The Church of Ireland in the later seventeenth century faced many challenges. After two decades of war and effective suppression, the church in 1660 had to reestablish itself as the national church of the kingdom of Ireland in the face of opposition from both Catholics and Dissenters, who together made up nearly ninety percent of the island's population. While recent scholarship has illuminated Irish protestantism as a social group during this period, the theology of the established church remains unexamined in its historical context. This article considers the theological arguments used by members of the church hierarchy in sermons and tracts written between 1660 and 1689 as they argued that the Church of Ireland was both a true apostolic church and best suited for the security and salvation of the people of Ireland. Attention to these concerns shows that the social and political realities of being a minority church compelled Irish churchmen to focus on basic arguments for an episcopal national establishment. It suggests that this focus on first principles allowed the church a certain amount of ecclesiological flexibility that helped it survive later turbulence such as the non-jurors controversy of 1689–1690 fairly intact.

By the 1690s, a religious initiative for benevolence and reform had taken firm hold throughout both England and Scotland. For roughly the next fifty years, a coherent movement for enlightened piety operated in the British Atlantic world that would emphasize institutional stability, social reform, and personal improvement. Constituting this movement were transatlantic religious networks that established unprecedented personal and institutional partnerships among traditionally antagonistic religious rivals. These collaborators sought to cultivate piety through traditional forms such as the enrichment of the liturgy, a refinement of architecture, and a fuller development of the faith through the application of the new learning to received revelation. Other efforts included prison reform alongside educational measures to promote Christian knowledge such as evangelism and missions, the teaching of the catechism, the circulation of libraries, and the establishment of charity schools. This was Britain's age of benevolence; at its core was a trans-denominational effort for spiritual renewal and social reform.

From the 1810s into the 1830s evangelical missionaries worked among Scottish Highland Catholic communities with the co-operation and assistance of the people and their priests. The historiography of protestant-Catholic relations is dominated by conflict and that of nineteenth-century Scotland focuses on tension in the industrializing Lowlands. However, the key religious issue for Highland Catholics was the response to expansionist protestantism. The Edinburgh Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools (ESSGS) best epitomizes this movement. Letters from priests and the society's annual reports reveal how long-established rural Catholic communities reacted to missionary activity and how, building on the tense compromises of the eighteenth century, for a few decades evangelicals and Catholics co-operated effectively. The ESSGS learned to involve local priests, provide sympathetic teachers and modify the curriculum. Catholics drew on their experience as a disempowered minority by resisting passively rather than actively and by using the society's schools on their own terms. Many Catholic parents and clergy developed a modus vivendi with evangelicals through their common interest in educating children. The evidence of northwest Scotland demonstrates how a minority faith group and missionaries negotiated a satisfactory coexistence in a period of energetic evangelical activity across the British world.

Henry Boynton Smith (1815–1877) was one of the few nineteenth-century American scholars committed to disseminating German methods of ecclesiastical historiography to a country known for its anti-historical tendencies. However, modern scholars have generally overlooked his significant contributions in this area. Hence exploring his scholarly reception and specifically his History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables will fill a niche in the historiography of church history.

Philip Schaff (1819–1893), the renowned church historian and founder of the American Society of Church History, was one of the few contemporaries of Smith who understood that Smith's scholarship was on a par with that being produced in Germany. Schaff specifically praised Smith's chronological tables—evidence of Smith's German education among some of the best German historians of the period, including Leopold von Ranke and August Neander. This essay reviews Smith's History of the Church of Christ, in Chronological Tables in the context of the newly emerging scientific history and describes his contribution to nineteenth-century American scholarship. Smith is worthy of attention for establishing a central position for the history of doctrine and for promoting the field of church history and the use of chronological tables in nineteenth-century America.

Fundamentalists—those ministers, theologians, and laymen who joined forces against theological liberalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries—cared deeply about history. In this sense they were no different from other protestants of their age, confronted with a historicized Bible and a world falling into the strict sequential order required by modernity. But fundamentalists were different. They viewed time in categories inherited from American protestant thought, as a logical unfolding of a single beginning rather than as open-ended development. This principle of “first things” lay behind their objections to evolution and biblical criticism, but also their stand on social issues, their insistence that the role of women could and should not progress and change over time. Among evangelicals today, the fundamentalist sense of time as the extension of full and complete beginnings still resonates, in opposition to abortion and homosexuality and in their continuing reverence for the American founding fathers. History can be powerfully immediate. For evangelicals, the Bible is not an ancient text about long-dead people but fully contemporary, and thus read not “literally,” as if every word were true, but as if time did not exist. Ultimately, however, history has no depth or traction, or any theological meaning, a parenthesis between the God-ordained beginning and end of time.

An open frontier imagined by restless pioneers. A bleeding back punished by Lenten mortification. A troubled soul leaning over the anxious bench. John Corrigan's groundbreaking book looks over the wide landscape of American religious history with a new dialectic in mind: empty and full. Emptiness is not simply felt but nurtured, imagined, mourned, inculcated, and even welcomed as an individual and communal experience. After his wide-lens introduction of the feeling of emptiness from settlement to the present, he concludes, “In America, the regulation of the feeling of emptiness, the management of that feeling, is accomplished through performance of a multifaceted social drama involving ongoing positioning and repositioning of the Christian in-group vis-à-vis groups perceived as competitors or opponents. The regulating of the feeling of emptiness as a part of the broader dynamics of social differentiation can be observed in groups representing a wide range of Christian ideas and behaviors.” This book then is not only a history of an emotion, but a complex account of group identity and boundary-making, a kind of Rorschach test in which a form of truth emerges in interpreting the shape of darkness against the light.

I first encountered the work of John Corrigan in graduate school. Catherine L. Albanese had assigned his book Business of the Heart in a seminar I was taking. I loved the book, but also felt troubled by it. It focused on religious revivals, a topic I was very interested in. But his approach to revival was clearly not my approach to revival. Corrigan used a mid-nineteenth century religious awakening to offer a compelling and innovative look at a subject I had never considered historically—emotions. Corrigan was asking different questions of his sources than I did, and as a result, he came to very different conclusions than I would have.

In Emptiness: Feeling Christian in America, John Corrigan delivers a sweeping study of the dialectic between emptiness and fullness in American Christianities. He draws from an impressive breadth of sources both over time and within different forms of American Christianity to explore how Christians have integrated the feelings of emptiness and, in turn fullness, as central to their identities, beliefs and practices. At the outset of the book Corrigan explains, “The practice of Christianity that was grounded in the feeling of emptiness, however, was not ambiguous. Christians determinedly chased the feeling of emptiness, valorized it as a longing for God, and performed devotions to prompt and deepen it.” He unpacks this argument in five chapters devoted to feelings, bodies, spaces, times, and believers.

As I read Corrigan's book over the last few months, I encountered it on several occasions with an acute sense of displacement. The margins of my copy are filled with notes reflecting the strange feelings that come from reading a book about emptiness on the #1 train between 225th Street and 66th Street in New York. Each day, as my fellow subway riders and I jam aboard the increasingly-crowded train, we struggle to settle ourselves in acceptable spots; eventually and inevitably this means our bodies find an uneasy peace in a space directly touching those alongside us—legs bumping legs, shoulders touching shoulders, arms along arms. At some points along the journey, this fragile détente of human bodies is prone to crumble; would-be riders barrel aboard, leveraging themselves inside despite slamming subway doors, loud indecipherable admonitions over the P.A., and the muttered protests of those already occupying some portion of the space the newcomers need. For a few weeks I took this trip with Emptiness in tow and I marveled, huddling in my designated square feet and leaning over the book on my lap, as the men, women, and children of New York's west side struggled to find just enough emptiness to enable them to get to work.

My office is the antithesis of emptiness. I am not sure how many books I have managed to cram into a 9 by 12 room, but suffice it to say I have used every available space, even to the point of violating the university's fire code. A year ago, when the fire marshal came around for a routine inspection, he informed me that I could not stack books all the way to the ceiling on top of 6-foot bookshelves but had to leave at least 12 inches' clearance. He told me he would be back for a repeat inspection in a couple of months. This forced me to do some culling—an excruciating task. So over spring break, I reluctantly downsized. Though every book now stood properly upright on a shelf, there was not an inch left anywhere in which to fit even one more volume.