Drawing on the witness statements compiled as part of the fifteenth-century diocesan inquest petitioning for the canonization of Jeanne-Marie de Maillé (1331–1414), a French holy woman and mystic, this paper argues that the inquisitorial process of saint-making offered an opportunity for deponents to make use of authoritative legal spaces for their own social and religious ends, and that through their use of rhetorical and narrative devices, deponents could use this contact with institutional mechanisms to perform acts of self-construction and self-authorization, over and above the formal requirements of the process. Through an examination the statements of two witnesses – one a canon of the Basilica of St Martin, and the other a bourgeoise laywoman – this paper illustrates that deponents could make use of a wide range of narrative strategies, from deploying the evidence of gossip to negotiate their own social position, to rhetorically crafting their own experiences in order to comment on and establish their own piety and devotion. The use of these strategies highlights the complexity of the interaction between individuals and institutions, and the multiple possibilities that were enabled by engagement with the machinery of the cult of saints.

This essay responds to scholarly arguments that “religion” arose in the particular circumstances of the modern West, distinct chronologically and conceptually from medieval religio. It argues that in the Middle Ages, Christian persecution helped to form that very notion of religion. It does so via the register of heresy inquisitions conducted by Bishop Jacques Fournier in Pamiers (1318–1325), which contains a curious and overlooked Occitan phrase: entendensa del be (“understanding of the good”). In three provocative ways, entendensa del be helps us to reconsider the origins of “religion.” First, one possibility is that the phrase represents an organic proto-religion among the heretics known as Good Christians. A second possibility is, conversely, that scribes presented an insignificant phrase as a technical term, helping to identify the group as heretical. This would highlight coercive inquisitorial agency in reinterpreting language and behavior, anticipating early-modern and modern constructors of “religion.” Third, by its links to troubadour culture, the phrase reminds us how in Occitania, conquest and resistance intertwined with inquisition's policing of “religious” behavior in a way that resembles claims for modernity. Regardless of which possibility, and most importantly, we discover how medieval persecution helped to form modern religion.

Samuel’s Life of Barsauma, a little-studied, late fifth-century Syriac text, commemorates the ascetic career of a nasty saint. One of the most noticeable features of this monastic hagiography is the high degree and diversity of violence: Barsauma is frequently portrayed as the victim of violence by his adversaries and the perpetrator of violence against his adversaries. Yet, the Life of Barsauma stands out from other late ancient monastic hagiographies because of its enthusiastic depiction of the saint’s lethality. According to Samuel, Barsauma uses his curse to kill an array of individuals, and the mere presence of him and his disciples leads to the mass deaths of Jews gathered in Jerusalem. For most late ancient hagiographers, a saint’s performance of violence was something to be downplayed or specifically rationalized, and rarely if ever would a saint’s performance of holy violence lead to the death of one person, let alone many people. The Life of Barsauma’s deviation from contemporary hagiographical convention compels this article’s investigation into the meaning that Samuel hoped to communicate through his thorough depiction of a lethally violent saint. I argue that Samuel’s Life constitutes the literary amplification of a memory about the historical Barsauma, and an exhortation for the monks of Barsauma’s monastery to imitate him with similarly violent actions. In the end, Samuel’s defies the conventions of monastic hagiography in order to authorize readers to perform their own acts of violence as they construct and police the monastic community’s sectarian boundaries.

This article examines how clerical reformers in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries utilized the Old Testament figure of Deborah to legitimize and encourage the active participation of elite laywomen in ecclesiastical reform. Focusing on key figures such as the countesses Matilda of Tuscany and Adelaide of Turin, the study shows how reformers crafted allegorical and historical links between biblical women and contemporary noblewomen, promoting the latter as agents of reform. Ecclesiastical reformers such as Peter Damian and Bonizo of Sutri made particular use of the Book of Judges’ Deborah to explore concepts of female secular authority defending the Latin Christian Church. The article argues that these reformers newly emphasized Deborah’s militant and authoritative role in the Old Testament rather than promoting existing late antique and early medieval readings of Deborah as a wife, widow, and mother. This shift in exegetical interpretations of Deborah directly supported the roles of elite laywomen in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries as vital co-participants in the ecclesiastical reform movement.

This article examines the series of debates concerning the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the revolutionary Philippines and in doing so demonstrates the contested legacies of the Patronato at the end of Spanish colonial rule. The government of Emilio Aguinaldo in 1898, which in 1899 was inaugurated as a republic, sought to exercise the prerogatives of ecclesiastical patronage as it had been under Spain. By formally regulating and controlling ecclesiastical appointments, the Philippine state addressed the long-standing issue of ecclesiastical secularization (the transfer of parishes from the regular clergy to the secular clergy) that pitted Spanish friars against Filipino diocesan priests, spurring the nationalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In effect, the Aguinaldo government assumed the functions of patronage to ensure the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the status of Catholicism in the new nation-state was debated by Filipino laity and clergy even beyond the center of the revolution. Filipino clergy, for their part, almost unanimously rejected government oversight of ecclesiastical affairs despite demanding church-state union and continued government support. Ecclesiastical affairs in this period were in a constant state of flux, negotiation, and dialogue, underscoring the complex and contested legacy of patronage after Spanish rule.

The rhetoric of spiritual kinship was a pungent part of a “discourse of separation” which materialized among the English puritans in post-Reformation England. Using print literature aimed at properly preparing the godly to come “worthily” to the Lord's Supper, most of which was penned by puritan divines, this article examines family language in use among the godly in the context of the communion meal in the Elizabethan and early Stuart national church. This rhetoric signaled a real identity – an identity tied intimately to the nexus of right doctrine and a certain type of English Protestant practice. The present essay traces out the theological framework that buttressed this identity and suggests the ways in which family language fostered both inclusive and exclusive responses among the godly as they sought to “rightly” celebrate the sacrament. It argues that the use of the language of spiritual kinship helped the godly come to terms with their uncomfortable position in a national church they considered insufficiently reformed, and with the difficulties that ensued from “holy” living, as naturally unholy beings, in a fallen world. This study contributes to our understanding of the informal mechanisms by which early modern English Protestants could navigate the choppy waters of social and religious life in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. More generally, this consideration of a distinctive puritan usage of familiar scriptural language to make sense of England's religious landscape in this period underscores the interpretive importance of remaining acutely aware of discursive context in early modern religious sources.

In the annual presidential address to the American Society of Church History (ASCH), Jonathan Ebel reflects on both the Depression-era meetings of the society and the efforts of agricultural economist Harry Drobish and his team of reformers in 1930s California. Ebel uses this framing of the ASCH meetings nine decades ago and Drobish's project to consider those who risk reform and he argues that a lesson the ASCH of today can take from the example of Drobish is that, even if things can go wrong, a tremendous amount of good can come from engaged action. Ebel asks the society's members to consider how hindsight can benefit them by encouraging them to not be silent or disengaged as individuals, and to think creatively about when and how their work resonates in and is relevant to the current social–political moment.

This article examines the words used by Christian chroniclers in medieval Iberia to refer to North Africans. Following the Islamic conquests of the Peninsula in the early eighth century, Iberian Christians increasingly associated North Africans with Islam – and, conversely, Muslims with North Africa. I demonstrate that the term “Moor” reflected a growing tendency over the Middle Ages to collapse religious identity and geographical origins, and further suggest that it was racialized in various ways. In other cases, chroniclers employed scriptural identifiers like “Moabite” and “Hagarene” to distinguish between Muslims from North Africa and those from Iberia. While such terms acknowledged a measure of geopolitical specificity in the present, they simultaneously asserted a kinship between contemporary Muslims and ancient biblical peoples, casting them as religious others, denying their coevalness with Christians, and further racializing them. Finally, I discuss the use of the word “barbarian,” which was sometimes applied to Muslims in general, but was occasionally used to refer to North Africans in particular, drawing on Arabic usage to associate barbarity and lack of civilization with North Africa. Ultimately, I argue that the application of such labels to North Africans and Muslims functioned to displace them geographically and temporally, serving Iberian Christian colonizing impulses and projects over time.

The wig was the quintessential accessory of eighteenth-century European culture, but the wearing of wigs by clerics became a subject of heated controversy across Catholic societies. Critics of clerical wig-wearing pointed to its inherent vanity, to Paul's proscription against men covering their heads in Church in 1 Corinthians 11, and to its apparent denial of the tonsure's importance as the visible outward sign of clerical status. However, defenders pointed to arguments about the need to cover up imperfections in the priest's body and avoid scandal. Various bishops moved to restrict the use of wigs amongst their diocesan clergy. However, no bishop was more active in legislating than the bishops of Rome themselves. Popes from Clement IX (r. 1667–69) to Pius VI (r. 1775–99) all issued instructions about clerical wig-wearing and their legislation betrays shifting attitudes and approaches. The most zealous rules from the 1720s gradually gave way to more pragmatic ones which attest to the persistent desire of Roman clerics to engage in male status competition and to the growing difficulty that the Church's leadership had in persuading them of the intrinsic superiority of their clerical status.

This article examines eleven communities of non-cloistered religious women in fifteenth-century Rome. These women, known as bizzoche, created a shared identity through their choice of clothing, which did not conform with their elite status, and their acts of piety, such as Eucharistic adoration and service to the poor. Such practices share similarities with the beguines in northern Europe, beatas in Spain and the Americas, and others, pointing to a broader women’s religious movement that transcended geographic space. However, scholarship often examines such communities of non-cloistered religious women in isolation, obscuring such connections. This article seeks to illuminate some of these commonalities and argues that late medieval, non-cloistered religious women across Europe used habit and pious practices to form a shared identity and navigate the gender- and class-based restrictions on publicly practicing their religion.

William Stringer was at various times a cheesemonger, a Methodist lay preacher, a priest, and an American Loyalist exile. Originally from London, Stringer preached the Gospel for the early Methodist movement, but longed for priestly ordination in the Church of England. Unable to achieve this goal due to his humble background, he was instead ordained in 1764 by the controversial and ecumenically minded Greek Orthodox bishop, Gerasimos Avontilies (also known as Erasmus of Arcadia), who ordained several Methodists under Greek Orthodox rites in London. Having acquired illicit ordination, Stringer moved to Philadelphia where he ministered to a parish that had broken from the Church of England during the Great Awakening. The clergy of Philadelphia responded negatively and wrote to Archbishop Richard Terrick of London, who ordered Stringer to desist from his ministry. However, Stringer did such a remarkable job of bringing his congregation back into the Anglican fold that Terrick agreed to re-ordain him in London under Anglican rites in 1773. With the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775, Stringer supported the British cause and rejected the revolt as inconsistent with Christian obedience. He was forced to leave America and return to England, where he lived out the rest of his life as a curate. Despite his initial transgressions, I argue that Stringer was a force for order, stability, and orthodoxy in a revolutionary world.

Howard Thurman, the great 20th-century African American thinker and pastor, has often been characterized as holding an antagonistic view of the Apostle Paul, based primarily on several passages in his most important work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). One of those passages describes the anti-Pauline position of his grandmother, a former slave, Nancy Ambrose. In this article we argue that Thurman was, in contrast to his grandmother, oftentimes an admirer of Paul. Our thorough consideration of Thurman’s published and unpublished work, as well as the work of his various intellectual and religious mentors, uncovers that he had a much more nuanced position on Paul than is normally described. He saw Paul as a profoundly radical and original thinker, who was nonetheless compromised by his Roman citizenship, distancing himself from his fellow Jews. For Thurman, a mentor to many in the civil rights movement, the question of citizenship was crucial, and he used Paul to help explore the complex intellectual, religious, and social situations of African Americans, caught between two worlds, ambivalent about trying to fit into a world that was ambivalent about them. In this way, for Thurman, Paul was a model of personal struggle and religious complexity.

In the mid-twentieth century, a contest played out between evangelicals and mainline Protestant denominations over which organizations would have access to the radio airwaves and whose message, including whose theology, would receive the widest hearing. While networks favored the mainline denominations, a host of independent evangelical stations and the National Association of Evangelicals’ broadcast arm countered the impression that network religion represented American religion more generally. Against this backdrop, the Atlanta-based Protestant Hour radio show, which began as one station in 1945 but boasted 600 participating stations by 1963, sounded a liberal theology that promoted the liberalization of Protestantism throughout its largely southern listening area. Building on Gary Dorrien’s characterization of liberal theology, this essay shows how the theology of three preachers who frequently appeared on the show—Methodist Robert E. Goodrich, Jr., Presbyterian John A. Redhead, and Lutheran Edmund Steimle—presented this liberalism and echoed such evangelical elements as a heightened Christocentricity, repeated reference to the Bible, and personal appeal. Despite the later decline of mainline Protestantism, a type of evangelical liberalism in the 1950s and early 1960s attracted numerous radio listeners in the south contrary to the stereotype of southerners as fundamentalists who embraced a conservative theology.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Protestant internationalism and missions turned their attention to social and economic matters. The 1920/30s saw an agricultural turn that was paralleled by a global discourse on the “improvement” of the rural. While the transformations in Protestant internationalism have been addressed in view of theological, ecumenical, and geopolitical changes, historians have yet to acknowledge the complex interplay of their local and global effects. By focusing on the work of a particular agent in agricultural missions, the International Missionary Council and its rural expert Kenyon L. Butterfield, and their engagement with rural reconstruction in India, China, and Japan, this article argues that impactful schemes necessitated the cooperation of a wide array of actors, from private to state, from foreign missionaries to local Christian and non-Christian communities and activists. Missionary and Christian rural reconstruction in Asia in the interwar period was shaped by forces of nationalism, (anti-)colonialism, and secularization that could benefit, halt, and transform comprehensive schemes. While the impact of missionary rural reconstruction was eventually hampered by its inherently universalist and invasive nature, its drive for professionalization led to manifold cooperations and careers that transitioned well into and in many ways anticipated and prepared a post-World War II development discourse.

John Paget (c. 1574–1638), head pastor of the English Reformed Church of Amsterdam from 1607–1637, helped to shape the future of Presbyterianism. Exiled from England for nonconformity, Paget embraced the cosmopolitanism and religious toleration of his new city, studying Hebrew and Arabic in a multicultural circle of scholars. When the plague struck Amsterdam, he preached sermons on death and visited members in infected homes. When it came to Protestant English exiles, his own tolerance ran short. His strict interpretation of Presbyterian governance met with challenges from Separatists and Puritans advocating for independent congregations (Thomas Hooker and John Davenport), and some of his own congregants who wished for more democracy in church matters. The controversy in Holland, especially via polemical publications, influenced England and America. His last years of ministry were marred by a group known as “The Complainants,” who attempted to unseat him. He relied on his relationship with the Dutch Reformed Church and the city magistrates to maintain his own position and turn away opponents. While his contentiousness dampened his influence and diminished his reputation, nevertheless, Paget was a key agent in the survival of Presbyterianism when it could not flourish in early 17th-century England.

This paper explores the origins of two different emergences of the Christian worldview concept, and their relationship to understandings of cultural conflict. It will offer an analysis of the historical, cultural, and theological context for each emergence. In both cases, worldview was what Ian Hunter has termed a “combat concept.” Section I of the paper will offer an overview of the origins of Christian worldview thinking in the late nineteenth century through the thought of James Orr (1844–1913) and Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Section II will deal with the second major emergence of Christian worldview as a combat concept in the 1970s, focusing on figures like Francis Schaeffer (1912–1984), Chuck Colson (1931–2012), and Nancy Pearcy (1951–). Both contexts exhibited increased cultural and religious pluralism, and conservative Christians displayed a heightened sense of ideological conflict. Worldview became a tool for differentiation from, and contention with, the “other.”

According to an influential narrative, the Cold War era Federal Bureau of Investigation led in the construction of a countersubversive machinery that was designed to punish progressive dissent and to uphold a conservative Christian capitalist public order. This narrative has been constructed with very little research done into the FBI’s actual views of and relations with the Cold War era political and religious Right, the ideology of which it was supposedly enforcing. Recent availability of FBI files makes such a study now possible – and yields results that destabilize the long-dominant narrative. These files show that the Bureau was in fact just as engaged in surveilling and repressing right-of-center organizations, and those of that era’s Christian Right in particular. Materials in the files suggests that far from being an empowering agent for the emerging Christian Right, the Cold War era FBI was in fact policing and enforcing a notably liberal containment consensus and that its views on “genuinely” American religiosity were very far from being far-right.

When evaluating factors shaping the Australian home front during World War I, the impact of preaching is generally overlooked, though historians have identified it as one of the most influential sources of public speech. This paper examines preaching in Melbourne just before and during the war, as reported in the influential Melbourne Herald. It asks how preaching was affected by the outbreak of war, and explores its developments, its reporting and its impacts. It points to conclusions about the nature and place of religion in the life of the city, and the interplay of preaching and war that highlight gaps in our understanding of the interaction of religion and war in Australia at that time. It challenges notions about Australian secularity, the degree of sectarianism, and the place of religion in our understanding of the war in both Australia and the wider British world.

During World War II, the German theologian Paul Tillich, then a professor at Union Theological Seminary, partnered with the United States’ organization Voice of America to deliver over 100 religious addresses in the German language into his homeland. In these broadcasts, Tillich utilized the Lutheran categories of Law and Gospel to identify and discuss the sins of the Nazis (and Hitler in particular) and to remind the German population that there was still hope in redemption. Remarkably, well before the war's end, Tillich argued for German collective guilt and the need for the atonement and expiation of the German people. He continually warned them of impending judgment and inescapable punishment – both human and divine – as the Allies advanced on the battlefield in a race toward Berlin. Yet Tillich often tempered this focus on judgment with an emphasis on the Gospel, the certain hope Germans have in God's salvation. This prism of Law and Gospel pervades the religious addresses. I will place these broadcasts in the context of the war, the wartime work of Voice in America, and what we know of other religious addresses delivered over the airwaves to Nazi Germany, to reveal how Tillich preached resistance to Nazi Germany.

This article tells the story of Lottie Beth Hobbs, one of the most important figures of the anti-ERA movement – and therefore a founding mother of the Religious Right. Although opposition of fundamentalist women to the ERA increasingly has been recognized in the founding of the Religious Right, Hobbs’s role remains underexplored. Relying on a moral and political framework indebted to her lifelong commitment to the Churches of Christ, Hobbs spearheaded a rhetorical and ideological shift that first united disparate conservative causes under a “pro-family” banner, then focused their attention on the threat of a tentacular secular humanism. By focusing on Hobbs’s career, this article bridges two scholarly foci on modern American conservatism, one highlighting anti-ERA organizing in the 1970s and the other focused on “family values” activism during the Reagan administration.