Böcker av James Preston

Within the liturgy, congregations pledge to accept, love, forgive, and nurture the newly baptized member. The church, however, often lives out this covenant selectively, forcing its gay and lesbian members into silence, alienation, and doubt. We Were Baptized Too challenges the church to take seriously its understanding of baptism and communion...

Kent is thought of as the 'Garden of England' and has been described as a county of 'hops, apples and cherries'. This may be true of a large part of the county, particularly after the Weald lost its important broadcloth and iron industries, but north Kent bordering the Thames and Medway became in the nineteenth century the most highly industrialised area of south-east England outside London. Kent, strategically located on the approach to London, had a long association with the armaments industries. It cast iron cannon from Tudor times to the early eighteenth century, provided the navy with warships from private and royal dockyards, and was an important manufacturer of gunpowder and explosives. It became a major supplier of paper to London stationers, and a source of millions of bricks and millions of tons of lime, cement, stone and sand for nineteenth-century developments in London and overseas. To fill a demand created by these industries for machinery, an engineering sector developed, which was at times at the cutting edge of technology. Barge building developed to exploit cheap water carriage of the county's products. Diversified farming provided the raw materials for a variety of agriculturally related activities including milling, tanning, malting and brewing. This book outlines the important place Kent industry held in the economy of southern England, and illustrates what remains extant in what is now essentially a post-industrial era.

Before the late nineteenth century ale and beer, brewed from malt, were widely consumed due to the lack of affordable, safe alternatives. North Kent was well placed for growing and malting barley to supply local and London brewers. While the malting process was to remain unchanged until after the abolition of the Malt Tax in 1880, the organisation of the industry shifted from small independent maltsters to the control of brewers who employed large-scale malthouses. Malting in Kent suffered a slow decline until it finally disappeared in 1981, its fate inextricably linked to national trends in brewing, particularly consolidation leading to the closure of excess brewing capacity and the consequent closure of dependent maltings. This book attempts to chart the history of malting in Kent, explain its processes, its building design and the reasons for its decline. Its heritage in the form of malthouses that survived demolition, now generally listed buildings with a new life as flats or desirable residences, is fully described. The book is well documented and accompanied by a range of archival and contemporary photographs telling the story of an important, but neglected, local industry.