Outside of hagiography, the evidence for female anchorites in early Christian Egypt remains scarce. House ascetics in cities survive for us in documentary and other sources, but women monks in non-coenobitic, nonurban environments are more difficult to locate, to the point at which some scholars have begun to question their very existence. This essay seeks to change the parameters of the scholarly debate over the nature of non-coenobitic female monastic experience. It examines hagiography, monastic rules and letters, and documentary papyri to reassess the state of the field and to produce a fuller portrait of anchoritic and semi-anchoritic female asceticism. Non-coenobitic women's monasticism existed, and it crossed boundaries of geography and social status, as well as the traditional categories of lavra, eremitic, coenobitic, and house asceticism. This interdisciplinary approach provides insights not only into women ascetics’ physical locations but also into their class, education, and levels of autonomy. An intervention into the historiography of women's asceticism in late antique Egypt, this study ultimately questions the advisability of using traditional categorizations of “anchoritic,” “lavra,” and “coenobitic” to classify female monasticism, because they obscure the particularities and diversity of female ascetic history.

This article examines the close ties that developed between Desiderius Erasmus and the Polish kingdom and the implication of these relationships on our understanding of the religious landscape of late medieval and early modern Europe. Few regions embraced Erasmus as enthusiastically as Poland, and nowhere else did he have such a concentration of allies positioned at the highest levels of society including the king himself. More than any other figure from western Europe, Erasmus helped shape the intellectual and religious agenda of the Polish kingdom during this period. A close analysis of this relationship expands our understanding of Reformation Europe in a number of critical ways. It brings Poland, normally viewed peripherally in this period, into key debates and discussions of the Reformation. Erasmus's relationship with Poland also speaks to wider issues and processes of change in the Christian world. As confessional distinctions were becoming more pronounced in the 1520s and 1530s and hope for ecclesial reunion receded, Erasmus looked to Poland as a model for Christendom. He held up the kingdom as an example of how difference could be accommodated and compromise could be reached through wise leadership in church and state.

The purpose of this article is to examine the biblical exegesis of two seventeenth-century Dutch Remonstrant theologians, Simon Episcopius (1583–1643) and Étienne de Courcelles (1586–1659). Their hermeneutic was characterized by an emphasis on the perspicuity, or clarity, of scripture through the use of reason, combined with the marginalization of spiritual meanings in favor of the literal-grammatical sense alone. In both of these emphases, they went beyond their theological forebear, Jacob Arminius (1559–1609), and adumbrated the methods of later Enlightenment thinkers. The stress on perspicuity and authorial intention led to increasing fascination with text criticism, linguistic analysis, and historical contextualization, highly rarefied disciplines that became prerequisites for correct, scholarly biblical interpretation. This development also pushed the question of biblical fallibility closer to the center of the doctrine of scripture. As a consequence of the philological, scientific study of the Bible, biblical interpretation was relegated to the field of scholarship and doctrinal formulation to the church. The original ideal of biblical perspicuity resulted in biblical obscurity.

For many years, the Religious Right has argued that Thomas Jefferson's “wall of separation” metaphor, expounded in his address to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802, did not reflect his true views on cooperation between Church and State; and that he was actually a devout Christian who embraced a symbiotic relationship between them. Recent scholarship, concurring with these views, contends that Jefferson's thoughts and actions, both in political office and as a private individual, reflected his desire for government participation in religious ceremonies and his sincere dedication to the Christian faith. This article refutes such arguments. It compares Jefferson's ideas with John Adams's more orthodox opinions, particularly in their attitudes toward the connection between atheism and personal morality. The article notes that Jefferson, while endorsing Jesus' ethical teachings, also embraced philosophical materialism. He probably did not believe in an afterlife. Jefferson's most thoroughgoing rejection of organized Christianity occurred in old age, when his fading hopes for religious reform latched onto Unitarianism.

Historians identify many connections between human rights and religion, including the influence of religious organizations on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Protestant ecumenical movement and American Protestantism played important roles in this regard. Historical analysis has so far taken insufficient account of another contemporaneous phenomenon important in terms both of religion and of rights—the British Empire. Its authorities typically offered a “fair field” to Christian missionaries irrespective of their nationality or denomination. They might also offer protection to religious minorities. In Egypt the situation was complicated. An Islamic country and a vital part of Britain's “informal” empire in the Middle East, Egypt was also an important area of missionary activity. To Egyptian government and British imperial representatives alike missionaries asserted their right and that of Christian converts to “religious liberty.” Focusing in part on Anglican mission in Egypt, this article examines the complex interplay of empire and Anglo-American ecumenism in missionary assertion of religious freedom. It also shows how imperialism and debates about “religious liberty” in Egypt and the Middle East influenced both “universal” and Egyptian national ideas about freedom of religion up to 1956.

Let us begin with the problem of binaries. Stark differentiation strengthens the consequences of difference. If you label something “sacred” for example, and suggest its opposite is “profane” the maintenance of that difference becomes quickly outsized because their difference is contingent on their connection. “Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions,” Émile Durkheim writes. “Profane things are those things to which such prohibitions apply and which must keep their distance from what is sacred.” There is no profane without the maintenance of the sacred; the sacred is established through its labored separation from the profane. Binaries are not static opposition as much as they are descriptive of a tense purlieu of their differentiation. In the case of the sacred and profane, Durkheim describes that space as religion itself. “Religious beliefs are the representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they sustain among themselves or with profane things,” he famously explained in 1912, setting the stage for the modern study of religion as one devoted to the analysis of the perpetuation of that binary.

Modernism: What was it? When was it? Does Modernism name “a break with the past,” proclaim the present as “qualitatively distinct and new”—or is Modernism's self-representation as an “ideology of rupture, opposition, and anti-institutionality” over-hyped? And when was the “when” of Modernism? Do Modernism's origins trace back to the era of Romanticism? Or to the 1880s and Baudelaire? Or to 1913 and Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring”? Or to 1922: the publication of Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

In his intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert Richardson never defines modernism, and never addresses the reasons for its turbulence in America. But he does present the maelstrom through his subject, showing how James helped drive the modernist sensibility he inhabited—a whirlwind of creativity and intellectual passion “whose leading ideas,” to quote Richardson, “are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about.” Presenting James as an intellectual activity, Richardson focuses on bringing the emotional background of that activity into view, chronicling James's intellectual history as splashes from a turbulent stream of consciousness. The book's dedication to Annie Dillard next to the book's epigraph from James reveals Richardson's respect for the volatility both writers represented. The dedication is: “For Annie, who wrote, ‘we have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, missile, and wild,’” followed by the epigraph from James testifying that, “[life] feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

One of the ways in which Christian groups responded to the challenges of modernity was by positioning themselves differently in space. In the interest of better understanding that process, let us think for a moment about the social system, the social space to be precise, within which groups exist. As one starting point for that, it is useful to acknowledge that social groups define themselves in relation to others. Specifically, groups define themselves by saying what they are not as much as by saying what they are. If we are to believe the German social systems theorist Niklas Luhmann, a leading advocate of the notion of social system, difference is prior to identity. That is to say—and this is the core of Luhmann's “difference” theory—one distinguishes a table from other objects before one indicates what it is (Luhmann adds, paradoxically, that distinction presupposes itself). His grand theory has shortcomings, but his point is that social groups create and maintain collective identity by defining themselves in relation to other groups, and especially by saying what they are not. They push off from other groups in defining themselves. We could extend that approach by stating that groups sometimes behave as if they lack a clear collective self-understanding; that is, they lack a fully formed core identity that they can marshall in a positive fashion against a field of other groups. They accordingly define themselves in relation to other groups, define themselves via negativa, by differentiating—in some cases to a great degree—from other groups. Identity is built through such negative definition. The twentieth-century American theorist of social conflict Lewis Coser described that mode of thinking in The Functions of Social Conflict, an extended mediation on the social conflict theories of Georg Simmel, and sociologist of religion Martin Reisebrodt has observed more recently how Christianity invents itself principally by distinguishing itself from other religious practices and beliefs. The process is evident among Christian groups in modernity as it was in early modern Europe. When we focus on how it has manifested spatially, we see the modern in American church history as a broad spectrum of occurrences demonstrating complexity, multivalence, competition, and differentiation.