Fire From Heaven

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 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.