In my review of previous presidential addresses, I found it interesting to discover that only one had built upon one of the most significant cultural and scholarly developments of the past generation and perhaps the past century, that is, women's and, later, gender studies and their relevance for our respective fields. That was Jane Dempsey Douglass's address twenty years ago as the first woman president of this Society on “what Calvin learned at the school of women,” an event that will surely be recognized in the program session tomorrow on “Women in the American Society of Church History.”

Despite the energy devoted by American and Western European church historians and theologians to the question of the ordination of women in early Christianity and in the (western) medieval Christian Church, these scholars have shown comparatively little interest toward the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church, even when comparative analysis could potentially help elucidate questions regarding the theology and practice of women's ordinations in the West. Most of the research on the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church has occurred in Mediterranean academic circles, usually within the field of Byzantine studies, or in the Eastern Orthodox theological community; sometimes the examination of the female diaconate in the Byzantine Church has been part of a broader examination of women's liturgical ministries.

Around 1184, Alan de Lille composed a sermon addressed to Europe's knights (Ad milites) as part of a treatise on the art of preaching (Ars praedicandi). In it, Alan condemned the felonious and violent behavior of Western warriors and reproached them for their mistreatment of the poor and the Church—the very groups that knights ought to protect in an ideal Christian society. According to Alan, such actions must cease and knightly behavior must be reformed. Using scriptural precedent, he encouraged knights to consider their spiritual welfare by articulating a difference between internal and external military service. Knights, if they wish to be soldiers of God, must wield both temporal and spiritual arms: the former to protect the Church and their homelands, the latter to combat the enemies of their souls. Balance between the two was essential since external service (earthly combat) was empty and meaningless without its internal counterpart (spiritual combat). By ensuring the proper equilibrium, knights could fulfill their assigned role in the world while actively working to ensure their own salvation.

Friedrich Oldenberg (1820–94), the Managing Director of the Central Committee for Inner Missions, toured the southern districts of East Prussia in the autumn of 1865. He made the trip at the request of the Inner Mission Society and the Senior Consistory in Berlin because officials had received some disturbing information about the pastors serving in the United Prussian Church. According to the reports, the clergy in the eastern districts were so insensitive and lazy that Protestant parishioners were turning to Catholic priests for pastoral care and then converting to Catholicism. Members of the Senior Consistory and the Minister for Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, Heinrich von Mühler (1813–74), were concerned and wanted a trustworthy individual to inspect the region and submit a report on the East Prussian churchscape. They chose Friedrich Oldenberg, a Jewish convert and native of Königsberg (East Prussia), as well as a longtime member of the Inner Mission Society. He toured the districts for two months and organized his findings in a lengthy report of 173 pages that he submitted in January 1866 to officials in Berlin.

In the wake of the 1927 landmark Supreme Court decision in the Buck v. Bell case, which affirmed the constitutionality of laws authorizing the compulsory sterilization of so-called “feeble-minded” residents of state institutions, moral theologian and priest John A. Ryan took up his pen to address the issue of sterilization from a Catholics perspective. In the resulting pamphlet, Human Sterilization, Ryan argued that eugenic sterilization measures were not only unscientific and bad social policy, but that the Buck decision in its articulation of civil rights represented a clear departure from the understanding of natural rights in Catholic moral teaching. The production of this text was the first piece of literature published by the National Catholic Welfare Conference that attempted to mobilize Catholic citizens throughout the United States in active opposition to eugenic sterilizahon laws as they came before the state legislatures.