Best Selling Books by Jeanne Halgren Kilde

Jeanne Halgren Kilde''s survey of church architecture is unlike any other. Her main concern is not the buildings themselves, but rather the dynamic character of Christianity and how church buildings shape and influence the religion. Kilde argues that a primary function of church buildings is to represent and reify three different types of power: divine power, or ideas about God; personal empowerment as manifested in the individual''s perceived relationship to the divine; and social power, meaning the relationships between groups such as clergy and laity. Each type intersects with notions of Christian creed, cult, and code, and is represented spatially and materially in church buildings. Kilde explores these categories chronologically, from the early church to the twentieth century. She considers the form, organization, and use of worship rooms; the location of churches; and the interaction between churches and the wider culture. Church buildings have been integral to Christianity, and Kilde''s important study sheds new light on the way they impact all aspects of the religion. Neither mere witnesses to transformations of religious thought or nor simple backgrounds for religious practice, church buildings are, in Kilde''s view, dynamic participants in religious change and goldmines of information on Christianity itself.

In the 1880s, profound socio-economic and technological changes in the United States contributed to the rejection of Christian architectural traditions and the development of a radically new worship building, the auditorium church. When Church Became Theatre focuses on this radical shift in evangelical Protestant architecture and links it to changes in worship style and religious mission.

Nature and Revelation is an absorbing history of Macalester College, from its origins as a Presbyterian secondary school in frontier St. Paul to its current presence as a nationally prominent liberal arts college. Detailing the college’s history, Jeanne Halgren Kilde tells stories of the college’s influential leaders, its defining moments, its rapidly changing student life, and the sometimes controversial evolution of the school’s curriculum and reputation, exploring its transformation from a modest evangelical college into a progressive, secular institution.By highlighting the college’s balancing act between nature and revelation—between the pursuit of empirical knowledge and religious conviction—Kilde traces the impact of changing perceptions of religion and education over Macalester’s more than century-long history. As once-religious colleges gradually shed their church ties and negotiated tensions between religious, vocational, and liberal arts missions, they both mirrored and affected the development of education and the trajectory of American Protestantism itself. Placing Macalester College in a national context, Kilde explores the cultural, political, and pedagogical challenges and shifts experienced by most U.S. institutions of higher education during this turbulent period.While so doing, Kilde uncovers a number of little-known aspects of the college’s history and explores the facts behind such persistent Mac myths as whether its most generous supporter, Reader’s Digest founder DeWitt Wallace, actually coaxed a cow into a college building as an undergraduate or later terminated his financial support of the college in objection to what he considered its leftist political sympathies, or whether the college’s initiative to attract minority students during the 1970s drove its operating budget into an enormous deficit. An enlightening and rich history, Nature and Revelation documents Macalester College’s unique story and reveals its significance to higher education and religion in the United States.

Introduction: Thinking about religious space : an introduction to approaches / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Conceptualizing space and place : genealogies of change in the study of religion / Juan E. Campo -- Hermeneutics of space : sacred space / Michael J. Crosbie -- Urbanism and religious space / Paul-François Tremlett -- Shared space, or mixed? / Robert M. Hayden -- Decommissioning and reuse of liturgical architectures : historical processes and temporal dimensions / Andrea Longhi -- The impermanence of religious space : three approaches to change in the American religioscape / Jeanne Halgren Kilde -- Planetary identities : globalization, climate change and meaning-making practices / Whitney A. Bauman -- Whose place is it? Layers of community and meaning in the land of Shinto and power spots / Caleb Carter -- Religious place/space in premodern China / Wei-Cheng Lin -- National treasures vs. alien species : religious spaces, raccoons, and national identity in contemporary Japan / Barbara R. Ambros -- Visualizing Himalayan Buddhist sacred sites in 3D/VR : pedagogy and partnership / Lauren Leve and Bradley Erickson -- Form and function in the ancient synagogue : evidence from the second to seventh centuries in Palestine and the diaspora / Marilyn J. Chiat -- A little bit of evil : Masjid Kufa in Early Twelver Shi''ism / Najam Haider -- Mediated spaces of collective ritual : sacred selfies at the Hajj / Nadia Caidi and Mariam Karim -- (In)visible priorities : epigraphic power and identity at a Jordanian state mosque / David Simonowitz -- Exploration of religious spaces in Western Africa : combining approaches to understand spaces / Daniel Dei -- Religious spaces as tourist sites in Ghana / Alice Matilda Nsiah -- Sacred space in 19th century Cape Town : mosque, city, landscape and a radical empiricism of the spatial / Ozayr Saloojee -- Mapping the spiritual Baptist universe : black Atlantic cosmography and the spatiality of spirit in Trinidad and Tobago / Brendan Jamal Thornton -- The spaces of Roman religion and Christianity in late antiquity / Béatrice Caseau Chevallier -- Presence and performance : Orthodox spaces of the Eastern Roman Empire / Amy Papalexandrou -- Remnants of Israel : Jewish spaces and landscapes in medieval and early modern Europe / Jessica Renee Streit and Barry L. Stiefel -- the religious landscape and its architecture in contemporary Europe / Esteban Fernández-Cobián -- Pre-Columbian and indigenous religious spaces in Mesoamerica / Brent K.S. Woodfill -- Protestant architecture in Latin America / Rodrigo Vidal Rojas -- Roman Catholic sacred space / Leonard Norman Primiano -- Protestant spaces in North America / David R. Bains -- Eastern Orthodox spaces in America / Nicholas Denysenko -- Diasporic sacred spaces : the case of boundary making at an American Sufi shrine / Merin Shobhana Xavier -- Women''s mosques : spaces to rethink gender and religious authority / Irum Shiekh -- Sites of miracles and other holy places : the Santuario de Chimayó as case study / Brett Hendrickson -- Situating the dead : cemeteries as material, symbolic, and relational space / Avril Madrell and Brenda Mathijssen -- Fundament and abyss : public religion at the Berlin Holocaust Memorial / David Lê.

The Left Behind series of apocalyptic Christian fiction is an incredibly popular phenomenon. Since 1995, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have sold over 50 million copies of their books, and are consistently on the bestseller lists. What does this say about popular Christian fiction? What does it say about pop culture and religion in general? And is there any significance to the biblical references in the books? In this fascinating collection, six contributors discuss aspects of the Left Behind craze and compare the series interpretation of the Rapture and the Second Coming of Christ with the common teachings of western religions. Complete with reading group discussion questions, this is a must-have for readers of Left Behind, true believers, or science fiction fans who want a smart and comprehensive guide to End Times and popular culture.