The Collected Sermons of Jim Jones - Volume IV
The 1972 Sermons, Part Two, and Additional Sermons
This volume continues one of the most important documentary projects in the study of modern religious history: the preservation and critical presentation of the sermons of Jim Jones.
Gathering the second set of 1972 sermons alongside additional recovered recordings, Volume IV offers a rare and unfiltered window into the evolving theology, psychology, and rhetorical power of the Peoples Temple leader. These sermons capture Jones at a pivotal moment-when his movement was expanding, his ideas were intensifying, and the foundations of what would become Jonestown were being laid.
Presented with original Q-number archival references, these transcripts are reproduced as historical documents for scholarly, theological, and critical engagement. Readers will encounter Jones's complex synthesis of Pentecostalism, New Thought, socialism, and prophetic authority-alongside the manipulative structures and ideological shifts that would later culminate in tragedy.
Editor Jeff Hood provides a deeply reflective introduction that does not excuse or sensationalize, but instead wrestles with the enduring theological and moral questions raised by Jonestown:
Where is God in horror?
How does faith become coercion?
And what does it mean to seek hope in the darkest corners of human history?
a publication of New Theology School Press
