In the latter half of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), and in the early sixteenth century, some Hungarian churchmen enhanced religious scholarship in their own country and abroad by their preaching and writing. The writings of these men exemplify the development in Hungary of support for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. These men also spoke out against the moral and spiritual deficiencies of the court. The activities and writings of these theologians pose a challenge to the chronicler of literature and of intellectual and religious history.

America's first unmarried female missionaries, women who went out to Asia and Africa in the early to middle nineteenth century, chose lives as intense and demanding as any man's. They chose the foreign mission vocation despite the belief, strong in their era, that women should accept the constraints and comforts of their “proper sphere,” the home. To make their decision, these women struggled with two sets of ideas which coexisted in tension: equality of all persons before God, and the ideology of “woman's sphere.” As persons of faith they could respond to God's commands in the same way as men without theological challenge, because equality of all persons before God was a major strand in their Christian tradition. As nineteenth-century women, however, they were asked to accept lowered status and protective restrictions, in keeping with woman's sphere ideology. These women chose to become missionaries, compromising on second-class status and protective restrictions. In their view, the missionary vocation was worth the cost of compromise.

One of the most boldly conceived assaults on benighted Africa during the nineteenth century was that undertaken by mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. With the brash confidence characteristic of the age, hundreds of American missionaries were dispatched from New York and Baltimore to convert the heathen tribes of Africa and wrest a continent from ruin. If the experience of the Protestant Episcopal church is at all typical, however, these efforts not infrequently aroused suspicion and open hostility. In fact, Episcopal penetration of Liberia in the second half of the second century was remarkable for a long and bitter contest with black nationalists who were intent on using the church as a vehicle for their own personal and racial ambitions.

Pope Pius X called Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) “the greatest saint of modern times.“ For anyone who grew up in the pre-Vatican II church, she was the most popular model of virtue. Her “little way of spiritual childhood” showed Catholics how each of them could practice their faith and gain salvation. The “Little Flower of Jesus” was, above all, a saint for the ordinary person, a heroine without heroics, a mystic who did not soar but through her language brought God and her relationship to him down to earth.

Twenty years ago Jerald Brauer wrote an essay on the writing of American church history entitled, “Changing Perspectives on Religion in America.” In this essay he noted that “change in perspective marks the writing of the history of religion in America.” After discussing the work of Robert Baird and William Warren Sweet, the two historians whose perspectives most influenced the writing of American church history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively, Brauer then directed his attention to a third and new perspective. This new perspective had developed in the post-World War II era and was the result of the work of Sidney E. Mead, Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Winthrop S. Hudson, and others. Brauer described the new perspective by pointing out how it differed from the work of Sweet. It was clear to Brauer, however, that no one historian or school of historians had yet emerged whose perspective was able to dominate the landscape in the manner that Baird and Sweet had. There really was no new single perspective, but a variety of approaches and interpretations. In other words, in the late 1960s the discipline of American church history was in a state of flux, and “a number of young historians” were, in Brauer's words, “anxious to develop a new perspective through which to view the development and nature of Christianity in America.”