Previous American Society of Church History (ASCH) presidents have used their presidential addresses for a variety of purposes, from contributing to the cutting edge of their own specialties to scanning the previous highlights of personalities or developments in their field.

Since St. Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima in 1549, the Jesuit mission in Japan had achieved an amazing number of conversions, even though their activity lasted for merely about fifty years. Their great success came to an abrupt end in 1614 when the Bakufu government began the full proscription and persecution of the religion. An earlier ruler, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had already banned Christianity and ordered the expulsion of foreign missionaries in 1587, but without strict enforcement. Since the 1630s, the former Christians were required to enroll in local Buddhist temples and annually go through the practice of treading on Christian icons in order to prove their apostasy. However, many Christians secretly retained the faith by disguising their true religious identity with Buddhist paraphernalia. These so-called “underground” (or sempuku) Christians survived more than two hundred years of persecution, and today some groups still continue to practice their own religion, refusing to join the Catholic Church. The present-day religion of the latter, called “hidden” (or kakure) Christians to distinguish them from the former, has drawn the attention of ample anthropological as well as religious studies.

From November 1, 1395, until August 25, 1396, Ermine de Reims, a peasant widow from Northern France, was systematically beaten and tortured by the devil almost every night. This is at least what the woman told her confessor, Jean le Graveur. This story takes place only thirty years before the formal beginning of the witchcraft repression in the Continent. For that reason I have opted to explore in this article a historical problem that lies at the very heart of the strange case of Ermine: the image of the devil on the eve of the great European witch-hunt. In particular, Jean le Graveur's narration can provide new evidence for assessing the continuities and ruptures between radical demonology and the previous theological conceptions of the devil. The overlap we find in Jean's manuscript between different traditions, contributes to demonstrate that the image of the devil that prevails in times of the early modern witchcraft persecution was not necessarily built in opposition to previous demonological paradigms. The new science of demons that began to emerge during the thirteenth century merely remarked certain traits of the devil of the Fathers, and therefore the differences between both mythologies arose from the decision of emphasizing different components of the very same demonological complex. The Satan of scholasticism, then, was not only an enhanced, revised and expanded version of the Augustinian devil, but the true consummation of the Patristic model, its fullest expression: one that would begin to emerge only at the end of time, on the eve of the Second Coming of Christ.

One of the few Irishmen active on the Continent in the eighth century of whom we have some information was a priest (or bishop) named Clemens. Together with the Gaul Aldebert, this peregrinus was the subject of an extensive correspondence between Boniface and the pope, which eventually led to the condemnation of both men at the Roman Council of 745. The accusations brought against Clemens by Boniface display parallels with known Irish teachings and practices, as well as other allegations leveled against individual traveling Irishmen and the Irish in general. This article closely examines the context of Boniface's charges and introduces an additional source to the framing of his arguments. It argues that the allegations must be viewed in the context of both contemporary practices and debates in Irish church and society, and the portrayal of these Irish peculiarities in texts written in and spread throughout the mid-eighth-century Continent and Anglo-Saxon England.

Despite the political unification of the German Empire in 1871, the longstanding confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants persisted through the early Wilhelmine era. Because confessional identity and difference were pivotal to how Germans imagined a nation, the meaning of German national identity remained contested. But the formation of German national identity during this period was not neutral—confessional alterity and antagonism was used to imagine confessionally exclusive notions of German national identity. The establishment of a “kleindeutsch” German Empire under Prussian-Protestant hegemony, the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf, and the 1883 Luther anniversaries all conflated Protestantism with German national identity and facilitated the marginalization of German Catholics from early Wilhelmine society, culture, and politics. While scholars have recognized this “confessionalization of the German national idea” they have so far neglected how proponents of church unity imagined German national unity and identity. This paper examines how Ut Omnes Unum—an ecumenical group of German Catholics and Protestants—challenged the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity and instead proposed an inter-confessional notion of German national identity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants.

The chamber pot was still full. The Dewy family's servant had not yet completed her morning chore of emptying the chamber pot when she dumped it over the head of their next door neighbor, Goody Ingerson. The unexpected assault was retaliation for the murder of some of the Dewys' hens. In 1714, the Dewys owned over 120 chickens, and as their closest neighbor, Ingerson grew tired of the fowl running freely through the Ingersons' property. The Ingersons chased those chickens out of their garden, barn, barley field, and scurried the unwanted guests out of their house. So, to show her unhappiness, Goodwife Ingerson wrung a few necks. The contents of the chamber pot did not slow her down, as Ingerson sent her daughter home with two more dead hens. Tensions escalated and a small brawl almost erupted when Abigail Dewy ordered her chamber pot wielding servant to apprehend the young girl escaping with the dead poultry. The Ingersons' daughter escaped the servant's clutches before Dewy could mete out a flogging with her whipping cord. The Ingersons' daughter made it home safely (perhaps to a chicken dinner). The case of the great hen squabble went to court, where the Connecticut magistrates ordered the Ingersons to pay for the dead chickens. However, when the court asked Abigail Dewy if she ordered her servant to drag Ingerson's daughter by the hair to the Dewy house, she lied and said no. For that, the Westfield church censured her for the sin of lying.

In recent years, the writings of Ambrose of Milan have enjoyed a revival of interest in historical and theological circles. The work of scholars like Christoph Markschies, Neil McLynn, Daniel Williams, and Marcia Colish has paved the way for a consideration of Ambrose's exegetical corpus, including his Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam, as well. Readers both ancient and modern have generally remarked upon two of the commentary's features: Its derivative nature, particularly Ambrose's generous borrowings from other third- and fourth-century writers; and its pronounced anti-Jewish tenor. This article explores the latter aspect of Exp. ev. Luc. in light of the consistent rhetorical association of Jews and heretics, particularly so-called Arians, in Ambrose's commentary. Both groups are said to share a number of characteristics that Ambrose contrasts unfavorably with pro-Nicene Christianity. These include Jews' and heretics' “literary luxury” as opposed to pro-Nicene simplicity; their barrenness vis-á-vis pro-Nicene fruitfulness; and finally Jewish and heretical faithlessness in opposition to the Nicene faith that Ambrose constructs as the mark of true Christianity. Through a sustained examination of Ambrose's rhetoric in Exp. ev. Luc., this article seeks to uncover the framework Ambrose sought to create for his fourth-century audience by establishing and exploiting associations between Jews and heretics.

“‘God Is My Partner’: An Evangelical Business Man Confronts Depression and War” chronicles the early career of R. G. LeTourneau, an industrialist and lay preacher whose life challenges the historiography of mid-twentieth-century fundamentalism as apolitical and otherworldly. In the 1930s and 1940s, every businessman had to grapple with the expanding federal state under the New Deal and in World War II. LeTourneau exemplified theologically conservative evangelical resourcefulness under changing political and economic conditions. Born in 1888 to a Plymouth Brethren family, his cultural memory reached back to the evangelical business activism of the nineteenth century, while his future lay in the fundamentalist subculture that the Brethren did much to create. However, as a businessman, LeTourneau had little patience with doctrines dividing “the world” from the church. He integrated evangelicalism into his manufacturing and managerial roles, and pushed fundamentalist clergy to tap laymen's proselytizing energy. Between 1930 and 1943, the years on which this article focuses, LeTourneau attacked dilemmas that preoccupied other evangelical business men: higher taxes, greater regulation, a forceful labor movement, and the challenge, as he saw it, to uphold the gospel and private enterprise against communist subversion. Business men such as LeTourneau represented the front line of what scholars have too often dismissed as trivial: evangelical politics during the New Deal.

Toyohiko Kagawa served as the leading Christian voice in Japan from the 1920s through the 1940s. While nationally respected throughout Japan, he also became a hero among American Protestants. Kagawa's popularity in the West rose during a time of transition for mainline Protestantism. The American mainline's optimism and dominance as the religious “establishment” began to falter. It faced both religious and economic depression, internal theological divisions, and a reassessment of their mandate for missions. In the 1930s, mainline Protestants in America were searching for a voice, and Kagawa provided one. Long before the recent scholarship on the rise of global Christianity, the mainline had turned to World Christianity as a model. It was not simply Kagawa's message as a world statesman, however, that drew American Protestants. They also employed him as a symbol for their own aims and ambitions. At a time of reevaluating the foreign mission enterprise, Kagawa and an indigenous Eastern church reminded the mainline of past success while promising hope for the future. As an interpreter of social issues, Kagawa likewise spoke a contemporary idiom. For a short time, the Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa became a Western hero, but a hero shaped through a particular Western lens.

Historians of science have often looked to the authentication of miracles at canonization trials as a way to investigate the ways in which religious and scientific understandings of the natural and the miraculous came together and, sometimes, into conflict. Most historians of science who have forayed into the world of miracles have, understandably, stopped at the moment of a saint's canonization. Examining the treatment of a saint's miracles both before and after the canonization process, however, yields a different picture. Drawing upon materials from the 1455 canonization and subsequent cult of the Dominican Vincent Ferrer (1350–1419), this essay reveals, first, that papal approval marked only one of several ways in which miracles received publicly-accepted “authentication,” and second, that, after the moment of canonization, the idea of carefully authenticated miracles became irrelevant not simply for the great masses of the faithful, but also for the ecclesiastical hierarchy, who adopted an ever shifting rhetoric of authenticity as authors used tales of the saint's “authentic” miracles to drive home their own various polemical points.

Stephen Riggs, Presbyterian missionary to the Dakota Indians, anxiously awaited a letter from the American Tract Society. He expected a reply about his proposed account of the recent war between the Dakotas and Euro-American settlers in Minnesota. After more than two centuries of contact between Dakotas and Europeans, and later Americans, relations had broken down entirely. Confined to reservations with some of their people starving, disgruntled Dakota warriors attacked villages and outlying cabins across southern Minnesota. Over several weeks in August and September 1862, they killed at least five hundred settlers and depopulated as many as twenty-three counties. The Reverend Riggs and his family barely escaped. Like so many Minnesota settlers, their home and possessions were destroyed. Military reinforcements eventually stopped the Dakotas' progress, compelling some to surrender and others to escape west to the plains. When hostilities ended, Riggs served as an interpreter in the negotiations over captives and at military tribunals organized to deal with detained Dakota fighters. He later visited Dakotas incarcerated in prison camps, paying special attention to the more than three hundred men sentenced to death for their part in the uprising. In light of his dramatic experience, Riggs proposed an account of his family's escape, along with details of the Dakota warriors' capture and confinement, in order to share how God had worked through this “mighty upheaval.”

Although the Sancta Sanctorum preserved some of the most venerated relics in Rome and a miraculous image of Christ, until the early twentieth century strict rules limiting access to the space made a formal examination of these objects nearly impossible. The series of investigations and resulting publications of the Sancta Sanctorum and its treasure of reliquaries, relics, and icon that took place between 1903 and 1908 therefore demonstrate an important turning point in the Church's attitude toward the medieval chapel's sanctified space. The papal permission given to scholars such as Florian Jubaru, Hartmann Grisar, Philippe Lauer, and Josef Wilpert allowed, for the first time, a scientific examination and cataloging of the chapel's objects. The permission, however, also instigated an environment of intense academic competition, as noted especially in the publications of Grisar and Lauer. This article discusses the explorations of the Sancta Sanctorum's holy objects in the context of the highly charged political environment of early twentieth-century Rome. The article suggests that concerns over artistic patrimony, the financial stability of the Vatican, the relationship between the papacy and the Italian state, and shifting trends in scholarship played roles in the decision to open the “Holy of Holies” and reveal the contents of the treasure of the Sancta Sanctorum.

This article traces the basic qualities of big science and applies them to the history of what I envision as “big religion.” Big religion offers a model for understanding several developments in mid-century American religious history, including religious revival within the mainline churches and synagogues, an evangelical resurgence, and various forms of backlash as well. Like big science, big religion peaked during the postwar era (though it built on earlier foundations) and is characterized by heightened institutionalization, professionalization, centralization of knowledge, government entanglements, and public support, as well as opposition. With big science as a guide, the concept of big religion offers historians of American religion an analogous manner of understanding the development of institutions, individuals, and movements within American religion, as well as responses and backlashes against them, as part of the same overarching phenomenon.

Late in 1888, a swift and public rift occurred between Mary Baker Eddy and her student Ursula N. Gestefeld. Historians agree it was a significant break, generally glossing its cause as a personal quarrel later codified in separate organizations: Eddy's Church of Christ, Scientist, reorganized in 1892, and Gestefeld's Church of the New Thought. This article finds, however, that the rift between Eddy and Gestefeld is best explained in terms of theology and religious practice. The two expressed incompatible views of Christianity and its relationship to Theosophy, eclecticism, truth, ethics, ambiguity, and special revelation. They ultimately codified these profound religious differences, not merely personal quarrels, in their distinct churches. The article's findings cause us to rethink the scope and shape of Eddy's self-professed Christianity; the common characterization of her as excluding powerful women from her church for authoritarian reasons; and the terrain occupied by the traditions and churches Eddy and Gestefeld subsequently developed. I show that in their case, contact resulted not in combination but in conversation and contestation, and ultimately perhaps in co-existence. This builds on and sharpens the theoretics describing the religious milieu in which they operated.

With its violent images of heavenly and earthly combat, the book of Revelation has been criticized for promoting a vengeful and distorted version of Christ's teachings. Gerd Lüdemann, for example, has attacked the book as part of the “dark side of the Bible,” and Jonathan Kirsch believes that the pernicious influence of Revelation “can be detected in some of the worst atrocities and excesses of every age, including our own.” Yet, surprisingly, nonviolent pacifists have also drawn on the Apocalypse for encouragement and support. This was especially true for generations of Russian Spiritual Christians (dukhovnye khristiane), a significant religious minority whose roots trace at least as far back as the 1760s, when the first “spirituals” (dukhovnye) were arrested and tried in Russia's southern provinces of Tambov and Voronezh. Although they drew upon apocalyptic martial imagery, the Spiritual Christians were pacifists, some of whom came to identify themselves with the Woman Clothed in the Sun of Revelation 12.

Few topics seem more natural and, sadly, timelier than American religion in bad economic times, our own or the economic depression of the 1930s. The essays by Heather Curtis, Jonathan Ebel, and Alison Greene point up how little we know about religion in the 1930s and, by implication, how little religion has informed policy during our own economic downturn. Perhaps our own crisis is still too new or we are distracted by the “Christian nation” debate or the latest clerical sex scandal. Whatever the cause, Curtis, Ebel, and Greene demonstrate that in the 1930s religion and economic dislocation produced remarkable religious challenges and transformations whose similarities as well as differences underlined their sometimes fateful intersection.

It has been more than one hundred years since the American Society of Church History (ASCH) began publishing its Papers in 1889, followed in 1932 by the journal Church History. To commemorate these one hundred–plus years of publication, the History of Christianity Section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) invited four current and past editors of Church History and, for an “outsider's” perspective, one historian who has not served as editor to participate in a panel discussion at the AAR's 2009 annual meeting in Montreal. We asked the panelists to look back on changes to Church History over time and how those changes have both mirrored and stimulated changes in the broader field of history of Christianity. We also wanted them to reflect on where they see scholarship in the field headed in the next five years or so.

In 1934 the third centennial celebration of Oberammergau's famous passion play coincided with Adolph Hitler's rise to power. For American Jews, the Oberammergau Passion Play had long symbolized the Christian roots of Anti-Semitism. Ironically, American Jews' liberal Protestant allies viewed Oberammergau as a symbol of Christian ecumenism, capable of uniting Protestants, Catholics, and even Jews. “Claiming the Passion” traces Oberammergau in the rhetoric of American liberals from the American tour of Anton Lang, who portrayed the Christus in 1923, to his successor's trial for Nazi sympathies in 1947. It places the conflicting Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant views of Oberammergau in the context of the early goodwill or interfaith movement. It argues that liberal Protestants' enthusiasm for Oberammergau arose from their effort to articulate a more inclusive national identity, in opposition to the Ku Klux Klan and other nativists. But the conflicts over Oberammergau also suggest that liberal Protestants had not yet come to terms with Jewish critiques of Christian Anti-Judaism.