According to the standard narrative, although John Henry Newman was driven away from Oxford in the 1840s by the dominant Protestant consensus, by the end of his life in the 1890s he was back in favour, fêted in Oxford as a Roman Catholic celebrity and as an esteemed alumnus. This article challenges that interpretation by examining the forgotten controversy over Newman's national monument, a significant aspect of his reception history. It shows how Newman's memory and reputation remained hotly contested, provoking resistance by the dons and citizens of late Victorian Oxford, even in this recently secularised and professedly tolerant university city.

In the wake of World War I and the Spanish flu epidemic, the Anglican layman James Moore Hickson embarked on a five- year international healing ministry. What circumstances contributed to his positive reception by the public and the press, and how did he gain episcopal support and private audiences with the archbishop of Canterbury? Hickson's ministry in Western Australia near the end of his global tour sheds light on some of the reasons why his ministry was so widely accepted.

This article demonstrates how transnational encounters and exchanges can shape and re-shape Christian beliefs and practices in a globalising world. It does this using the example of a transnational network of neo-charismatic churches called Newfrontiers that was founded in the small towns of Sussex during the 1970s but, by 2011, encompassed almost 850 churches in over sixty countries. Drawing on extensive primary research, this article shows how the theological and practical commitment of Newfrontiers churches to racial reconciliation and the building of diverse congregations was forged over thirty years through encounters between British, South African and Ghanaian Christians.

This article unearths the little-remembered history of British fundamentalist organisations of the Cold War era. These bodies constituted the last embers of an organised movement in Britain: the British Evangelical Council after 1953; the English Consultative Committee and the British Council of Protestant Christian Churches from the mid-1950s; the Christian Bible Unity Fellowship in the 1960s; and the British and European Reformation Fellowship in the 1980s. Based on archival and published material, the article argues that these organisations tried to render US-style fundamentalism into a new Anglicised version, but that each failed due to confessional disagreements and personal rivalries.

This article uses the history of Jewish-Christian relations in twentieth-century Britain to shed light on the theological and political changes which have shaped inter-faith dialogue, and explore religious responses to the perceived acceleration of secularism. In so doing it questions the centrality of antisemitism and the Holocaust as the key drivers of change in Jewish-Christian relations and highlights the importance of broader shifts in religious belief, and a growing perception of ‘common ground’ between faiths. While Jewish-Christian relations in Britain are now frequently presented as a model of inter-faith cooperation, this article argues that longstanding theological and political challenges have continued to problematise this role-model status.

Violence is a crucial lens for inquiring historically into Christianity worldwide. The field of World Christianity, however, has been oriented by a paradigm of growth, success and Christian converts’ creative agency. This article establishes the need for a historiographical intervention in the literature on World Christianity through a critical analysis of texts that have formed the field, followed by examinations of anti-Evangelical violence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico, and Catholic-Protestant conflicts in colonial East Africa. These case studies identify lacunae in the field and suggest that violence has often been a constitutive part of the contextual formation of World Christianity.

This article examines the role of the networks and protagonists involved in securing the Bulgarian Church's participation in the seventh Lambeth Conference in London (1930) in their attempt to end the schism between the Bulgarian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople dating from 1872, and to secure a new place for the Bulgarians in the wider ecclesial and political landscape. New evidence, contained in unpublished documents in the Lambeth Palace Archives in London, enables a better understanding of the various connections at work behind the scene, including how the Church of England perceived and responded to complex issues within their own ecumenical strategy and the wider context of British foreign policy.

This article looks at how ZANU and ZAPU, the two main Zimbabwean nationalist groups in UDI-era Rhodesia, sought to present and engage with Christianity in their propaganda. Given that the Rhodesians cast themselves as defenders of ‘Christian civilisation’, it was inevitable that the media war would touch heavily upon ecclesiastical issues. It is contended here that the nationalists developed a powerful argument: that the Rhodesian government and the Churches of southern Africa were falling far short of the ideals of Christianity. This message then in turn served as an important part of their critique of the white minority regime.

As a relatively open academic atmosphere related to religious studies in general became manifest in the People's Republic of China in the early 1990s, new possibilities for studies of various forms of Christianity in greater China (the mainland and Chinese communities outside of the PRC) began to be realised both within China and overseas. Within the first decade of the twenty-first century, two major handbooks related to the study of Christianity in China were produced under the editorships of the Belgian Jesuit scholar, Nicolas Standaert (1959–)1 and the German Protestant scholar, R. G. Tiedemann (1941–2019),2 initiating what should be considered to be the most up-to-date and essentially new standard reference works regarding the study of all forms of Christianity that have had interactions with various Chinese persons over the period of time from the beginning of the Tang dynasty (seventh century) to the year 2000. Both volumes were large by any standard, the former being nearly a thousand pages in length, and the latter extending beyond a thousand pages. Both produced a state-of-the-art account of their particular historical coverage of varying forms of Christianity that came to or emerged within China during those periods. Notably, most of the supporting authors who contributed to those two massive volumes were foreign scholars of the history of Christianity in China and Chinese Christianity.3