The 1814 memoir of missionary wife Harriet Newell was important for awakening the early nineteenth-century American Evangelical imagination on behalf of the burgeoning missionary cause. As young women ‘read the self’ and patterned their lives according to the literary examples they encountered, Newell's memoir used the language of ‘usefulness’ as a powerful theological plot. This article hopes to address the lacuna of scholarship regarding the theological aspects of Newell's writing and how it was those aspects in particular which subsequent generations venerated in the creation of missionary wife memoirs.

The charismatic renewal in the early 1960s was a significant development in global Christianity, creating theological and pastoral debates and disagreements with both local and international dimensions. This article sets the controversy between the leading Anglicans John Stott and Michael Harper within the wider cultural context that impacted the initial rise of the charismatic movement, and its subsequent growing global acceptance. The Stott-Harper debates contributed notably to the long-term domestication of the charismatic movement within an established Church, keeping most charismatic Anglicans within the Evangelical tradition. Conservative Evangelicals were enabled to adjust constructively to the growing ‘charismatisation’ of global Evangelicalism.

This article examines the context for the establishment of the non-denominational Port of London Society, and the dissenting Bethel Union, which came together to form the British and Foreign Sailor Society in 1833. Making forensic use of the surviving archives as well as contemporary reports in regional and national newspapers, it challenges the traditional historiography which focuses on the charismatic, but disruptive, figure of George Charles (‘Boatswain’) Smith (1782–1863). It suggests that the cult of the founder is misplaced for Smith, and that marine religious charities flourished despite, rather than because of, his contribution.

Bryan Mackey (1770–1847) was for years the unremarkable, unremarked rector of a rural parish in Gloucestershire. He has, however, the distinction of apparently being the first priest with African ancestry to be ordained into the Church of England and who then served his entire career in Britain. His life history raises questions about historical racism within the Church and the wider society.

Is the era of the reference book coming to an end? Publishers evidently don't think so. Not only have we seen an explosion in the number of handbooks, companions and dictionaries produced by the mainstream academic press in recent years, but even older, well-established ‘brands’ continue to flourish. Here is the fourth edition of Oxford University Press's ‘flagship’ Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church (ODCC), considerably expanded and revised from the third edition. Yet although libraries continue to buy works such as this, and academic colleagues to use them and refer to them, students often – if my experience is anything to go by – prefer the easier, cheaper, faster route of online sourcing, and particularly Wikipedia. A review of this edition of the ODCC has to reckon, then, not only with evaluating the content of the work itself, but, more sharply than perhaps was necessary before, with the questions of who exactly is likely to use it, and how it stands up in comparison with the competition.

Two contradictory tendencies mark the historiography of Christianity in South Africa. First, the country has been a rich crucible for important scholarship on Christianity. In a country where 80 per cent of the population currently claim Christian affiliation, it is not hard to imagine why this would be the case. The country has a centuries-old Christian presence, spanning the Protestantism of early Dutch settlers in the Cape to the many European and North American missionaries of all persuasions who descended upon South Africa in subsequent centuries (some estimated that the south-eastern region of Natal in the nineteenth century was the most missionised area in the world at that time). An equally great magnet for scholarship was the size and diversity of the independent church movement in South Africa – or those Christians who broke away from missionary oversight to form Black-led congregations, many affiliated with other Black Christian organisations in the Atlantic world. By the mid-century, thousands of churches labelling themselves as Zionist, Apostolic and Ethiopian filled South Africa and attracted a commensurately rich scholarship; many such studies focused on how Christianity was Africanised via the independent church movement. In a darker vein, a further impetus for scholarly interest was the way in which Protestantism was wielded by (some) Afrikaners to justify the apartheid regime. Unsurprisingly, this led to an expansive twentieth-century literature on state power and Christianity, both social scientific as well as theological. Finally, historical studies in general have tended to cluster more densely in South Africa than is the case for many other regions of the African continent – a phenomenon that is due to the country's thriving research scene and its many tertiary education institutions. Viewed from this perspective, the large number of histories of Christianity in South Africa should be seen as a smaller subset of the extensive scholarship on South Africa itself.

Thomas Kaufmann's The saved and the damned was first published in Germany in 2017. It was therefore one of many publications that year offered to mark the fifth centennial of Martin Luther nailing up his Ninety-Five Theses (quite possibly a legendary event, as the author notes). Kaufmann's work, now available in English translation, is an unapologetically blunt assertion that ‘In the beginning was Luther’ (p. 6). In this it is much the same as some other English-language scholarship from 2017, such as the monumental Oxford handbook of the Protestant Reformations, which also began with Luther. Although a comparatively recent entry in English-language Reformation scholarship, The saved and the damned has already generated academic discussion and was the focus of a panel at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference in 2023.

This article analyses a selection of archival material written by Paul Tillich, particularly his early parish sermons and sermons from World War I. Although the themes of ‘eternity’ and ‘the soul’ are rare in the early parish sermons and only appear in the context of death or suffering, they play a predominant role in the World War I sermons. This article suggests that this is because, for Tillich, suffering became the interpretative key. Through his sermons amidst the suffering and devastation of war Tillich employed what he called the immanent way of theology.