One of the few Irishmen active on the Continent in the eighth century of whom we have some information was a priest (or bishop) named Clemens. Together with the Gaul Aldebert, this peregrinus was the subject of an extensive correspondence between Boniface and the pope, which eventually led to the condemnation of both men at the Roman Council of 745. The accusations brought against Clemens by Boniface display parallels with known Irish teachings and practices, as well as other allegations leveled against individual traveling Irishmen and the Irish in general. This article closely examines the context of Boniface's charges and introduces an additional source to the framing of his arguments. It argues that the allegations must be viewed in the context of both contemporary practices and debates in Irish church and society, and the portrayal of these Irish peculiarities in texts written in and spread throughout the mid-eighth-century Continent and Anglo-Saxon England.

Despite the political unification of the German Empire in 1871, the longstanding confessional divide between German Catholics and Protestants persisted through the early Wilhelmine era. Because confessional identity and difference were pivotal to how Germans imagined a nation, the meaning of German national identity remained contested. But the formation of German national identity during this period was not neutral—confessional alterity and antagonism was used to imagine confessionally exclusive notions of German national identity. The establishment of a “kleindeutsch” German Empire under Prussian-Protestant hegemony, the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf, and the 1883 Luther anniversaries all conflated Protestantism with German national identity and facilitated the marginalization of German Catholics from early Wilhelmine society, culture, and politics. While scholars have recognized this “confessionalization of the German national idea” they have so far neglected how proponents of church unity imagined German national unity and identity. This paper examines how Ut Omnes Unum—an ecumenical group of German Catholics and Protestants—challenged the conflation of Protestantism and German national identity and instead proposed an inter-confessional notion of German national identity that was inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants.

Toyohiko Kagawa served as the leading Christian voice in Japan from the 1920s through the 1940s. While nationally respected throughout Japan, he also became a hero among American Protestants. Kagawa's popularity in the West rose during a time of transition for mainline Protestantism. The American mainline's optimism and dominance as the religious “establishment” began to falter. It faced both religious and economic depression, internal theological divisions, and a reassessment of their mandate for missions. In the 1930s, mainline Protestants in America were searching for a voice, and Kagawa provided one. Long before the recent scholarship on the rise of global Christianity, the mainline had turned to World Christianity as a model. It was not simply Kagawa's message as a world statesman, however, that drew American Protestants. They also employed him as a symbol for their own aims and ambitions. At a time of reevaluating the foreign mission enterprise, Kagawa and an indigenous Eastern church reminded the mainline of past success while promising hope for the future. As an interpreter of social issues, Kagawa likewise spoke a contemporary idiom. For a short time, the Japanese Christian Toyohiko Kagawa became a Western hero, but a hero shaped through a particular Western lens.

This article traces the basic qualities of big science and applies them to the history of what I envision as “big religion.” Big religion offers a model for understanding several developments in mid-century American religious history, including religious revival within the mainline churches and synagogues, an evangelical resurgence, and various forms of backlash as well. Like big science, big religion peaked during the postwar era (though it built on earlier foundations) and is characterized by heightened institutionalization, professionalization, centralization of knowledge, government entanglements, and public support, as well as opposition. With big science as a guide, the concept of big religion offers historians of American religion an analogous manner of understanding the development of institutions, individuals, and movements within American religion, as well as responses and backlashes against them, as part of the same overarching phenomenon.

It has been more than one hundred years since the American Society of Church History (ASCH) began publishing its Papers in 1889, followed in 1932 by the journal Church History. To commemorate these one hundred–plus years of publication, the History of Christianity Section of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) invited four current and past editors of Church History and, for an “outsider's” perspective, one historian who has not served as editor to participate in a panel discussion at the AAR's 2009 annual meeting in Montreal. We asked the panelists to look back on changes to Church History over time and how those changes have both mirrored and stimulated changes in the broader field of history of Christianity. We also wanted them to reflect on where they see scholarship in the field headed in the next five years or so.

Our fellow historian Peter Brown reports that according to a memoir written, sometime around 1900 by a contemporary of Benedetto Croce, the eminent Italian philosopher, Croce challenged a colleague to a duel over an issue of metaphysics. What a startling report that makes you eager to turn the page—as in a John Gresham volume—in order to find out what happened. But nothing more is said in the book, compelling the conclusion that for the author, this was routine, unimportant, and even normal for professors to challenge each other to deadly duels. He must have thought that no explanation was necessary. And so a single sentence stands alone, tantalizing, unexplained—for contemporaries commonplace; for posterity altogether startling. What a splendid introduction to how to see the past offered us by Peter Brown!

My first subscription to Church History was in 1965, which came about the same way many people first began receiving the journal in those days—Ray Petry, our medievalist in graduate school at Duke University, recommended that anyone who was interested join the ASCH in order to receive the journal.

In 1932, Shirley Jackson Case, a recent president of the American Society of Church History, summarized the activities of the “The Church History Deputation to the Orient” by rehearsing some of the questions that the visiting scholars asked of their colleagues in Asia. Among those queries were these: “What service is the study of Church History as a whole rendering to Christianity today in your country? Could this service be improved, and, if so, in what practical way?” For Case and others, the study of church history was directly related to the practice of Christianity. To research, publish, and teach church history was to serve Christianity.

The first issue of the journal Church History appeared in 1932—seventy-nine years ago—the year William Warren Sweet was president of the American Society of Church History. It was a time of considerable pain and social stress in many parts of the world. Perhaps in response to this turmoil, the inaugural issue conveyed a deep-seated optimism about the future. A bracing faith in the providential course of history characterized the three essays in that first issue and the authors conveyed that faith with erudition, narrative flair, and sweeping knowledge of Christian history. Few authors today exert such broad command of events in the larger history of Christianity, or display such facility with a wide range of primary documents, and few write with such ebullience. Such may be the price of leaving behind a world where providence is clearly in sight.