All ideals of Christian perfection, and mysticism is certainly one of these, are forms of response to the presence of God, a presence that is not open, evident, or easily accessible, but that is always in some way mysterious or hidden. When that hidden presence becomes the subject of some form of immediate experience, we can perhaps begin to speak of mysticism in the proper sense of the term. The responses of the subject to immediate divine presence have been discussed theologically in a variety of ways and according to a number of different models. Among them we might list direct contemplation or vision of God, rapture or ecstasy, deification, living in Christ, the birth of the Word in the soul, radical obedience to the directly present will of God, and especially union with God. All of these responses, which have rarely been mutually exclusive, can be called mystical in the sense that they are answers to the immediately experienced divine presence. Therefore, the mysticism of union is just one of the species of a wider and more diverse genus or group.

The purpose of this paper is to continue and perhaps to further discussion of the basic assumptions that long have undergirded the various general interpretative survey histories of Christianity and religion in America.1 Attention to particular problems, issues, and regions and the struggle with new methods have made available fresh insights into the nature of religious history in the American context. These insights raise the question of whether another general survey history of Christianity or of religion in America can or ought to be written until the profession develops a more adequate interpretive framework built solidly on recent research.

The arduous task of queering the Song of Songs, a book that is ostensibly an unequivocal celebration of male-female sexual love, was accomplished over many centuries by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church (as well as by Jewish Sages of blessed memory, though they were hampered by a modesty and restraint to which their Christian cousins were seldom subject). Night after night in their cells, by flickering candlelight, they queeried the Song of Solomon, strenuously inquiring after its spiritual meaning and confidently setting it forth. And as they did so their austere cells were transformed into lavish theaters. What follows is a series of preliminary portraits of some of the more remarkable performers.

In her controversial novel, No Graven Image (1966), former missionary and best-selling evangelical author Elisabeth Elliot described the visit of a zealous missions executive, Mr. Harvey, to observe her main character, missionary Margaret Sparhawk, working among the mountain Quichua Indians in Ecuador. Harvey, a pompous sort, arrived with two cameras slung around his neck and spent most of his visit snapping photographs. When Margaret suggested it was time to leave the home of Pedro, her Quichua language informant, Harvey demurred, not yet finished with his picture taking.

The twenty-fourth of September 1905 started as a typical Sunday in Zion City, Illinois. Promptly at 2:00 P.M. John Alexander Dowie ascended the platform of Shiloh Tabernacle, robed in the brightly embroidered garments of an Old Testament High Priest. He was acknowledged by the seven thousand souls who sat before him as the Messenger of the Covenant, the third and final incarnation of the prophet Elijah, and the General Overseer and First Apostle of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion. The 6,600 acres of farms, homes, factories, and businesses surrounding the tabernacle were exclusively his. And for all practical purposes, so were the people. One contemporary journalist judged that Dowie had come to possess the “most autocratic power it is possible to wield in this republic,” while another concluded that “no man… of our time has ever secured anything like the personal following he has.” Near the end of the five hour service the prophet changed into his white expiation robes and, as he had done on countless Sundays in the past, prepared to bless and distribute the Holy Sacraments. But this time, in the semi-darkness of the early evening, he seemed to stagger and slump to the floor. The people soon learned that Dowie had suffered a crippling stroke. They also soon knew that their effort to build a biblical Zion on the “sky-skirted prairie” north of Chicago was in shambles.

For centuries, from its Roman endorsement as imperial cult around the year 400 to its revolutionary disestablishment in the 1790s, the Christian religion laid claim to the allegiance of Europe's peoples, even a right to set policies about Jews. This fateful historical conjunction between the making of Europe and the spread of Christian allegiance rested upon an ever-changing mix of custom, law, and conviction, religious in coloration but political, social, and cultural in expression. Diverse practices and patterns, worked out over centuries, became so tightly interwoven that to pull on one was to stretch or unravel another. To call for religious purity or poverty was to upset social and legal custom; to round up heretics was to secure political order, and the reverse; to see into the end-state of things presaged, for some, the overthrow of Roman prelacy as the reign of Babylon, whence its reverse: to manage time and chronology was to stabilize the standing order.

In the early ninth century Bishops Gerbald of Liège and Haito of Basel described the qualities of the ideal country priest.1 Many of his virtues were negative. For example, he was to shun all questionable contacts with women; drunkenness was condemned, and he was to avoid taverns with their salacious amusements; he was not to ape the laity by bearing arms; commerce and usury were forbidden to him as were, of course, all simoniacal practices. More positively, he was admonished to be diligent in his sacramental functions, especially baptism and anointing, as well as celebration of the Mass, and to observe the canonical hours. Finally, he was to instruct his flock in the rudiments of the faith, the Apostles' Creed and the Lord's Prayer, and to exhort them to lead the Christian life. The desire to attain these modestly ambitious goals during the Carolingian period resulted in an increased concern for clerical qualifications. Manuscripts from St. Emmeram at Regensburg and Freising in Bavaria, for example, contain detailed lists of subjects for ecclesiastical examination,2 and the sorts of episcopal statutes or capitularies which Gerbald's and Haito's works represent seem to have been distributed widely throughout the Empire3.

Calvin's political interests had a beginning in his humanistic studies, before his conversion, or commitment to Protestantism. His Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia appeared April 4, 1532. The date of his conversion is much disputed, but there is fairly good evidence for placing it almost exactly two years later, about the time of his visit to Lefèvre in April, 1534. His own statements here must be given more weight than those made by Beza after Calvin's death. If, as is probable, he was inwardly half convinced of the Protestant position in 1532, he was, nonetheless, still clinging tenaciously—in his own words “obstinately devoted (adonné)”—to the papacy and had apparently not definitely discarded any of his traditional assumptions with respect to religion.

The Christianity which developed in the United States [after 1800] was unique. It displayed features which marked it as distinct from previous Christianity in any other land. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Christianity of Canada most nearly resembled it, but even that was not precisely like it.

As Peter Brown has so eloquently described in The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, bones became an avenue to power in late antiquity. Wealthy Christians who could lay claim to the bodies of the holy dead gained status through their willingness to share the gratia thus acquired with those lacking relics of their own; Paulinus of Nola, proprietor of Saint Felix's remains, affords an illuminating example. Patronage was restyled, Brown argues, as the royal, priestly, or monastic controllers of bones became the intermediaries through whom the saints' generosities were bestowed on sinful humans. Yet cooperation was not always the dominant spirit in the dispensing of gratia: relics could provide new opportunities for competition, as is dramatically illustrated by a rivalry confused and perhaps forever obfuscated by contradictory texts. The rivals are the heiress-turned- ascetic Melania the Younger and the empress Eudocia, wife of Theodosius II. The bones are Stephen's.

By asking “what happened to Christian Canada,” I begin with an assumption that there once was a Christian Canada which is now gone. That assumption is intentional. It is intended to highlight not only the dramatic changes that have taken place in Canadian religious life over the last sixty years, but also substantial contrasts between the religious histories of Canada and the United States, which otherwise are so similar in so many respects. This paper explores the question primarily with American observers in mind, for whom the Canadian past is often as much a shadowy mystery as the great expanse of Canadian geography. But I hope Canadians who read this account may benefit from observing how one sympathetic American views their history and also from realizing that the splendid array of marvelous historical studies that have been produced by a splendid array of marvelous Canadian historians have reached at least some appreciative readers in the United States.

In recent years several notable studies—including those by Judith Perkins, Daniel Boyarin, and Elizabeth Castelli—have assessed the importance of martyrdom and suffering in constructions of ancient Christian identity. This essay takes as its starting point the observation by Perkins that in early Christian communities, the threat of suffering (whether real or perceived) worked to create a particular kind of self. In Perkins's view, many ancient Christians came to believe that “to be a Christian was to suffer.” Christian martyr acts, when understood as textual vehicles for the construction of culture and the articulation of Christian identities, emerge as one mechanism by which such selves were constructed. In the pages that follow I will explore how the reading and hearing of narratives about martyrdom constituted an exercise derived from Greek philosophy, adapted to inspire a largely nonliterate audience. This exercise not only trained early Christians to be ready for death and the world to come, but also worked to shape their perceptions of the Christian way of life in this world.

On August 21, 1861, Bishop Auguste Marie Martin of Natchitoches, Louisiana, issued a pastoral letter “on the occasion of the War of Southern Independence.” In it, Martin argued that slavery was “the manifest will of God.” It was the will of God for Catholics to continue “snatching from the barbarity of their ferocious customs thousands of children of the race of Canaan,” the cursed progeny of Noah. It was also the obligation of Catholics to repudiate abolitionists for “upset[ting] the will of Providence” and misusing “His merciful plans for unrighteous actions.” Father Napoleon Joseph Perché, coadjutor of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, submitted his approval of Martin's pastoral statement by printing it in the Catholic newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique. Three years later, the Roman Congregation of the Index issued a statement condemning the opinions espoused by Martin and approved by the French ecclesiastical leadership of New Orleans. The Index was Pope Pius IX's organization in charge of censoring ideas deemed unacceptable to Catholic doctrine. The Index argued against Martin's proposition “that there exists a natural difference between negroes and whites,” and that God sanctioned slavery as a means of redeeming Africans.

My subject is the religion of the black American and my thesis is twofold: that the black man's religion is a religion of soul and that the soul of the black man's religion is his music. My concentration is on the spirituals. The paragraphs that follow are in part an abstract of my paper and in part a bibliographical essay indicating some studies or interpretations on which I draw or to which I am indebted.

Calvinism as an historical movement was exceedingly complex. It was a phenomenon in which theology, economic theory, political philosophy, and a general cultural orientation were inextricably mixed and applied in an intense effort to refashion society into a Holy Commonwealth. In attempting to interpret this movement, as Sidney E. Mead has pointed out, “one is always in danger either of trying to do complete justice to the complexity and landing in a confusing incoherence and lack of clarity, or of seizing upon one interpretative theme in the interest of clarity and landing in over-simplification.” Most of the discussions of Calvinism, in any or all of its various manifestations, have avoided the first alternative—falling into the morass of confusion and incoherence—but many have succumbed to the second—an over-simplification that is definitely misleading.

It has been a truism in the history of medieval religious orders that the Cistercians only admitted women late in the twelfth century and then under considerable outside pressure. This view has posited a twelfth-century “Golden Age” when it had been possible for the abbots of the order of Cîteaux to avoid contact with women totally. Only later did the floodgates burst open and a great wave of women wishing to be Cistercians flood over abbots powerless to resist it. This paper reassesses narrative accounts, juridical arguments, and charter evidence to show that such assertions of the absence of any twelfthcentury Cistercian nuns are incorrect. They are based on mistaken notions of how the early Cistercian Order developed, as well as on a biased reading of the evidence, including a double standard for proof of Cistercian status—made much higher for women's houses than for men's. If approached in a gender-neutral way, the evidence shows that abbeys of Cistercian women appeared as early as those for the order's men. Evidence from which it has been argued that nuns were only imitating the Cistercian Order's practices in the twelfth century in fact contains exactly the same language that when used to describe men's houses is deemed to show them to be Cistercian. Formal criteria for incorporation of women's houses in the thirteenth century are irrelevant to a twelfth-century situation in which only gradually did most communities of monks or nuns eventually identified as Cistercian come to be part of the newly developing religious order.

Although the past two decades have shown signs of scholarly interest in the social history of fourth- and fifth-century Christianity, especially among British scholars, much remains to be done before a synthetic reconstruction will be justified. Among the tasks to be completed is the determination of the social class backgrounds of the later empire's Christian clergy. For if these backgrounds can be established, it will be possible to investigate how extensively they influenced the clerics' thought and action. Unfortunately, the determination of social origins in antiquity is not always a straightforward enterprise. This is particularly true in the case of the Cappadocian Fathers, whose social class membership is the topic of the present essay.

Among the defining traits of Restoration politics was a degree of hostility between the royal court and the English episcopate unprecedented since the Reformation. A long pattern of cooperation between the king and bishops was broken after 1660. The issues of religious toleration and of Charles II's Catholic sympathies particularly divided church and court, and at times rendered them overt political opponents. Significant study has been made of the policy disagreements beneath these battles, and of the political maneuverings that resolved them. Less attention has been given the ideas and attitudes that divided the Restoration court and church leadership. This article will argue that certain intellectual shifts were required before the policy disagreements that divided Charles II's court and the bishops could emerge as open political fights.

When the early nineteenth-century pastor William Henry Foote reflected upon the eighteenth-century Christians who were his forebears in North Carolina and Virginia, he paused at one point to make an observation about the clothes they wore. “A church-going people are a dress-loving people”, he said; “The sanctity and decorum of the house of God are inseparably associated with a decent exterior; and the spiritual, heavenly exercises of the inner man are incompatible with a defiled and tattered, or slovenly mein. All regular Christian assemblies cultivate a taste for dress, and none more so than the hardy pioneer settlers of Upper Carolina, and the valley and mountains of Virginia” As they readied themselves for worship, Foote elaborated, the faithful “put on their best and carefully preserved dress” in preparation for “their approach to the King of Kings”.