sharpsburg and its importance during and after the Battle of Antietam. September Mourn: The Dunker Church of Antietam by Alann D. Schmidt and Terry W. Barkley rectifies this oversight in the first book-length study of its kind. On September 17, 1862, two mighty armies grappled across the rolling hills, fields, and woodlots surrounding Sharpsburg, Maryland.

The Obama administration’s overreaching and pervasive secularist policies represent the greatest government-directed assault on religious freedom in American history. So argues conservative movement leader Phyllis Schlafly and journalist George Neumayr. In No Higher Power, Schlafly and Neumayr show how Obama is waging war on our religious liberties and actively working to create one nation under him rather than one nation under God.

Sincere religious reflection was a hallmark of soldiers in both armies in the Civil War, and it was generally an authentic religiosity rather than a battlefield conversion to spirituality. This is not surprising, as these characteristics had been common in the general population since the founding of the United States. Americans, despite their politics and prejudices, had always been and continued to be a strongly religious and highly moral people throughout the Antebellum Period (c. 1820-1860). Although there may have been a large number of battlefield conversions, in the average community, a person's attitude toward devotion was strongly shaped by the dominant religious beliefs of his neighbors or the local population as a whole.

Raised on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux in 1970s Lebanon, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. As the bombs fell, she lived an adolescence of excess and transgression, defying death in nightclubs. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment by day of the same men who would spend the night with her. As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father's last wish is for his favorite song, "Sinnerman" by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral.