1.
Pensacola Christian College
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Pensacola Christian College is a Christian, Independent Baptist liberal arts college in Pensacola, Florida. At the time of its inception in 1974, PCC was opposed to accreditation, Arlin and Beka Horton graduated from Bob Jones University in 1951, and moved to Pensacola, Florida in 1952 to found a Christian grade school. That school, Pensacola Christian Grade School, opened in 1954 and was later renamed Pensacola Christian Academy, in 1974, the Hortons opened Pensacola Christian College to further their vision of Education from a Christian Perspective. Pensacola Theological Seminary, an extension of PCCs graduate school, was founded in 1998, in 1996, state and federal agencies requested millions of dollars of unpaid taxes between 1988 and 1995 from A Beka Book, at the time a division of PCC. A Beka Book, provides a K–12 curriculum that is used by some Christian schools, in February 2012, Arlin Horton announced that he would be retiring from the ministry after the May 2012 school year. The schools board voted unanimously to install Troy Shoemaker, a PCC graduate, mr. Shoemaker obtained a bachelors degree in education from PCC in 1989, and a doctorate of education from PCC in 2007. PCC has eight academic divisions including Arts and Sciences, Basic Sciences and Engineering, Bible, Business, Communicative Arts, Education, Music, the school accepts a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative from the Bible and teaches students young Earth creationism. Students are taught that God created the Earth in six literal 24-hour days, the 4.54 ±0.05 billion years age of the Earth, the Big Bang theory, and scientific theories of abiogenesis and evolution are rejected by Pensacola Christian College. From 1974 until 2011, Pensacola Christian College did not seek accreditation, in October 2013, PCC was officially accredited by TRACS. PCC participates in the National Christian College Athletic Association for intercollegiate sports, Sports include mens basketball and soccer and womens basketball and volleyball. The mens wrestling team won the NCCAA national championship in 1994,1995,1996, and 1998, the Mens Eagles Basketball games as well as the Lady Eagles basketball games are played in the arena level of the Sports Center. PCC also hosts a number of high school sporting tournaments. In addition to athletics, PCC students are also afforded the opportunity to play intramural sports through their Collegians. Sports offered through collegians include soccer, basketball, softball, volleyball, every fall Collegian Soccer culminates with the winners of the playoffs facing each other in the annual Turkey Bowl held over the Thanksgiving weekend. Also in the students can play softball and basketball. The campus offers opportunities for individual or group recreation, such as the Arlin R. Horton Sports Center that opened in 2009, the Sports Center has facilities for ice-skating, bowling, racquetball, miniature golf, table tennis and weight lifting. In addition, it includes a wave, water cannons, an inline skating track, a roof top sun deck. The campus also has the John Ray Hall Field House in which students can play basketball, swim, work out in the weight room, and play tennis in the tennis courts
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Christian
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A Christian is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. Christian derives from the Koine Greek word Christós, a translation of the Biblical Hebrew term mashiach, while there are diverse interpretations of Christianity which sometimes conflict, they are united in believing that Jesus has a unique significance. The term Christian is also used as an adjective to describe anything associated with Christianity, or in a sense all that is noble, and good. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there were 2.2 billion Christians around the world in 2010, by 2050, the Christian population is expected to exceed 3 billion. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey Christianity will remain the worlds largest religion in 2050, about half of all Christians worldwide are Catholic, while more than a third are Protestant. Orthodox communions comprise 12% of the worlds Christians, other Christian groups make up the remainder. Christians make up the majority of the population in 158 countries and territories,280 million Christian live as a minority. In the Greek Septuagint, christos was used to translate the Hebrew מָשִׁיחַ, in other European languages, equivalent words to Christian are likewise derived from the Greek, such as Chrétien in French and Cristiano in Spanish. The second mention of the term follows in Acts 26,28, where Herod Agrippa II replied to Paul the Apostle, Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. The third and final New Testament reference to the term is in 1 Peter 4,16, which believers, Yet if as a Christian, let him not be ashamed. The city of Antioch, where someone gave them the name Christians, had a reputation for coming up with such nicknames, in the Annals he relates that by vulgar appellation commonly called Christians and identifies Christians as Neros scapegoats for the Great Fire of Rome. Another term for Christians which appears in the New Testament is Nazarenes which is used by the Jewish lawyer Tertullus in Acts 24, the Hebrew equivalent of Nazarenes, Notzrim, occurs in the Babylonian Talmud, and is still the modern Israeli Hebrew term for Christian. A wide range of beliefs and practices is found across the world among those who call themselves Christian, denominations and sects disagree on a common definition of Christianity. Most Baptists and fundamentalists, for example, would not acknowledge Mormonism or Christian Science as Christian, in fact, the nearly 77 percent of Americans who self-identify as Christian are a diverse pluribus of Christianities that are far from any collective unity. The identification of Jesus as the Messiah is not accepted by Judaism, the term for a Christian in Hebrew is נוּצְרי, a Talmudic term originally derived from the fact that Jesus came from the Galilean village of Nazareth, today in northern Israel. Adherents of Messianic Judaism are referred to in modern Hebrew as יְהוּדִים מָשִׁיחַיים, the term Nasara rose to prominence in July 2014, after the Fall of Mosul to the terrorist organization Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. The nun or ن— the first letter of Nasara—was spray-painted on the property of Christians ejected from the city, where there is a distinction, Nasrani refers to people from a Christian culture and Masihi is used by Christians themselves for those with a religious faith in Jesus. In some countries Nasrani tends to be used generically for non-Muslim Western foreigners, another Arabic word sometimes used for Christians, particularly in a political context, is Ṣalībī from ṣalīb which refers to Crusaders and has negative connotations
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Christian fundamentalism
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Christian fundamentalism began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries among British and American Protestants as a reaction to theological liberalism and cultural modernism. Fundamentalists are almost always described as having an interpretation of the Bible. A few scholars regard Catholics who reject modern theology in favor of traditional doctrines as fundamentalists. Scholars debate how much the terms evangelical and fundamentalist are synonymous, interpretations of Christian fundamentalism have changed over time. Fundamentalism is a movement manifested in various such as Pentecostalism or Roman Catholicism with various theologies. The movement became more organized in the 1920s within U. S. Protestant churches, especially Baptist, many such churches adopted a fighting style and combined Princeton theology with Dispensationalism. The term fundamentalism was coined by Baptist editor Curtis Lee Laws in 1920 to designate Christians who were ready to do battle royal for the fundamentals, the term was quickly adopted by all sides. Laws borrowed it from the title of a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 called The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth, the term fundamentalism entered the English language in 1922, and is often capitalized when referring to the religious movement. The term fundamentalist is controversial in the 21st century, as it can carry the connotation of religious extremism, some who hold these beliefs reject the label of fundamentalism, seeing it as too pejorative, while to others it has become a banner of pride. Such Christians prefer to use the fundamental, as opposed to fundamentalist. The term is confused with Christian legalism. Fundamentalism came from streams in British and American theology of the 19th century. Modernists attempted to update Christianity to match their view of science and they denied biblical miracles and argued that God manifests himself through the social evolution of society. These latent tensions erupted to the surface after World War I in what came to be called the fundamentalist/modernist split, however, the split does not mean there are just two groups, modernists and fundamentalists. There are also people who considered themselves to be neo-evangelicals, separating themselves from the components of fundamentalism. These neo-evangelicals also wanted to separate themselves from the fundamentalist movement and they in turn had been influenced by the Pietism movement in Germany. A second stream was Dispensationalism, a new interpretation of the Bible developed in the 1830s in England, John Nelson Darbys ideas were disseminated by the notes and commentaries in the widely used Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909. Dispensationalism was a theory that divided all of time into seven different stages, called dispensations
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Modernism
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Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions of horror to World War I. Modernism also rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, and many modernists rejected religious belief, the poet Ezra Pounds 1934 injunction to Make it new. Was the touchstone of the approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the novel, atonal and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and makes use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, others focus on modernism as an aesthetic introspection. While J. M. W. Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists, There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the Pre-Raphaelites actually foreshadowed Manet, with whom Modernist painting most definitely begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, rationalism has also had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and later Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom had significant influence on existentialism. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron, Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station and Kings Cross Station. These technological advances led to the building of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge. The latter broke all previous limitations on how tall man-made objects could be and these engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. Arguments arose that the values of the artist and those of society were not merely different, but that Society was antithetical to Progress, the philosopher Schopenhauer called into question the previous optimism, and his ideas had an important influence on later thinkers, including Nietzsche. Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection undermined religious certainty and the idea of human uniqueness, in particular, the notion that human beings were driven by the same impulses as lower animals proved to be difficult to reconcile with the idea of an ennobling spirituality. Karl Marx argued that there were fundamental contradictions within the capitalist system, historians, and writers in different disciplines, have suggested various dates as starting points for modernism. Everdell also thinks modernism in painting began in 1885–86 with Seurats Divisionism, the poet Baudelaires Les Fleurs du mal, and Flauberts novel Madame Bovary were both published in 1857. In the arts and letters, two important approaches developed separately in France, the first was Impressionism, a school of painting that initially focused on work done, not in studios, but outdoors. Impressionist paintings demonstrated that human beings do not see objects, the school gathered adherents despite internal divisions among its leading practitioners, and became increasingly influential. A significant event of 1863 was the Salon des Refusés, created by Emperor Napoleon III to display all of the paintings rejected by the Paris Salon. While most were in standard styles, but by artists, the work of Manet attracted tremendous attention
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United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
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United Kingdom
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The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom or Britain, is a sovereign country in western Europe. Lying off the north-western coast of the European mainland, the United Kingdom includes the island of Great Britain, Northern Ireland is the only part of the United Kingdom that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. The Irish Sea lies between Great Britain and Ireland, with an area of 242,500 square kilometres, the United Kingdom is the 78th-largest sovereign state in the world and the 11th-largest in Europe. It is also the 21st-most populous country, with an estimated 65.1 million inhabitants, together, this makes it the fourth-most densely populated country in the European Union. The United Kingdom is a monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. The monarch is Queen Elizabeth II, who has reigned since 6 February 1952, other major urban areas in the United Kingdom include the regions of Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. The United Kingdom consists of four countries—England, Scotland, Wales, the last three have devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in their capitals, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, respectively. The relationships among the countries of the UK have changed over time, Wales was annexed by the Kingdom of England under the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. A treaty between England and Scotland resulted in 1707 in a unified Kingdom of Great Britain, which merged in 1801 with the Kingdom of Ireland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Five-sixths of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1922, leaving the present formulation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, there are fourteen British Overseas Territories. These are the remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in the 1920s, British influence can be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former colonies. The United Kingdom is a country and has the worlds fifth-largest economy by nominal GDP. The UK is considered to have an economy and is categorised as very high in the Human Development Index. It was the worlds first industrialised country and the worlds foremost power during the 19th, the UK remains a great power with considerable economic, cultural, military, scientific and political influence internationally. It is a nuclear weapons state and its military expenditure ranks fourth or fifth in the world. The UK has been a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council since its first session in 1946 and it has been a leading member state of the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, since 1973. However, on 23 June 2016, a referendum on the UKs membership of the EU resulted in a decision to leave. The Acts of Union 1800 united the Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved self-government
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Liberalism
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Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality. Liberalism first became a political movement during the Age of Enlightenment. Liberalism rejected the social and political norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a philosophical tradition. Locke argued that man has a natural right to life, liberty and property. Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and sought to replace absolutism in government with representative democracy, prominent revolutionaries in the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of what they saw as tyrannical rule. Liberalism started to spread rapidly especially after the French Revolution, the 19th century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, South America, and North America. During the 20th century, liberal ideas spread even further as liberal democracies found themselves on the side in both world wars. In Europe and North America, the establishment of social liberalism became a key component in the expansion of the welfare state, today, liberal parties continue to wield power and influence throughout the world. Words such as liberal, liberty, libertarian, and libertine all trace their history to the Latin liber, which means free. One of the first recorded instances of the word occurs in 1375. The words early connection with the education of a medieval university soon gave way to a proliferation of different denotations and connotations. In 16th century England, liberal could have positive or negative attributes in referring to someones generosity or indiscretion, in Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare wrote of a liberal villaine who hath. confest his vile encounters. With the rise of the Enlightenment, the word acquired decisively more positive undertones, being defined as free from narrow prejudice in 1781, in 1815, the first use of the word liberalism appeared in English. In Spain, the Liberales, the first group to use the label in a political context. From 1820 to 1823, during the Trienio Liberal, King Ferdinand VII was compelled by the liberales to swear to uphold the Constitution, by the middle of the 19th century, liberal was used as a politicised term for parties and movements worldwide. Over time, the meaning of the word began to diverge in different parts of the world. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, In the United States, liberalism is associated with the policies of the New Deal programme of the Democratic administration of Pres
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Baptists
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Other tenets of Baptist churches include soul competency, salvation through faith alone, Scripture alone as the rule of faith and practice, and the autonomy of the local congregation. Baptists recognize two ministerial offices, elders and deacons, Baptist churches are widely considered to be Protestant churches, though some Baptists disavow this identity. Historians trace the earliest church labeled Baptist back to 1609 in Amsterdam, in accordance with his reading of the New Testament, he rejected baptism of infants and instituted baptism only of believing adults. Baptist practice spread to England, where the General Baptists considered Christs atonement to extend to all people, while the Particular Baptists believed that it extended only to the elect. Thomas Helwys formulated a distinctively Baptist request that the church and the state be kept separate in matters of law, Helwys died in prison as a consequence of the religious persecution of English dissenters under King James I. In 1638, Roger Williams established the first Baptist congregation in the North American colonies, in the mid-18th century, the First Great Awakening contributed to Baptist growth in both New England and the South. Baptist missionaries have spread their church to every continent, the largest Baptist denomination is the Southern Baptist Convention, with the membership of associated churches totaling more than 15 million. Modern Baptist churches trace their history to the English Separatist movement in the century after the rise of the original Protestant denominations and this view of Baptist origins has the most historical support and is the most widely accepted. Adherents to this position consider the influence of Anabaptists upon early Baptists to be minimal and it was a time of considerable political and religious turmoil. Both individuals and churches were willing to give up their theological roots if they became convinced that a more biblical truth had been discovered, during the Protestant Reformation, the Church of England separated from the Roman Catholic Church. There were some Christians who were not content with the achievements of the mainstream Protestant Reformation, there also were Christians who were disappointed that the Church of England had not made corrections of what some considered to be errors and abuses. Of those most critical of the Churchs direction, some chose to stay and they became known as Puritans and are described by Gourley as cousins of the English Separatists. Others decided they must leave the Church because of their dissatisfaction, historians trace the earliest Baptist church back to 1609 in Amsterdam, with John Smyth as its pastor. Three years earlier, while a Fellow of Christs College, Cambridge, reared in the Church of England, he became Puritan, English Separatist, and then a Baptist Separatist, and ended his days working with the Mennonites. He began meeting in England with 60–70 English Separatists, in the face of great danger, Smyth and his lay supporter, Thomas Helwys, together with those they led, broke with the other English exiles because Smyth and Helwys were convinced they should be baptized as believers. In 1609 Smyth first baptized himself and then baptized the others, in 1609, while still there, Smyth wrote a tract titled The Character of the Beast, or The False Constitution of the Church. In it he expressed two propositions, first, infants are not to be baptized, and second, Antichristians converted are to be admitted into the true Church by baptism. Hence, his conviction was that a church should consist only of regenerate believers who have been baptized on a personal confession of faith
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American Baptist Churches USA
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The American Baptist Churches USA is a Baptist Christian denomination within the United States. The denomination maintains headquarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the organization is usually considered mainline, although varying theological and mission emphases may be found among its congregations, including modernist, charismatic and evangelical orientations. It traces its history to the First Baptist Church in America, from 1907 to 1950, it was known as the Northern Baptist Convention, and from 1950 to 1972 as the American Baptist Convention. In 2009, the denomination had 1,310,505 members in 5,402 churches, by the end of 2014, this had declined to 1,198,046 members in 5,120 congregations. The Puritan minister Roger Williams established the First Baptist Church in Providence — now the First Baptist Church in America — in 1638, in the 18th century, they sometimes created local congregational associations for support, fellowship, and work. The evangelical mission led to the establishment of the national Triennial Convention in 1814, an effort by local churches to organize, fund. The ABCUSA descends from this Triennial Convention, the Triennial Convention was loosely structured, and the SBC offered Baptists a more centralized organizational structure for carrying on missionary and benevolent work. In contrast, however, the Triennial Convention afforded local churches a higher degree of local autonomy, the majority of churches in the North continued to work through these separate cooperating societies for missions and benevolence. The societies were united under the umbrella of a convention in 1907. The Northern Baptist Convention was founded in Washington, D. C. on May 17,1907, charles Evans Hughes, the then sitting governor of New York and later Chief Justice of the United States, served the body as its first president. The purpose of the Northern Baptist Convention was to bring about a consistent cooperation among the separate Baptist bodies then existing and it was the first step in bringing together Baptists in the North with ties to the historic American Baptist mission societies in the nineteenth century. These had contributed to establishing schools for freedmen in the South after the American Civil War, as well as working on issues of health. Many of their missionaries and members had worked as teachers in the South, in 1911, most of the churches of the Free Will Baptist General Conference merged with it. The name of the Convention was changed in 1950 to the American Baptist Convention and it was the second step at bringing together on a national level Baptists with ties to the mission societies. The ABC was characterized from 1950–66 with annual resolutions at its conventions having to do with the Civil Rights Movement, without exception, these resolutions were progressive and genuinely encompassing. They addressed both the need for change in attitude and action, and the need for broader social change that could only be instituted through political action. As in many cases, the rhetoric of the annual conventions was sometimes ahead of local activity, in 1964 it created the Baptist Action for Racial Brotherhood, which early the next year produced a pamphlet outlining actions for change in local churches. The black churchmen said the Convention had excluded them from decisionmaking positions, the following year, Dr. Thomas Kilgore Jr. pastor of the Second Baptist Church of Los Angeles, was elected the first black president of the Convention
