Description

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Presented with original Q-number archival references, these transcripts are reproduced as historical documents for scholarly, theological, and critical engagement.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