Thomas Pott takes as a point of departure the gospel’s unmistakable call for the unity of the Body of Christ. This leads him to reflect on several issues over which there is division in the Church. However, none of these issues is capable of endangering the fact that the liturgy bears, manifests, and transmits ecclesial unity uniquely and fundamentally.

Negotiations in Paris provoke both optimism about an end to the American participation in the war and pessimism regarding the consequences of continued conflict in the south. The Harrisburg Seven call national attention to radical peace action. Nixon’s campaign against antiwar Senator George McGovern divides Catholics, a majority of whom vote for the Republican Nixon. The Christmas bombings call forth condemnation from antiwar Catholics. Some Catholic leaders call for amnesty for draft evaders while others oppose it. This raises the issue of national reconciliation. America’s exit from the war calls forth assessments about the conflict and its meaning.

Mutual estrangement characterised the relationship between the popes and the Protestant Churches for centuries after the Reformation. Despite occasional ecumenical stirrings, the creation of Protestant state Churches removed formal contact between popes and Protestants from a theological to a diplomatic plane. The concurrent development of Protestant ideas of history, which styled the pope as the Antichrist of prophecy and the consolidation of the Catholic understanding of him as the steward of an exclusive tradition, further eroded the space for dialogue. Only from the nineteenth century onwards did significant changes alter these patterns of understanding. The growth of developmental historicism began to relativise doctrinal differences; whilst the retreat of the confessional state created renewed possibilities for papal–Protestant contact. These shifts prepared the way for the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, which since the 1960s has transformed relations for the better. Whether formal reconciliation can proceed any further, however, remains to be seen.

This chapter surveys the condition of Roman Catholicism and Roman Catholics in Victorian England. Special emphasis is placed on significant historical, political, aesthetic, and devotional elements of Roman Catholicism in Britain, and how these elements influenced Gerard Manley Hopkins’s life and writing. In particular, the chapter considers how Hopkins’s sacramental vision, cultivated during and following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, profoundly shaped his poetry at the levels of form, feeling, and vision. This chapter therefore examines Roman Catholicism as a transformative vision of everyday life and living, the arts, and vocation for not only Hopkins but also his contemporaries who endured, and subtly resisted if not helped to redress, the social prejudices against and legal exclusions of Roman Catholics throughout the Victorian period.

This chapter chronicles the triumph of a Protestant notion of religious liberty at Independence. The Protestant victory took the form of the late colonial state's domestication of an international legal provision—Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 18 emerged from the concerted effort of international Protestant ecumenists to protect Christianity from the ravages of secularism, manifesting in restrictions on missions in places like Northern Nigeria, among other things. Protestant ecumenists emphasized two religious liberties: the liberty of the proselytizer to preach and the target audience to convert. Further, Protestant ecumenists argued that the Protestant notion of religious liberty trumped arguments about the empire's need to be separate (or distanced) from Christian missions. By narrating the Protestant effort to neutralize a mission-hostile secularist separation with a mission-friendly notion of religious liberty, the chapter argues that these constitutional ideas take shape in specific contestations. Consequently, the chapter makes a case for apprehending these ideas by closely studying the struggles that galvanize them.

In the aftermath of the Great War, the English Province developed a much stronger educational apostolate through publications, newspaper articles, university lectures, and new houses in the university cities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Cambridge, and Stellenbosch in Southern Africa. This was complemented by the opening of a boys school at Laxton in Northamptonshire followed later by a prep school at Llanarth, and later still of a Conference Centre, Spode House, at Hawkesyard. Much of the growth can be traced to the leadership given by Bede Jarrett, Provincial for four terms from 1916 to 1932, who also initiated the mission in Southern Africa. However, the Province maintained its parish commitments, and by the end of the 1950s the Province was stretched too thinly to ensure the well-running of each house. Community and parish life at Pendleton deteriorated to the point where there was no option other than closure of the priory and withdrawal from the parish.

The Stone-Campbell Movement combined the evangelical revivals of the American frontier, the Enlightenment philosophy of John Locke, Thomas Reid, and Francis Bacon, and the democratic ideals of the United States. The “restoration plea” of early Stone-Campbell leaders emphasized four interrelated themes: restoration, unity, missions, and eschatology. Early leaders believed that the restoration of the teachings, practices, and terminology of the New Testament church would lead to visible unity in an increasingly divided Christianity, which in turn would aid global missions and usher in the millennium. They thought restoring the New Testament church would promote greater faithfulness to God and individual freedom of conscience, as Christians would be united around the teachings, practices, and terminology of Scripture alone, not those promoted by later teachers or found in creeds of human origin. Today the movement represents the ongoing desire in American Protestantism for a Bible-based, mission-oriented, non-denominational Christianity.

In the era of the two world wars, internationally minded American statesmen turned their attention to meeting two objectives. The first was to engage the United States more with the wider world; more particularly to embed the United States within an international system dominated by European states but, with the inclusion of Japan, becoming increasingly pluralistic. The second was to use this new American global consciousness to reform the international system so that it accorded with the standards of civilization and operated along commonly regarded civilized norms. The codification and promotion of international law was one of the key methods of achieving these objectives; not coincidentally, many, if not most, of the key American internationalists of the era were lawyers.

In this chapter, I analyze the ideological affinity between PIJ and Iran. I do so by first analyzing al-Shiqaqi’s view on the Shiites, and then investigating PIJ’s support for the Iranian Revolution. We see that the Iranian issue cannot be understood without relating the Iranian Revolution to the leitmotif of al-Shiqaqi: anti-colonialism. Consequently, we see that theological Shiite influence on PIJ is exaggerated. Second, as we assessed the ideological influences on al-Shiqaqi in , we here add to this analysis by comparing the thought of al-Shiqaqi with that of Ali Shariati and Ruhollah Khomeini. In the last section, the analysis is extended to include PIJ’s pragmatic stance in internal Palestinian politics. We see that while the Iranian Revolution embodies the need for regional unity, between Sunnis and Shiites, the resistance against the State of Israel embodies the need for local Palestinian unity.

The Second Vatican Council officially launched the Catholic Church into the ecumenical movement. A reexamination of these texts more than fifty years later suggests areas of critique as well as further possible developments that were underexplored at the time, even though the seeds for these developments were planted at the council.

This chapter explores relations between the Church in Wales and other faith communities. 1920 saw the formation of the Church in Wales as a new province of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The following decades witnessed numerous Welsh contributions to global Anglicanism, including its leadership by a former Welsh bishop, proposals for an Anglican Communion Covenant, and recognition of principles of canon law common to the churches of the Anglican Communion. After 1920, ecumenical relations with other churches in Wales improved gradually, and in the 1970s the church entered a covenant for the union of churches in Wales and today it is an active in Churches Together in Wales. However, from the 1930s, the church entered international ecumenical agreements with churches of other traditions, such as the Old Catholics, the united churches of South India and North India, and, in the 1990s, Lutheran churches of Nordic and Baltic lands. The chapter explores critically the value and challenges posed by these agreements and the role played by leaders within the Church in Wales in their formation. The past twenty or so years have also seen the development of dialogue between the Church in Wales and other major world religions, driven in part by the increasingly pluralistic nature of Welsh society.