It was born at the turn of the twentieth century 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, praises Fire from Heaven as "a breathtaking story [written] with a novelist"s feel for history, a philosopher"s...