From the days when Christians were identified by the exclamation, “See how they love one another!”, to the present when other sorts of exclamations may be heard, the phenomenon of Christian community has received considerable attention. “From the first century in Rome,” Robert Nisbet has observed, “down to the contemporary works of Maritain, Niebuhr, and Ellul, the search for Christian community has been a crucial element of Western history.” Durkheim, Nisbet adds, found the very origins of religion in “the sense of the sacred community.” Whether as historians of Western history or of church history, we cannot escape the question of community. And whether as citizen or believer, neither can we escape more existential questions suggested in our own land and our own time that relate to the broad theme, “Christianity and Community.”

Paul of Samosata, who succeeded Demetrianus as bishop of Antioch in 260 C. E., faced heresy charges early in his career and formal interrogations in 264 and 268 at synods in Antioch. The second of these condemned him. This study seeks to reinterpret the Christological position of the faction opposing Paul and to analyze its implications for the later development of eastern Christian thought. Of course, the bishops and presbyters who met at Antioch in the 260s to discuss the morals and doctrines of Paul did not represent a unified doctrinal position. Gathered from various regions, they revealed a diversity of motives and concerns. Even the label “Origenists,” often used to characterize the group, is misleading. Although many of the attending prelates followed Origen and his school, there is no record of conscious appeal to the writings of the Alexandrian master.

When the twenty–two year old Andronicos II (1282–1328) acceded to the throne of Byzantium, the empire was in a state of political, social, and ecclesiastical decline. This paper will consider the attempts of Patriarch Athanasios I to reverse this process of decay and to eliminate foreign religious elements from the capital of the Orthodox Byzantine empire. In 1261, the Byzantine empire had been restored to its capital, Constantinople, after fifty-seven years of Latin occupation. The city, however, had declined sadly from its former glory. The area of its effective hegemony was reduced to sections of western Anatolia and Greece, some islands in the Aegean, and Byzantine Thrace. Even this pitiful remnant was subject to the continuing assaults of the Turks, the pillaging of Catalan mercenaries turned hostile, the exploitation of Latin merchants, and threats of a Western military adventure to restore a Latin kingdom and Church of Constantinople.

Oscar Handlin noted some years ago that most immigrants to the United States found the voluntary practices of American religious institutions “unfamilar and disturbing.” This was not the case with the Irish Catholic immigrants in this country. They had little difficulty adjusting to these practices in America since they had developed them in Ireland before coming to the United States. Thus, many American Irish Catholics viewed voluntaryism not as a uniquely Protestant or American experience; they saw it as part of their Irish Catholic tradition.

Warren Felt Evans was the first American mental healer to publish his ideas extensively. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), the father of mental healing in America, bequeathed only scattered manuscripts to his followers. Evans, however, wrote six books that decisively influenced the growth of New Thought, a loosely organized religious movement concerned with health and spiritual integration. This essay contends that Evans' thought and therapy united idealistic philosophy and practical mysticism, thus extending one species of American romanticism, rooted in the Transcendentalist movement, into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The treatment of late nineteenth-century revivalism by historians of American Christianity has generally been rather unsystematic, despite the inclusion of the great revivals in survey histories like William G. McLoughun's Modern Revivalism and Bernard Weisberger's They Gathered at the River. There have been a few good biographies of major evangelists, such as James Findlay's of Dwight L. Moody. Early nineteenth-century revivalism has received a larger share of attention because of its close connections with social reform movements, which seem to be more interesting to liberally- inclined historians than do the later revivalists with specifically conversionist aims. From more “conservative” religious scholars, understandably, the treatment of such material has tended to be more expository and theological than analytical. In all, the revivalist tradition after 1850 has been given rather short shrift as representing only a backwash of American religion, perhaps associated with lower socioeconomic classes or marginal groups. That, unfortunately, has left us with a wide gap between event and explanation when the late sixties and seventies brought a resurgence of conservative and “Spirit-filled” evangelicalism among middle-class Christians, and when 1976 revealed a strong evangelical strain even in the political arena.