In an essay of the early 1920s, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner offered alternative phrasings for the Protestant liberalism against which his generation was in revolt: one could speak of “the evolutionistic optimism of world-betterment,” or simply of “Christian Americanism.”

For the medieval world the Council of Florence provided the last great opportunity to close the gap separating Eastern from Western Christendom. Not only was it the most brilliant convocation of Greeks and Latins in the entire Middle Ages, but it marked the first occasion in centuries that East and West assembled in ecumenical council to debate the differences separating their two churches.

Whenever Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, stood before newly baptized Christians on Easter week, his task seemed straightforward: to explain the meaning of the initiations they had recently undergone. His explanations, however, were peppered with dialogue, as he thought aloud about the impression these rites had made on the new converts. He recounted the previous days' events in these words: “You went, you washed, you came to the altar, you began to see what you had not seen before.” This promise of novel sights, however, could not dispel the neophytes' lingering doubts. Aloud, he imagined their questions: “Is this that great mystery which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard … ? I see waters which I used to see daily; are these able to cleanse me?” Ambrose wondered if the baptism lacked sufficient majesty, such that a catechumen might ask, “‘Is this all?’” Ambrose already knew what he would reply, “Yes, this is all, truly all.” Baptism, the rite often timed to coincide with Easter, might disappoint as much as it inspired awe.

The apt phrase, “a nation with the soul of a church” was coined by G. K. Chesterton in answer to his question, “What Is America?” the title of the autobiographical essay in which he relates how he came to appreciate what the United States was all about. Being irked, and then amused by the kinds of questions asked him when he applied for entrance into the United States, he was led to ask what is it that “makes America peculiar?” He concluded that it was the fact that

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in The Declaration of Independence… It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, and that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.

The hymns of evangelical Protestantism are the most widely used spiritual texts in American history. Sacred lyrics like “All hail the power of Jesus' name,” “Jesus, lover of my soul,” “How firm a foundation,” and “When I survey the wondrous cross” have been sung, preached, and prayed by millions of Americans since the eighteenth century. At worship, revivals, youth services, conferences, conventions, and colleges, and in the family circle, these hymns have been ceaselessly repeated in an unending round of living oral tradition. Since the Great Awakening two and a half centuries ago, the churches of the evangelical tradition have published tens of thousands of hymn texts and tunes. This continuous popularity since colonial times establishes hymnody as a crucial expression of American evangelical religiousness.

With the endowment of a lectureship for the defense of the Christion faith, the distinguished English natural philosopher, Robert Boyle, gave the Anglican church a unique opportunity to counter the atheistic currents of thought which were posing a challenge to the faithful in the late seventeenth century. Of the Boyle lectures preached between 1692 and 1713, the most important and popular ones incorporated the new natural philosophy of the age—including some of the recently published ideas of Newton—in an apologetic which was remarkable for its flexibility and its concern with contemporary theological issues. Within the institutional framework which Boyle's generosity had provided, certain of the Anglican clergy devoted themselves anew to the age-old exercise of utilizing the discoveries of science in the service of their faith. It was particularly appropriate that they do so since many of the challenges were based implicitly or explicitly on a materialistic and mechanistic science.

Some years ago, wrote the Flemish monk Guibert to his friend Radulfus, strange and incredible rumors reached his ears at the Benedictine monastery of Gembloux. They concerned an old woman, abbess of the Benedictine foundation at Bingen-am-Rhein, who had gained such fame that multitudes flocked to her convent, from curiosity or devotion, to seek her prophecies and prayers. All who returned thence astonished their hearers, but none could give a plausible account of the woman, save only that her soul was “said to be illumined by an invisible splendor known to her alone.” Finally he, Guibert, impatient with rumor and zealous for the truth, resolved to find out for himself. In the year 1175 he wrote to this famed seer, Hildegard, with mingled curiosity and awe. Surely she had received “rare gifts, till now practically unheard of throughout all ages”; in prophecy she excelled Miriam, Deborah, and Judith; but let her recall that great trees are uprooted sooner than reeds, and let her keep herself humble.

“The story of the peopling of America has not yet been written. We do not understand ourselves,” complained Frederick Jackson Turner in 1891. Subsequent immigration history contributed to national self-understanding. Eighty years later historians have turned their attention to a second chapter in the halftold tale of the peopling of America. They have begun to concentrate on the story of the regrouping of citizens along racial, ethnic and religious lines, and of their relations to each other in movements of what have come to be called “peoplehood.”

The African Orthodox church, an expression of religious autonomy among black Americans, had its genesis in the work and thought of George Alexander McGuire, a native of Antigua, whose religious journey and changing ecclesiastical affiliation paralleled his deepening interest in and commitment to the cause of Afro-American nationalism and racial consciousness. Born in 1866 to an Anglican father and a Moravian mother, George Alexander McGuire was educated at Mico College for Teachers in Antigua and the Nisky Theological Seminary, a Moravian institution in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands (then the Danish West Indies). In 1893 McGuire, having served a pastorate at a Moravian church in the Virgin Islands, migrated to the United States, where he became an Episcopalian. In 1897 he was ordained a priest in that church and, in the succeeding decade, served several parishes, including St. Thomas Church in Philadelphia, which was founded by Absalom Jones. His abilities and skills were recognized, and in 1905 he became the archdeacon for Colored Work in the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas. Here he became involved with various plans—none of which bore fruit—which would have provided for the introduction of black bishops in the Episcopal church to assist in that church's work of evangelization among black Americans. It is believed, however, that McGuire was influenced by the different schemes which were advanced, and that he “almost certainly carried away from Arkansas the notion of a separate, autonomous black church, and one that was episcopal in character and structure, as one option for black religious self-determination and one avenue for achieving black independence.”

As some recent historians have argued, the phenomenon of “gender,” that is, the way in which a society or group perceives and articulates difference between the sexes, can provide that society or group with fundamental terms in which to understand itself and explain or justify its actions. Consequently, historical evidence of the way groups or societies have perceived and articulated sexual difference—have constructed gender—may therefore take us beyond matters of sexuality per se to wider revelations about the perceivers' sense of themselves1.

It is almost a truism that when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species first appeared, in 1859, many people found its evolutionism to be unacceptable for religious reasons. They thought the theory of natural selection working by random variations conflicted with long-held and cherished beliefs about God and His relationship with man and the world. But although the general fact of the religious opposition to Darwinism is well-known, precise questions about the nature of the opposition—if indeed there was total opposition—have yet to be answered fully The present article seeks to go some way towards the asking and answering of such questions, although the discussion will keep to relatively sophisticated thinkers who took both science and religion seriously, and who were therefore concerned to achieve some harmony between the two. It will not deal with those who cared only for either science or religion.

American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.

The Council of Constance has presented a problem to propapal historians since its close. On the one hand, the council ended the Great Western Schism, establishing an accepted line of popes while condemning doctrinal errors attributed to John Wyclille and John Hus. On the other hand, its decrees, llaec Santa and Freqnens, issued to safeguard the work of reunification and that of reform, later were used to justify the attempt of the Council of Basel to enact an anticurial reform of the church. Haec Santa was exalted to the level of a dogmatic definition in order to justify the Council of Basel's deposition of Eugenius IV, the second undoubted pope in the line begun at Constance.

This article examines medieval liturgical artifacts that survived the English Reformation by being converted to alternative religious and secular purposes. Exploiting both textual and material evidence, it explores how sacred objects were adapted and altered for a range of domestic and ecclesiastical uses, together with the underlying theological assumptions about adiaphora or “things indifferent” that legitimized such acts of “recycling.” These are situated on a continuum with iconoclasm and approached as dynamic and cyclic processes that offer insight into how Protestantism reconfigured traditions of commemoration and patterns of remembrance. Simultaneously, it recognizes their role in resisting religious change and in preserving tangible traces of the Catholic past, showing how converted objects served to perpetuate and complicate social and cultural memory. The final section investigates the ambiguous longer-term legacies of this reform strategy by probing the significance of growing concerns about the sin of ‘sacrilege’ committed by those who had profaned holy things.

Congregational minister and onetime home missionary Josiah Strong (1847–1916) is perhaps best known for his militant advocacy of American expansion. He was also, however, an early leader of the Social Gospel movement who urged the reform of society to cope with the problems of an industrial era. Throughout the thirty-year period during which Strong set forth his views in print (1885–1915) expansion and reform were important themes in his thought, although significant changes appeared in his treatment of both; this was symptomatic of a basic attitudinal shift toward American society.

During the past century the textual criticism and literary history of the Penitentials have received considerable attention, but the investigation of their actual function in social and church life has only begun. Yet the field is inviting. The Penitentials have, for instance, notable legal and economic aspects; they offer considerable information on ascetic practices, they have a bearing on ritual developments; and the relation of their relaxations, compositions and commutations of penance to the development of Indulgences is itself an important question. It is not the purpose of the present article to investigate any of these, but to suggest still another angle of approach. I wish to present some elementary considerations toward the answer to a question which is perhaps more basic than any of those just suggested. The question may be stated thus: What did the Penitentials contribute, and what were they designed to contribute, to the cure of souls? The cure of souls (cura animarum ) means of course the general ministry of religion in the care, and only incidentally the healing, of souls. But the penitent was regarded as one morally diseased and ill, and his treatment is, in the Penitentials, repeatedly, even habitually, referred to as the task of the moral physician. His sins are the symptoms of disease. The penalties enforced are “medicamenta,” “remedia,” “fomenta”—measures designed to restore his moral and spiritual health.

The Iconoclastic controversy was undoubtedly one of the major conflicts in the history of the Christian Church. It was not just a Byzantine conflict; the West was also involved in the dispute. It is true, however, that the West never followed the East in the theological argument, nor did it suffer all the implications and consequences of the Byzantine theology of the Icons. In the history of the Christian East it was, on the contrary, a turning point. All levels of life were affected by the conflict, all strata of society were involved in the struggle. The fight was violent, bitter, and desperate. The cost of victory was enormous, and tensions in the Church were not solved by it. The Church in Byzantium has never recovered again her inner unity, which had been distorted or lost in the Iconoclastic strife.

The experience of Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) and the Christian Assembly (Jidutu juhuichu or Jidutu juhuisuo) in Mainland China after the Communist Revolution of 1949 reveals the complexity of church and state relations in the early 1950s. Widely known in the West as the Little Flock (Xiaoqun), the Christian Assembly, founded by Watchman Nee, was one of the fastest growing native Protestant movements in China during the early twentieth century. It was not created by a foreign missionary enterprise. Nor was it based on the Anglo-American Protestant denominational model. And its rapid development fitted well with an indigenous development called the Three-Self Movement, in which Chinese Christians created self-supporting, selfgoverning, and self-propagating churches. But it did not share the highly politicized anti-imperialist rhetoric of another Three-Self Movement, the Communist-initiated “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (sanzi aiguo yundong): self-rule autonomous from foreign missionary and imperialist control, financial self-support without foreign donations, and self-preaching independent of any Christian missionary influences. As the overarching organization of the one-party state, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement sought to ensure that all Chinese Protestant congregations would submit to the socialist ideology.

Reformed churches in early modern Europe gave special prominence to moral discipline and created institutions to oversee public behavior and promote personal sanctification. These moral tribunals—known variously as consistories, kirk sessions, presbyteries, or Kirchenrat—have been of particular interest to social historians, who have found in disciplinary records a rich deposit for understanding popular belief and daily life in the age of Reformations. Today a veritable “cottage industry” (to use Judith Pollman's apt phrase) of specialized studies exists exploring the form and function of reformed discipline throughout sixteenth-century Europe, from Emden to the French Midi, from the Scottish lowlands to Transylvania. Accordingly, perceptions of these disciplinary institutions have changed significantly. Whereas consistories were once often portrayed as repressive agents of social control concerned primarily with punishing misbehavior and promoting a kind of puritan moral austerity, recent scholarship has shown that these disciplinary institutions played an important role in defining confessional boundaries and preserving the sacral unity (and witness) of the eucharistic community. The importance of Calvinist social discipline in the process of confessionalization and state-formation in early modern Europe is now widely acknowledged. At the same time, specialists have gained new awareness of the penitential and pastoral dimensions of reformed discipline. Consistories concerned themselves not simply with supervising and controlling public behavior and belief, but also with educating the unlearned, defending the weak, and mediating interpersonal conflicts. As Robert Kingdon recently commented regarding John Calvin's consistory in Geneva, “Discipline to these early Genevans meant more than social control. It also meant social help.”