This article explores thinking and practice regarding property at houses of canons from the mid-ninth to mid-eleventh centuries, through a case study of the charters of Saint-Hilaire-le-Grand in Poitiers. Since Late Antiquity, Christian orders debated the legitimacy of private property, with most rejecting it in favor of exclusively common holdings. For houses of canons, property became a defining issue in the Central Middle Ages: Carolingian legislation in 816 asserted that canons (unlike monks) could hold private property, while the order of regular canons, which emerged in the eleventh century, rejected it as corrupt. The role of property at houses of canons in the interim period, meanwhile, has been largely neglected by scholars. This essay argues that Saint-Hilaire embraced Carolingian acceptance of private property among canons, but that that stance did not preclude protection of joint property and interest in the common life. The resulting detailed understanding of both the quotidian functioning of property at a tenth-century house and the ideals that drove its regulation inform my concluding comments on two broader topics: the role of wealth and property in a dedicated religious life, and the nature of reform movements in the church of the Central Middle Ages.

In the early modern period, Basque women who could not or did not want to follow the traditional paths of monasticism or secular marriage had a third option. They could become seroras, or celibate laywomen licensed by the diocese and entrusted with caring for a shrine or parish church. Seroras enjoyed significant social prestige and their work was competitively remunerated by the local community; yet despite their central place in the local religious life of the early modern Basque Country and Navarre, the seroras have attracted almost no historical study. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, it summarizes the social and spiritual context that allowed for women to experiment with the more unorthodox religious vocations like that of the seroras; and secondly, it draws from extensive primary documentation concerning the seroras in order to outline the main features of the vocation, by extension differentiating them from better-known categories of the semi-religious life such as the beguines, Castilian beatas, or Italian tertiaries.

When the Baltimore Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church issued a pastoral letter critical of St. Mary's College in 1811 it provided an opportunity for Louis DuBourg, the college's president, to respond with an apologetic defense of the college and of Catholicism more generally. In doing so he synthesized several strands of Catholic apologetics, including the via notarum, the utilitarianism that came to dominate French Catholic apologetics in the eighteenth century, the emphasis upon beauty and emotion that characterized Chateaubriand's Genuius of Christianity, and the earlier work of Bishop Bossuet critical of the doctrinal instability of protestantism. Aimed at a popular audience, DuBourg's apologetics created an identity for the American Catholic Church that emphasized its place within the largest part of worldwide Christianity, its role as educator of the best minds of Western civilization, and the beauty of its worship.

Church leaders and laypeople in the US went on the defensive shortly after rock and roll became a national youth craze in 1955 and 1956. Few of those religious critics would have been aware or capable of understanding that rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, had deep religious roots. Early rockers, all southerners—such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and James Brown—grew up in or regularly attended pentecostal churches. Pentecostalism, a vibrant religious movement that traced its origins to the early 20th century, broke with many of the formalities of traditional protestantism. Believers held mixed-race services during the height of Jim Crow segregation. The faithful spoke in tongues, practiced healing, and cultivated loud, revved-up, beat-driven music. These were not the sedate congregants of mainline churches. Some pentecostal churches incorporated drums, brass instruments, pianos, and even newly invented electric guitars. Rock ‘n’ roll performers looked back to the vibrant churches of their youth, their charismatic pastors, and to flashy singing itinerants for inspiration. In a region that novelist Flannery O'Connor called “Christ-haunted,” the line between secular and sacred, holy and profane was repeatedly crossed by rock musicians. This article traces the black and white pentecostal influence on rock ‘n’ roll in the American South, from performance style and music to dress and religious views. It also analyzes the vital ways that religion took center stage in arguments and debates about the new genre.

Editor's Note: This forum offers three case studies that show how Christian minorities pushed for new relationships between church and state, and between piety and politics, in the decades following the American Revolution. The gradual disestablishment of religion, and the religious competition that disestablishment unleashed, stimulated these changes. In ways unanticipated by those who crafted disestablishment, the strategies that Christian minorities pursued to gain public respect and exercise citizenship were creative harbingers of policies that only became fully developed in the twentieth century.

In 1863, Sarah Josepha Hale rejoiced that after a decades-long campaign, Thanksgiving had become a national holiday. Hale was not alone in her desire to unite patriotism with spiritual devotion. In her personal correspondence with the president, Eliza Gurney also spoke of the blessings God had bestowed on the nation. Gurney, a devoted Quaker, had met with Lincoln in 1861 to give him spiritual comfort and had continued writing with him ever since. After his public proclamation of Thanksgiving, Gurney wrote to him to demonstrate her “cordial approval of thy late excellent proclamation appointing a day of thanksgiving” despite the fact that as a Quaker she did “not set apart especial seasons for returning thanks.” Gurney saw the holiday as an effective means of making less devout Americans conscious of their God-given blessings and thus supported the federal holiday even while she refused to celebrate it.

The War of 1812 ignited a fierce debate in New York about the rights, duties, and responsibilities of citizens in wartime. Two counties in the Upper Hudson River Valley (Rensselaer and Columbia) openly revolted against Governor Daniel D. Tompkins's draft of local militiamen. In September 1812, opponents of the war met in a countywide assembly where they declared the federal draft of the New York militia an “assumption of power, unwarranted by the constitution, [and] dangerous to the rights and privileges of the good people of this state.” The assembly further resolved to defy the governor's detachment order, and as a result, less than a third of the 860 militiamen drafted from Columbia and Rensselaer Counties appeared at the designated rendezvous points. Within weeks, the governor convened the first of three courts-martial to prosecute militiamen “who failed, neglected or refused to obey the orders of the commander in Chief of the said State.” As late as 1818, the New York State legislature insisted upon making a “salutary example” of men who “disregard the voice of duty and the requisitions of law.”

In the nineteenth century, the Mormons were a minority religious group living on the fringes of the United States in both a geographic and social sense. Yet, in the twenty-first century, historians are increasingly realizing that the history of this marginal religious “other” sheds a great deal of light on the American past broadly conceived. This essay briefly describes an important moment in early Mormon history that illuminates our developing understanding of religious liberty in the early American republic, and the political obstacles Americans outside mainstream protestant Christianity faced in their efforts to obtain equal treatment under the law as American citizens.