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Handmaids of the Apocalypse: Queen Gerberga, Empress Adelaide, and the Ottonian Tenth Century Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Bailey R. Poletti
Gerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany and wife of Louis IV of France, receives frequent scholarly mention in relation to a treatise by Adso of Montier-en-Der circa 950–954. The topic of this short work, presented as a letter to Gerberga in answer to a question she posed to the monk, was the life of the Antichrist, that fearful servant of Satan who would appear before Christ's Second Coming
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Rethinking Church–State Relations in Seventeenth-Century Philippines: The Guerrero-Hurtado de Corcuera and Pardo-Audiencia Controversies Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Alexandre Coello de la Rosa
The early modern Philippine archipelago is often described as being under the power of a frailocracy with a far-reaching impact. From a microhistorical approach of ecclesiastical contentiousness, I argue that the intermittent clashes between and inside the two pillars of colonial rule—the civil and ecclesiastical powers—belie the church's overarching control over state affairs. The church was not a
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Adoniram Judson's Burmese Bible: Dependency and Development Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 John de Jong
Adoniram Judson is widely perceived as the pioneer Bible translator in Burma. His translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, however, built upon three centuries of Roman Catholic missionary outreach. Catholic priests had arrived as chaplains for Portuguese immigrants to Burma in the early sixteenth century, but an indigenous Burmese Catholic church was established within a generation through intermarriage
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Introduction for John T. McGreevy, Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis (2022) Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Dana L. Robert
Approximately one third of the world is Christian, and half of those are Roman Catholics. The demographics alone make writing a global history of Catholicism a mammoth task. To attempt the impossible, Professor John T. McGreevy of Notre Dame University has tackled a theme that plays itself out over multiple centuries and diverse cultural settings—the conversation, negotiation, tension, and conflict
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Among All the Nations Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Charles Keith
I spent much of the first decade of the 2000s writing a book about the Catholic Church in nineteenth and twentieth-century Vietnam. I came to the topic as a scholar of Vietnam, and very much not as a scholar of modern Catholicism. In the project's early stages I searched high and low for a general history to fill in the (many) gaps in my knowledge of the subject. The best I could find was Nicholas
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Unexplained Revolutions: The Origins and Ends of Latin American Catholic Upheaval Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Jennifer Scheper Hughes
John T. McGreevy's chronicle of modern Roman Catholic history is a vivid and sometimes jarring reminder of the historical depth of contemporary divisions within the Church, especially as these enter the public sphere. Catholicism: A Global History from the French Revolution to Pope Francis elucidates the church's ambivalent response to the challenge of modernity over the long nineteenth and twentieth
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Perspectives Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Leslie Woodcock Tentler
John McGreevy has written a book of such breadth and erudition as to daunt a would-be reviewer. How to evaluate so formidable an achievement? One could, of course, devote one's allotted paragraphs exclusively to praise, all of which would be merited. (McGreevy's engaging prose would come in for prominent mention.) But what then of the critical eye that every reviewer hopes to train on even the most
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Response Church History Pub Date : 2024-03-19 John T. McGreevy
My thanks to the reviewers for their insightful comments and to the editors of Church History, most especially Jon Butler, for shepherding the reviews. Having once served as a Church History editor, I appreciate his labors even more.
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Medieval Meaning Makers: Addressing Historical Challenges and Rejuvenating Ritual through Allegorical Interpretation of the Liturgy Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Ayelet Even-Ezra
This article studies the act of suggesting symbolic meanings for Christian divine office in medieval Europe. Twentieth-century anthropology placed great emphasis on the anthropologist as an interpreter of symbolic meanings of ritual, but while using indigenous explanations, it did not address explication as a social practice. The phenomenon of systematic symbolical explanation in medieval Europe, I
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The Basel Compactata and the Limits of Religious Coexistence in the Age of Conciliarism and Beyond Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Adam Pálka
The Compactata, one of the most significant documents related to the Council of Basel, have not been analyzed and understood properly in the historiography, both in relation to their content and impact. This article aims to provide a better understanding of the Basel Compactata by discussing the controversial nature of these documents as demonstrated in international diplomacy and polemical writings
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Practice of Piety Translated: The Dynamics of the International Circulation of a Devotional Book Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Jan van de Kamp
This article attempts to develop a more systematic theoretical framework for investigating the international dissemination of devotional books in early modern times. In terms of the concept of cultural translation, the devotional genre offered fertile ground for the dynamics of selection, appropriation, decontextualization, and recontextualization. In this study, a case is made around one particular
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“No Place Is So Dear to My Childhood”: Evangelicalism, Nostalgia, and the History of an American Hymn Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Christopher D. Cantwell
This article tracks the surprising history of a love ballad about a lost sweetheart that went on to become a celebrated gospel hymn about the rural roots of America's greatness. Titled “The Little Brown Church,” but sometimes called “The Church in the Wildwood,” the song's evolution speaks to the ways in which nostalgia became central to the social and religious imagination of those American Protestants
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Guess Who's Coming to Church: The Chicago Defender, the Federal Council of Churches, and Rethinking Shared Faith in Interracial Religious Practice Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 William Stell
On the cover page of the September 23, 1922, issue of the Chicago Defender, editor Robert S. Abbott announced Go-to-a-White-Church Sunday. Less than a month later, the Federal Council of Churches announced its inaugural Race Relations Sunday. Through a comparative analysis of these two events, this article reconsiders historians’ tendency to assume and emphasize a shared faith across racial lines when
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Roundtable on Michael J. Hollerich, Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021) Church History Pub Date : 2023-12-11 Andrea Sterk
Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception
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Community and People in Catholic Thought, 1830–1870 Church History Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Roberto Romani
Far from being limited to denunciations of modernity, nineteenth-century Catholic thought had a programmatic and visionary side. This article deals with the models of community put forward by Lamennais in L'Avenir, Antonio Rosmini, Luigi Taparelli d'Azeglio, and Wilhelm Ketteler. These writers reimagined the foundations of public life against the claims of self-interested individualism and state omnipotence
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A Waldensian Pastor Between the Confessional Myth and National Genealogy History and Religious Reform in Emilio Comba (1839–1904) Church History Pub Date : 2023-11-30 Taro Shirakawa
Emilio Comba, a leading Waldensian historian in the nineteenth century, was a strong advocate for nation-building in post-unification Italy. This article examines the relationship between Comba's “making Italians” endeavors and his historical writings, focusing mainly on his appropriation of the preceding confessional framework. As a fervent nationalist and evangelical pastor, Comba believed that true
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“We Slay Demons”: Moral Progress and Origen's Pacifism Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Jennifer Otto
This article evaluates Origen's criticism of Christian participation in the Roman army in relation to two prominent themes in his writings: the moral progress of the Christian and the role of demons in God's providence. I argue that, for Origen, to be a Christian is to be a soldier, albeit one whose adversaries are not human combatants, but the Devil and his angels. The battle is won when Christians
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The Role of the Cult of Saints in Reshaping Episcopal Leadership and Cracow's Struggle for Primacy in Piast Poland Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Sebastian P. Bartos
In the regional duchies of high medieval Poland, ideological aspects of the piety associated with holy men and women directly affected the hierarchical model of public authority. As active political brokers, the bishops of Cracow assertively operated to formalize, control, and utilize the cult of saints for two main purposes: to buttress the post-Gregorian ideal of clerical leadership and to secure
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Printing, Publics, and Pudding: Charles Chauncy's Universal Salvation and the Material Transformation of New England Orthodoxy Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Michael Baysa
For over thirty years, eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy published his views about universal salvation outside of the printing press. While scholars have argued that he was reluctant to publish because of his heterodox views against a predominantly Calvinist public, the long history of a broadly circulating manuscript complicates any clear intentions toward privacy or secrecy. Instead
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The Dust Bowl, the Depression, and American Protestant Responses to Environmental Devastation Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Randall J. Stephens
The 1930s Dust Bowl on the Great Plains was one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history. Over-farming, severe drought, and high winds primed dust storms. Depopulation occurred in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. All was made worse by the economic crisis. While historians have written extensively about the Dust Bowl, its causes and its effects, there is little detailed
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“Not Only to the Gentiles, but Also to the African”: Samuel Chambers and Scripture Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Janiece Johnson, Quincy D. Newell
Around a hundred Black people joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS Church) in the nineteenth century. From 1873 to 1876, a clerk created one of the most extensive records of an early Black Latter-day Saint when he wrote down Samuel Chambers's religious testimonies given in deacons quorum meetings. Though these records have been known to the academic community for decades
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Introduction: ASCH Panel on Mark A. Noll, America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), 864 pp., $39.95 hardcover Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Grant Wacker
If a random member of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) were asked to select four individuals to go on a new Mount Rushmore of “Most Influential American Religious Historians,” I would wager that Mark Noll would make the cut pretty easily. After many years of laboring in the deep trenches of undergraduate education at Wheaton College, and then the even deeper trenches of graduate education
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Encountering the Bible from Subaltern Sources Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Dennis C. Dickerson
Mark A. Noll's insightful and comprehensive survey of the Bible as foundational to American history skillfully nuances this contested topic. While some might describe the United States as a Bible republic, Noll, in stunningly dense detail and documentation, correctly calls the nation a Bible civilization. In drawing this crucial distinction, Noll demonstrates that the Bible and Biblical literacy underlay
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Three Bible Nation Arguments and the Black Social Gospel Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Gary Dorrien
This book completes the magnificent two-volume work that Mark Noll began with In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2016), or to say the same thing differently, it completes the trilogy of his summing-up books that he began with America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Like its two predecessors, America's Book contains capsule summaries
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The Problem with Biblical Authority Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Amanda Porterfield
Mark Noll's new book is a masterpiece. A monumental work of scholarship and erudition, America's Book merits respect for its artistry as well. The writing is lucid and well crafted. Always judicious, circumspect, and fair-minded, America's Book moves the reader right along, one page to the next, through 846 pages not counting front matter, in a story of enormous importance for understanding religion's
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Rethinking the Decline of a Bible Civilization Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Leigh E. Schmidt
At 846 pages, Mark Noll's history of what he labels America's Protestant Bible civilization certainly has the feel of encyclopedic comprehensiveness. That this hefty volume is but the second portion of Noll's larger history of the Bible in America only adds to the sense of grand summation: the synoptic account of how the scriptures have shaped the nation—its public life, moral order, political divisions
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Which “America”? What “Civilization”? Church History Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Mark Noll
For most of the years I was working on the book that has been so graciously but also insightfully critiqued by these four interlocutors, my working title was Bible Nation: From Tom Paine and Francis Asbury to Francis Grimké and Woodrow Wilson. My plot, as I conceived it, ran from Paine, who inadvertently precipitated an all-but unanimous defense of the Scriptures from a wide swath of otherwise contentious
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Cyril of Alexandria's Renunciation of Religious Violence Church History Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Matthew R. Crawford
Scholarly accounts of the violent events that occurred early in Cyril of Alexandria's episcopal tenure rely most of all upon Socrates's Ecclesiastical History, Damascius's Philosophical History, and John of Nikiu's Chronicle. In contrast, Cyril's own corpus is almost never consulted or engaged by scholars working on these topics, which has resulted in the complete neglect of certain passages that are
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“The Lord does not wish the death of a sinner”: Investigating Selected Ordinary Glosses to Pope Gregory IX's Decretales (1234) on Heretics Church History Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Yanchen Liu
This article provides a new perspective on the discussion of heresy from one of the most influential canonical-jurisprudential commentaries of the Middle Ages: Bernard of Parma's Glossa ordinaria to Pope Gregory IX's Decretales (commonly known as the Liber extra). Based on an analysis of Bernard's legal glosses, with special emphasis on his citation of Roman and canon law traditions, I argue that the
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History and Spiritual Formation: Baron Friedrich von Hügel's Spiritual Nurture Church History Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Robyn Wrigley-Carr
Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925) viewed history as the crux of institutional religion. He also believed that our response to God needs to include all three “Elements of Religion”: the “Intellectual Element” (rational and theological), “Mystical Element” (experiential and devotional) and “Institutional Element” (sacramental, community, tradition and history). Given the role of history in the Baron's
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“The Year of Jubilee is Come”: Black Millerites and the Politics of Christian Apocalypticism Church History Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Benjamin Baker
This article explores the experiences of black people who accepted the teaching of William Miller that Christ would return to the earth in 1843–1844. Heretofore, black Millerites have been almost completely ignored in the substantial historiography of Millerism, millennialism and apocalypticism, and black religion. In this article, I argue that the black experience in Millerism deserves to be studied
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“I Confided in My Mother and She Called the Archdiocese”: Parents and Clergy Sex Abuse Church History Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Colleen McDannell
Scholars have acknowledged that there is a systemic aspect to Catholic clerical sex abuse that acts as a type of grammar structuring behaviors and responses. Feminist critics in particular stress the patriarchal nature of the abuse that connects bishops, priests, and boys together. This essay argues that in addition to public systems dominated by men, there are also private structures that facilitate
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The Economic Reform of Female Monasticism in the Papal States of Clement VIII: Ideas, Actions, and Impacts Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Isabel Harvey
In the Papal States of the end of the sixteenth century, most female monasteries were mendicant. In doing so, nuns violated many rules of the XXVth session of the Council of Trent: they obviously did not respect enclosure, but also were unable to survive only thanks to their real estate properties, as stated by the chapters 2, 3, and 16 of the De Regularibus et Monialibus decree. This financial situation
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Demonic Assault, Providence, and the Search for Salvation in Early Modern Reformed English Protestant Theology Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Brendan C. Walsh
During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—the height of European demonological interest—England experienced a series of demonic possession cases that gained substantial attention from the clergy and laypeople alike. Reported across sensationalist pamphlets and learned demonological treatises, these cases were presented as extraordinary tokens of God's providence intended to be interpreted
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Hidden in Plain Sight: John Cotton's Middle Way and the Making of the Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Michael P. Winship
The 1648 Cambridge Platform, Congregationalists’ first, guided New England Congregationalist church practice well into the next century. Yet the synodical deliberations that shaped the platform remain largely a closed book. Were the contents of all three preparatory platform drafts known, a baseline could be established for inferring those deliberations. But it has long been taken as a given that John
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“An Oppressive Insensibility”: Disestablishment, Clerical Infirmity, and the Origins of the Manual Labor Movement Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Christopher J. Stokum
In the contested spiritual economy of the early nineteenth century, recently disestablished American clergymen consolidated themselves in theological seminaries. Members of the dominant New England Congregationalist and Presbyterian ministries, these seminarians organized a defensive front against itinerant, populist rivals by intensifying their curricula, proscribing physical exertion as a distraction
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The Politics of Media Format: Printing Poor Sarah During the Removal Crisis in Cherokee Nation Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Sonia Hazard
Nineteenth-century Cherokee printers were media theorists who made political arguments through the materiality of Christian tracts. This article turns to the tract Poor Sarah as an illuminating example, especially because Cherokees published it in two editions in 1833 and 1843, affording a comparative analysis from before and after the tribe's forced removal from Cherokee Nation to Indian Territory
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Puritans, Padres, and Pentecostals: Perspectival and Pedagogical Shifts in Americana Church History Church History Pub Date : 2023-05-03 Daniel Ramírez
In this article, I invite the guild to rethink received paradigms and perspectives in the study and teaching of American church and religious history. The common additive approach of the last decades that folds in Latino/a experience usually reflects new themes of contemporary immigration and diversity, but rarely considers constitutive contributions to foundational stories or is conscious of perspectival
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Making Masculine Monks: Gender, Space, and the Imagined “Child” in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Identity Formation Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Jacob W. Doss
Bernard of Clairvaux's letter to his young cousin Robert, written in the early 1120s CE, ignited a public controversy between the powerful Cluniacs and the upstart Cistercians over proper monastic practice and recruitment that smoldered throughout the twelfth century. This article examines how Cistercian polemics arose out of this new monastic competition to form Cistercian identity. Bernard of Clairvaux
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An Herb for Speaking to The Dead: The Liturgical and Magical Life of Hyssop in The Latin Middle Ages Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Michael Barbezat
Magical practices have been described as a point of convergence for different pathways in medieval culture. This article examines one such convergence in the ritual use of hyssop in medieval Latin theology, liturgy, and a group of magical texts linked to the understudied Book of Raziel. In these magical texts, hyssop supposedly helped the living speak to the dead through its use as a tool for sprinkling
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Waldensianism Before Waldo: The Myth of Apostolic Proto-Protestantism in Antebellum American Anti-Catholicism Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Samuel L. Young
Between 1820 and 1850, American presses generated an enormous amount of literature devoted to the myth of apostolic Waldensianism. Though the Waldenses began as a lay reform movement in the twelfth century, speculations about their apostolic origin were popularized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This historical construction gave American Protestants a versatile rhetorical weapon against
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Conquering the Idols: English Iconoclasm in Ireland, 1649–1660 Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Joan Redmond
The English Parliament's conquest of Ireland in the mid-seventeenth century left memories of violence that persist even in modern Ireland. This article considers one important but neglected dimension to the English campaign and subsequent rule: the attack on Irish Catholic devotional objects, including statues, images, vestments. The damage to the physical fabric of Irish Catholicism coincided with
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A New Jerusalem: Flavius Josephus in Early America Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Kristofer Stinson
This article argues that the first-century Jewish historian, Titus Flavius Josephus, was of central importance to early American Protestants as they wrestled with how to construct a divinely upheld polity and with who would be included within it. By tracing the prefaces to the many editions of Josephus that were published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it becomes clear that many Protestant
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The Cost of Democracy: The Church of Ireland and Its Ritual Canons, 1871–1974 Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Alan Ford
In 1870, disestablishment suddenly turned the Church of Ireland from a state church into a democracy, governed by its “parliament,” the General Synod. The empowerment of the laity left it with a distinctive, indeed unique, feature among the churches of the Anglican communion—a set of disciplinary canons designed to exclude high-church ritualism from its worship. Passed in 1871, these canons, the most
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Mobilizing the Spiritual Resources of the Nation: The 1918 United War Work Campaign Church History Pub Date : 2022-12-16 Jeanne Petit
On September 3, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson released a letter praising organizations that had provided services for soldiers, including the Young Men's Christian Association, the National Catholic War Council, and the Jewish Welfare Board. Through the work of these groups, the president declared, “the moral and spiritual resources of the nation have been mobilized.” Wilson then asked that, instead
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Anger, Prayer, and the Transformation of Desire: Augustine's Catechumenate as an Emotion-Shaping Institution Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Alex Fogleman
Anger was a topic of significant reflection in antiquity, and it was taken up in new ways in early Christianity. As contemporary historians explore the myriad ways in which emotions were not only described but also presented, scripted, and made normative in historical sources, greater clarity is needed to understand the ways in which institutions were involved in shaping emotions. This essay argues
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The Bride of the Holy Trinity: The Role of Mary in Mechthild of Magdeburg's Mystical Theology Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Erin Risch Zoutendam
This article adds to our understanding of late medieval women's religious writing by examining the role of the Virgin Mary in Mechthild of Magdeburg's thirteenth-century mystical text The Flowing Light of the Godhead (Das fließende Licht der Gottheit). The Virgin Mary was ubiquitous in late medieval religious writing, but she played different roles and modeled different ways of life, reflecting the
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An Enslaver's Guide to Slavery Reform: William Dunlop's 1690 Proposals to Christianize Slaves in the British Atlantic Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Peter N. Moore
When it was first brought to light in 2010, an anonymously authored, unpublished document from 1690, Proposals for the propagating of the Christian Religion, and Converting of Slaves whether Negroes or Indians in the English plantations, appeared to support claims for an emerging humanitarian sensibility among Christian antislavery reformers in seventeenth-century England. This article argues that
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A Tale of Two Missions: Illinois Choices and Conversions at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Michaela Kleber
The Illinois, particularly the Kaskaskia, are well known to have converted in large numbers to Catholicism under the guidance of Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, another lesser-known missionary society, the Missions Étrangères, also evangelized among the Illinois. The juxtaposition of these two French Catholic missionary societies working among the same Native
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“But All Had Great Reason to Dread!”: Religion, Affect, and Conspiracy in the Stamp Act Crisis Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Joshua D. Urich
This article explores affective and emotional components of conspiracism in the 1765 Boston Stamp Act Crisis. Once a common subject in the study of Revolutionary America, conspiracism has disappeared from the historiography in recent decades. I argue that this is a serious oversight in understanding religion in the Revolutionary era. Unmasking conspiratorial plots against colonial liberties was a religious
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Nicholas Wiseman, The Dublin Review, and the Oxford Movement: A Study with Reference to John Henry Newman, 1836 to 1845 Church History Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Robert M. Andrews
In 1836, a new Roman Catholic periodical, The Dublin Review, was founded by Nicholas Wiseman, Michael Joseph Quin, and Daniel O'Connell. Though religion was only one aspect of its intended focus, the place and identity of Roman Catholicism in post-emancipation Britain was a major emphasis. Of particular focus was the Oxford Movement (1833–1845), otherwise known as Tractarianism. Wiseman, then rector
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Gender, Knighthood, and Spiritual Imagination in Henry Suso's Life of the Servant Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Jacob Randolph
Twenty-first-century scholarship on the late medieval Dominican mystic Henry Suso has seen a marked interest in gendered explorations of his Vita in the realms of authorship, authority, and social and religious prescriptions. In particular, the position of the nun Elsbeth Stagel, Suso's longtime friend, mentee, and narrative subject in the Vita, has come to the forefront as a site of contestation.
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Negotiating Liturgical Obligations in Late Medieval Dominican Convents Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Claire Taylor Jones
Liturgy has often served as a source for studying the identities of medieval religious communities through examining local saints and special chants or ceremonies. This article deepens such approaches by considering the practice of liturgical coordination, which required each convent to reconcile the obligations imposed upon it by the order to which it belonged, the diocese in which it lay, and the
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The Reception of Thomas Delaune's Plea for the Non-Conformists in England and America, 1684–1870 Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Simon Lewis
In a 1683 sermon, Benjamin Calamy, an Anglican priest, claimed that the separation of Dissenters from the Church of England was unjustifiable. Thomas Delaune, a London Baptist schoolmaster, responded in A Plea for the Non-Conformists (1684), which compared seventeenth-century Dissenters to sixteenth-century Reformers who had escaped from the “Church of Rome.” The Restoration authorities judged the
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Delivery and Deliverance: Religious Experiences of Childbirth in Eighteenth-Century America Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Shelby M. Balik
This paper argues that childbirth served as a prism for religious experience in early America, not just among the women who experienced it but also among the members of their households and communities. Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the social and physiological dimensions of early American spirituality by illuminating a religious culture of childbearing
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Beyond the “Marble Arch”? Archbishop J.A.F. Gregg, the Church of Ireland, and the Second World War, 1935–1945 Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Matthew Houston
J.A.F. Gregg, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh, played an important role in religious life across the island of Ireland for half of the twentieth century. He has been portrayed by historians as the “Marble Arch,” a leader who reigned over one Church across two states. This article reevaluates that interpretation: by using the period of the Second World War as a case study, it suggests that the
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Between the Vatican and Moscow: The Lithuanian Imprint on the Death Throes of the Soviet Union (1979–1989) Church History Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Arūnas Streikus
By introducing different types of sources—published documents on Vatican's Eastern policy, archival material of the Soviet governmental agencies, egodocuments of local ecclesiastical leaders—this article tries to identify the role Lithuanian subjects have played in the field of Vatican-USSR relations during the first half of Pope John Paul II's pontificate. The research reveals that, since the end
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Learning from Muslims and Jews: In Search of the Identity of Christ from Eighth-century Baghdad to Seventeenth-century Hague Church History Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Paul C. H. Lim
In past iterations of ecclesiastical historical writings and teachings, there has not always been sufficient acknowledgment of the encounters between Christians and their religious Others. This article is an exercise in diachronic comparative interreligious encounter: a Muslim-Christian engagement in the eighth century CE and a Jewish-Christian epistolary exchange in the seventeenth century CE. The
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The First Catholic Diocese in Asia and the Spread of Catholicism: Juan de Albuquerque, Bishop of Goa, 1538–1553 Church History Pub Date : 2022-03-07 José Pedro Paiva
This article offers an interpretation of the actions of the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque as bishop of the first Catholic diocese in Asia. The analysis considers the local impacts of the episcopal government and the connectivities of its action, particularly through comparison with similar processes adopted in Spanish America. Based on a wide range of historical sources and cross-referencing them
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Sums Theological: Doing Theology with the London Bills of Mortality, 1603–1666 Church History Pub Date : 2022-03-07 Spencer J. Weinreich
From 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603–1604