Harriet Beecher Stowe, who achieved international fame for her 1852 antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is best known to historians of American religious thought as a critic of New England Calvinism and its leading light, Jonathan Edwards. But in airing her frustrations with the Puritan tradition, Stowe also singled out a much earlier source of the problem: Augustine, the fifth-century bishop of Hippo. At his worst, Augustine typified for Stowe not only theological rigidity but also the obdurate refusal of the male system-builders to take women's perspectives seriously. Consequently, in the New England of the early republic, when “the theology of Augustine began to be freely discussed by every individual in society, it was the women who found it hardest to tolerate or assimilate it.” In leveling such criticism, Stowe echoed her elder sister Catharine Beecher, a prominent educator and social reformer, whose well-known writings on the role of women in the home have often overshadowed her two companion volumes of theology, in which she devotes more attention to Augustine than to any other figure. Yet for all her extended critiques of Augustinian themes, Beecher buried her most provocative rhetorical flourish, as one might conceal a dagger, in the last endnote on the last page of the second volume. Seizing upon the African context of Augustine's career as a metaphor for his deleterious influence on Christian theology, she concluded that reasonable people have a duty to resist the “African enslavement of Anglo-Saxon minds” no less than to combat the “Anglo-Saxon enslavement of African bodies.”

When, after their decade of studies in Athens, Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus returned to Cappadocia, one of the first things they did was to compile a collection of the exegetical works of Origen and publish them under the title Philokalia. This fact might lead the historian to conclude that Basil and Gregory subscribed to, or at least were in sympathy with, the allegorical method of exegesis. But such is hardly the case, for in their later writings (and this holds true for the third member of the Cappadocians, the younger Gregory of Nyssa) there can be discovered no one prevailing approach to the interpretation of scripture. Allegory is indeed used, and often, but so too we find typological and anagogical exegesis, as well as frequent examples of naive literalism. That the Bible formed the basis of theological reflection for the Cappadocians can in no way be denied, but that they held to any particular style or styles of exegesis cannot be demonstrated.

The attempt to create a purified Dutch language and establish a Dutch cultural and linguistic identity distinct from Germanic variants became a major preoccupation of late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Netherlanders. Overcoming variations in regional dialects between the central province of Holland and the northern, eastern, and southern provinces and constructing a standard unitary language for inhabitants of the Low Countries was to occupy Dutch writers for several generations. Clearly the development of a national vernacular was essential in the process of achieving cultural and political independence from the Spanish overlords during the Eighty Years War.

There can be little doubt that for centuries the most important single unit of the Christian church has been the parish. It is surely the most fundamental of the structures upon which the institutional church has been built. Only by studying closely the parish and what goes on within it can we gain a real appreciation of what religion has meant and continues to mean to the average Christian at the grass roots level. It is somewhat surprising, given the general spread of interest in social history among contemporary historians, that there has not been more study of the parish. One can understand the superior appeal of historical theology to the historian who concentrates on ideas, given the range and sophistication of the systems of thought created over the centuries by theologians, but we should not forget that these systems could not even be comprehended by the great majority of Christians. One can similarly understand the superior appeal of ecclesiastical politics to the historian who concentrates on events, given the high drama in which ecclesiastical leaders have often been engaged, but we should not assume that these events necessarily even came to the attention of average Christians. But for the historian of society who is interested in the religious experience of the average man, the parish must be a starting point.

When a Yankee named George Washington rode into the town of Lebanon in central Kentucky during the summer of 1834, most townspeople grew suspicious of what they called “his eastern ways.” Washington assumed control of the eight-year-old Presbyterian school for girls and soon made it his goal to monopolize education in the area. Finding that since 1828 the Catholic Sisters of Loretto ran Saint Augustine's Female Academy in the same town, Washington, according to one report, “did all in his power to bring odium upon” the rival institution. He even encouraged some sort of ill reports about the school's principal, Sister Ann Constantia Spalding, the daughter of prominent Catholic pioneers Henrietta and Richard Spalding. Within that first year, Washington challenged Sister Spalding to select a handful of her students to face a like number of his pupils in a debate so that the public might judge, as he wrote, which “is the best of the two [schools].” “‘Which is the best of the two,’” Spalding responded, [would have been more grammatically written ‘which is the better of the two.’” Having thus asserted herself, Spalding politely declined the invitation. Embarrassed by this exchange, Washington slipped out of town at the end of the academic year.

Several weeks ago I received an appealing letter from a scholar who is presently engaged in making a study of the life and labors of an eminent priest of the Church of England in Colonial New Jersey. The reverend gentleman was the somewhat notorious Uzal Ogden, Junior, missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, stationed in Sussex County. His was one of the most interesting careers of his time. He was a noted evangelistic preacher— so much so that some of his colleagues in the priesthood regarded him with jaundiced eyes as “Methodistical,” and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church drove a spike into his proposed consecration to the episcopate.

The age of the Reformation, as one of the creative periods in the history of the Western church, was rich in great personalities. The challenge of the time brought some men to heroic heights, while it took scores of lesser men out of their small corners and flung them into the great stream of movement and action which was remaking the world, where they were compelled to assume places of leadership. The names, and often the life stories, of many of the characters of four hundred years ago are still familiar to us today. Some of them are household names. But there are no Anabaptist names among them, even though the Anabaptist movement represents a distinct type of continental Protestantism. Menno Simons, the sturdy leader of Dutch Mennonitism, is perhaps most widely known of the Anabaptist leaders, although the quadricentennial of his conversion from Catholicism to the Anabaptist movement, which was celebrated last year by Mennonites round the world, passed scarcely noticed. But Menno was not the founder of Anabaptism, and ten years before he appeared on the theatre of action most of the original founders and leaders of Anabaptism in its birthland in Switzerland and South Germany were numbered among the martyrs. The careers of these Swiss leaders were so short that even among their present-day Mennonite descendants most of them had been totally forgotten until they were revived in recent years by modern historical research; and today there is no living tradition attached to their names. It is true that as long ago as 1910 Adolph von Harnack could say in his History of Dogma: “Thanks to the research of recent years we have been presented with figures of splendid Christian leaders from among the circles of the Anabaptists, and many of these noble and reverend characters come nearer to us than the figures of an heroic Luther and an iron Calvin.”

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

For over thirty years, eighteenth-century Boston minister Charles Chauncy published his views about universal salvation outside of the printing press. While scholars have argued that he was reluctant to publish because of his heterodox views against a predominantly Calvinist public, the long history of a broadly circulating manuscript complicates any clear intentions toward privacy or secrecy. Instead, Chauncy strategized around the printing press and the pulpit. Using more discreet modes of publication, like manuscript circulation and scribal publication, he gathered a supportive public for universal salvation before his views even reached the printing press. The audience for his work grew even further through intimate conversations and private correspondence between readers of the manuscript and those they wanted to convert. By the time Chauncy decided to print his views, Congregationalist ministers’ hopes for a largely orthodox public sphere had already been compromised through various means of sharing, exchanging, and distributing ideas outside of the printing press. In many ways, it was not strictly the allure of Enlightenment ideas that facilitated the liberalization of New England theology. It was also the ways writers like Chauncy attended to different modes of publications to situate different readers as a captive and receptive audience.

At the turn of the twentieth century, an enchanted response to Christianity among minority peoples on China's ethnic frontiers in Southeast Asia caught Western missionaries by surprise. This paper explores the historical circumstances and the dynamics of the mass Christian conversion among those hill peoples. Far from a cultural defeat and a grudging surrender to a conquering foreign faith, their embrace of Christianity was an exuberant, communal rush toward fulfillment of indigenous prophecies of redemption. Unlike the civilizing project of the modern state—a coercive mandate of assimilation and ideological transformation—the Christian movement offered them a choice and allowed them to channel their desperate prophecies of the past toward a reformist messianism. With its war on local shamanism, rituals of courtship, and inherited (and often inebriated) rhythms of ethnic life, Christian conversion was ostensibly a break with indigenous traditions. However, it also ironically fortified the ethnic identities of the peripheral peoples—especially through the creation of the written script for the purpose of Bible translation—and generated fresh resiliency for their material and cultural survival.