In October 1555 Jean Jourdain, twenty-six, a humble farmer living near Geneva, was distraught at having contracted venereal disease, for which he could not afford medical treatment. On a Sunday morning, rather than going to church, Jourdain went into the woods where he stabbed himself. Immediately after inflicting the wound, Jourdain heard the ringing of the church bell. Feeling remorse, he asked forgiveness from God and walked to a nearby village, where he languished another eight days before expiring. In spite of his contrition, authorities ordered that Jourdain's body be dragged on a hurdle and then impaled and left exposed outside the city as a deterrent to others. In February 1564 Julienne Berard was most upset about being convoked by Geneva's Consistory to account for a dispute she had had with her nephew. According to witnesses, Berard, so frightened by the prospect of facing the questions of Calvin and other Consistory members, took her life by throwing herself in the Rhone River. As a result of this self-inflicted death, Berard's body was also dragged through the streets of Geneva and buried at Champel which, as the site of executions, was a place of ignominy. Over a century later, the notary Jean Bardin hanged himself because he was devastated by the deaths from an explosion of three of his young children and by the subsequent burglary of his house. In spite of the entreaties of his widow on behalf of their surviving minor children, the Small Council passed an extremely harsh sentence in September 1670, enjoining that Bardin's body be dragged on a hurdle before burial and that all his assets be confiscated.

Fray Diego de Landa's harsh inquisition against the Maya Indians of Yucatán has generated passionate controversy for over four centuries. This essay reexamines documentary sources related to the case in order to better understand both the event and Landa's interpretation of his own actions. The evidence suggests that Landa's reading of and response to the Mayan apostasies were shaped by the millenarian ideas of Spanish Franciscanism. Within this millenarian context, a richer and more consistent account of Landa's character and actions becomes possible.

Statuary groups, countless illustrations, and colorful stained glass all preserve for us the most famous medieval image of the charitable soldier-saint, Martin of Tours (336–397). The young Martin is depicted seated on his horse dividing his soldier's cape to share it with Christ disguised as a freezing beggar at the gate of Amiens. After abandoning the Roman army, Martin became a monk, an ascetic “soldier of Christ,” and was chosen by the people of Tours as their bishop. Renowned in his lifetime as a wonderworker, Martin's tomb remained for centuries an important pilgrimage center. The later Carolingian kings carried a fragment of Martin's cape into battle as a victory-giving talisman, and French monarchs invoked the saint as their patron. Because of its royalist associations, Saint Martin's basilica at Tours was almost completely destroyed in the French Revolution, and subsequently houses and new municipal streets encroached on the sacred space.

G.Sherwood Eddy (1871–1963), a leading figure in American Protestantism through the first half of the twentieth century, is currently most often relegated to footnote references or mentioned only in relation to two of his most famous colleagues, Kirby Page and Reinhold Niebuhr. He was, however, one of the most renowned international evangelists of the time who worked closely with John R. Mott and Robert Speer in the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM). While a student at Yale, Eddy experienced a dramatic deepening of faith in 1889 at the famous Northfield Student Conference and then, while a student at New York's Union Theological Seminary and later at Princeton Theological Seminary, joined the SVM. Despite his seminary study, Eddy chose to remain a layman all his life. As a YMCA traveling evangelist in India from 1896 to 1911 and in Asia from 1911 to 1931, Eddy embodied many of the attitudes and methods of Protestant global mission for the approximately fifty years of its greatest activity. Primarily engaged in student evangelization, Eddy manifested a deep ambivalence toward the method of mission work. An examination of Eddy's life reveals that in Eddy one finds both the cultural imperialism with which nineteenth-century missionaries are often charged and a sensitivity to other peoples and a commitment to indigenous churches and leadership.While Eddy's ministry spanned over five decades, this essay concentrates on Eddy's labor prior to World War I, for in those years Eddy was most in conflict withhimself.

Recent scholarship has exploded the myth that German soldiers had nothing to do with genocidal crimes in World War II. We now know that what Omer Bartov has called the “barbarization of warfare” on the eastern front involved regular military as well as SS units and the Einsatzgruppen. But what about the chaplains, Protestant and Catholic, who accompanied Hitler's forces? Those men, linked into both ecclesiastical and military hierarchies, preached and administered the sacraments. Following established traditions, they also boosted morale, accompanied condemned men to their executions, and supported Germany's war aims.