Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the 21st Century Book

The New York Times Notable Book about the fastest-growing form of worship on earth: the vibrant, primal spirituality of Pentecostalism.

It was born a scant ninety-five years ago in a rundown warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. For days the religious-revival service there went on and on-and within a week the Los Angeles Times was reporting on a "weird babble" coming from the building. Believers were "speaking in tongues," the way they did at the first Pentecost recorded in the Bible-and a pentecostal movement was created that would by the start of the twenty-first century attract over 400 million followers worldwide. Harvey Cox has traveled the globe to visit and worship with pentecostal congregations on four continents, and he has written a dynamic, provocative history of this explosion of spirituality-a movement that represents no less than a tidal change in what religion is and what it means to people. Daniel Mark Epstein, the acclaimed biographer of the evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, calls Fire from Heaven "a breathtaking story [written] with a novelist's feel for history, a philosopher's clear insight, and a reporter's eye for detail." And the Boston Globe hailed Harvey Cox as "an ideal guide for a pilgrimage through an unfamiliar religious world...able to demystify without desanctifying."