Academic literature on the topic 'Bible Society of Saratoga County'

AbstractBible courses in public schools are receiving a level of attention not witnessed in decades, and their increased numbers create greater potential for local conflicts and lawsuits over whether they promote religion and violate the First Amendment. Such courses are relatively understudied, and their contents and the paths by which schools decide to offer them are largely unknown. One district that has experienced both conflict and lawsuit over its Bible course is Ector County Independent School District in Odessa, Texas, where a 2005–2008 dispute pitted townspeople and national organizations against each other. This article uses the Odessa controversy as a case study to demonstrate how Bible courses provide a unique window into the confusion found at the intersection of American public education, the study of religion, and church-state relations. Drawing upon school district documents, recordings of school board meetings, journalistic accounts, legal documents, press releases, Bible curricula produced by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools and the Bible Literacy Project, and course materials from district high schools, it traces the development of the conflict. It examines the role that appeals to the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause played in the controversy, confusion over what is legally acceptable in public schools, particularly in regard to historicity issues, and the difficulty in developing a genuinely nonsectarian course. It contextualizes the Odessa debate within Christian Right efforts to influence public schools and larger American society, efforts often grounded in the claim that America is a Christian nation. Controversies such as Odessa's illustrate the tensions produced in American society by competing notions of religious freedom and American identity.

The researcher sought to investigate the rise of prosperity gospel and its momentum in the midst of the learned society who can read the Bible and get its true meaning. The Equation Theory guided the study. The theory is anchored on the principle of reward and retribution, which states that the goodness of a person is confirmed by physical wellbeing and material prosperity while a sinful person is defined by the opposite. The study was carried out in Kawagware, Nairobi County that is habited by good number of people, becoming a soft target for the prosperity gospel. The study targeted congregants attending Christian charismatic churches in the area. Multi-stage sampling techniques comprising of cluster, purposive, convenient and simple random sampling procedures were used to select the churches and congregants. Data was gathered using drop and pick questionnaire for congregants. Data was analysed using SPSS (version 20) and results summarised using descriptive statistics comprising of frequencies, percentages presented using tables. Prosperity gospel was found to be appealing to congregants as it was considered to address their economic wellbeing, social wellbeing, spiritual wellbeing, guaranteeing them for holiness according, having the spiritual appeal as well as promissory prophesies. As a show of commitment, the congregants attend the churches unwaveringly, participate in the church services, and sacrifice their time, offerings, tithes, and gifts. The researcher recommends that different players, government, faith-based and private organisations should provide economic opportunities and create awareness to people living in poverty stricken areas like the Kawangware to enable them make informed decision and have economic independence.

Cooking my house specialty, New Mexican green chili, I heard the knock at the back door and dried my hands to open it for my expected guest. Shyly, the young man in the collar offered a bouquet of bright spring flowers and another gift, the golden- sunned paperback copy of A Sand County Almanac. “I thought you might like this—it’s a favorite of mine.” He had no idea how beloved this book was to me, or the author. In this small gesture, I felt like he was unintentionally offering me a concrete symbol of the growing bridge between the spiritual ethics of Aldo Leopold the naturalist and scientist, and his beloved wife, Estella, the devout Roman Catholic. Leopold had once noted that we would not ever come to integrating a land ethic into our American culture until churches and faith communities got involved. This obviously makes sense when you consider that only a small percentage of the nation, and indeed the world, possess a depth of scientific and/or ecological literacy. But in 2014, over 75% of Americans (and 84% worldwide in 2010) self-described themselves as having a religious affiliation. Another substantially growing group consider themselves spiritual, though not affiliated or have “fallen away” from their original religious practice. Scientific findings though rationally convincing often have less power to move people in their decision making, or perspectives, than faith. In the past, this has often led to land damage rather than health, but as shown by Pope Francis’s recent actions, this paradigm is shifting. Leopold was a student of the Bible, and he observed that the Mosaic Decalogue of the Ten Commandments dealt with humans’ relationships with each other in society. Leopold stated that the human ethical relationship to the land community was an evolving process, just as was human-to-human morality, mentioning the evolvement of human understanding that slavery is wrong. Leopold, in his “Land Ethic” essay, cited that leading thinkers in the Bible, the prophets (such as Ezekiel and Isaiah), urged deeper understandings.