Merging religious history with childhood studies, this article analyzes the rise of the Sunday school movement to show how concepts of childhood, and young people themselves, helped shape early American religious culture. Religious disestablishment, republican concerns about virtue, and romanticized reconstructions of childhood led to a heightened focus on young people within late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Protestant reform movements. The resulting dissemination of Sunday schools across the country established physical and imagined communities of faith dedicated exclusively to young people. They also fostered unprecedented levels of youth religious leadership by allowing adolescents to serve as teachers, challenging inherited patterns of social and cultural authority. Sunday schools thereby became transformative and transactional spaces where young people could both shape and be shaped by the growing Protestant community. This article describes this synergistic relationship between childhood, youth, and Protestant benevolence by examining the two related educational models that emerged within the Sunday school movement in the early national period. The first, exemplified by republican-humanitarian Sunday schools founded in the late eighteenth century, emphasized literacy instruction for the purpose of creating a virtuous citizenry. The second model also aspired to create virtuous citizens, but it envisioned using Sunday schools primarily to evangelize and sanctify the nation. The increasing emphasis on evangelism produced an even more significant structural shift: the transformation of Sunday schools into child-centric institutions that facilitated youth religious leadership. This in turn helped inaugurate a period within American Christianity when institutions and ministries were designed specifically for children on mass scale, permanently altering the religious landscape and redistributing spiritual authority to more marginalized groups, including young people themselves. By revealing how age became an increasingly crucial factor in determining the shape and substance of religious experiences, this article demonstrates that ideals and anxieties about childhood helped create volunteerism, which in turn reshaped the structure of American Protestantism while simultaneously contributing to the formation of a broader child-centric culture that persists in the modern day.

Muscovy's active period of eastward expansion began with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan’ in 1552. By the seventeenth century, one observer claimed that the conquest of Kazan’ was the event that made Ivan IV a tsar and Muscovy an empire. With this victory, the tsar claimed new lands, adding to his subjects the diverse animistic and Muslim population of Turkic Tatars and Chuvashes, and Finno-Ugric Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts. The conquest of Kazan’ provided both the Metropolitan of Moscow and Ivan IV (the Terrible) an opportunity to transform the image of Muscovy into that of a victorious Orthodox power and to justify the title of its Grand Prince as a new caesar (tsar). Since the conquest was the first Orthodox victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, commemorations of it were immediate, including the construction of the Church of the Intercession by the Moat (St. Basil's) on Red Square.

The incorporation of the lands and peoples of Kazan’ has served traditionally to date the establishment of the Russian Empire. Accounts of the conquest have emphasized the victory of Orthodoxy against Islam, with the Russian Orthodox Church and its Metropolitan as the motive force behind this expansion. The conversion of the Muslims and animists of the region is portrayed frequently as automatic, facing little resistance. More recently, scholars have criticized this simplistic account of the conquest by discussing the conversion mission as a rhetorical construct and have placed increasing emphasis on the local non-Russian and non-Orthodox resistance to the interests of the Church and state.

As the pioneer of the New England Awakening and its literary defender, Edwards has long been associated with revivalism and sectarianism in American Protestantism. Several writers have noted that his Faithful Narrative (1737) of the 1734 Northampton revival, with its many translations and reprints, not only stimulated the Great Awakening of 1740 and later revivals but helped set the pattern of conversion experience in its more “enthusiastic” features. Attention has been called to his involvement in the “hell-fire” preaching of the revival, its emotional excesses, its distorted conception of childhood religion, and its pietistic individualism.

From the end of 1494 to the spring of 1498 Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara was a prophet with honor in his adopted country. The Florentines believed in his divine mandate and in his message that the French invader, Charles VIII, was the instrument of God, come to punish the corrupt Church and the sinful Italians and to institute a universal reform. Believing, as he told them, that Florence was divinely chosen to lead the way, the Florentines gave Savonarola the opportunity—rare for prophets— of translating his vision into a practical program. From the pulpit Savonarola taught the first city of the Renaissance how to become the first city of the New Age. Florence, reformed by the friar and his followers, was to be the center from which the spiritual light would illuminate the world.

This article examines early protestant efforts to confront the belief that souls in purgatory appeared to or haunted the living. It demonstrates that a series of Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead (1521 or 1522) long attributed to Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt were actually written by Martin Luther or a close disciple. More importantly, it shows that these Articles participated in an extended effort by Luther to realize the doctrinal foci of the Reformation in the daily lives of believers as they encountered apparitions and poltergeists, worried about lost loved ones, and faced their own deaths. Luther aimed, in particular, to discipline Christians’ senses of hearing and sight. Relating inward and outward senses, and explaining the apparent wandering dead as demons in disguise, Luther counseled Christians to hear the Word rather than the dead, to see Christ rather than the devil. Karlstadt also sought to realize doctrinal concentration, but in a manner shaped by his conception of faith as knowledge. Addressing anxiety about those who died before the Reformation, Karlstadt explained the wandering spirits as ignorant souls, destined for salvation but still needing to learn the right way. These wanderers spurred the living to diligent study of God's will.

The Council of Sens (May 25, 1141), during which the teaching of Peter Abelard († 1143) was condemned by an ecclesiastical court, has long been one of the most disputed subjects in twelfth-century scholarship. The outcome of the Council, understood as a victory for Bernard of Clairvaux († 1153) over master Abelard, bequeathed us centuries of distorted historical interpretation. For far too long, understanding of what happened was firmly based on the account given by Bernard's biographers, in the first place his secretary (and adoring admirer) Geoffrey of Auxerre, who related the confrontation between Bernard and Abelard in his contribution to the hagiographical biography of the abbot. Not unnaturally, the Vita places Bernard at the center of his time, making him the dominant figure of the twelfth century. Thus no doubt was admissible concerning Abelard's heresy and Bernard's right and justice in condemning him.

Since H. L. Gray questioned the view that “Italian learning languished” between the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447 and 1488 when John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas Linacre visited Italy, several scholars have attempted to show the nature of the new learning fostered in England by such intermediaries as Robert Flemmyng, William Selling, and John Free, among others. Roberto Weiss has investigated more thoroughly than anyone else the interest of these Englishmen in the new learning during that interval. His book brings the narrative to 1485, a time which for him marks the beginning of genuine English humanism.While there is no doubt that Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre were leaders of the avant garde of humanism or that Selling, Flemmying, and Free helped bridge the gap between 1447 and 1488, some less well-known men played an important part in the advance of the new learning.

Prior to the outbreak of the German Revolution of 1848, the liberal publicists Wilhelm Jordan and Robert Prutz complained bitterly about “the foolish absorption of the Germans in theological problems.… when political and economic issues should occupy their full attention.”

One of the most innovative provisions of the Economic Opportunity Act, passed by Congress in August 1964 as the heart of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, was funding for a preschool program for the youngest of America's poor, known as Head Start. Many children were qualified for Head Start in Mississippi, the poorest state in the nation. This was especially so in the northwest quadrant of that state. The area, known locally as “the Delta,” was dominated by the floodplain of the lower Mississippi River, a largely rural, cotton-based economy, and tens of thousands of desperately poor, largely black, farm workers.

Anabaptism was a religious movement of the little people of village and town, affecting in the end almost the whole area of the Germanic dialects from the Tyrol to Flanders, from Alsace to Prussia. Anabaptism, for all its, or perhaps precisely because of its, dissociation from principality and privilege, was more exclusively a Germanic movement than even Lutheranism; for the latter could at least go beyond the Germanic dialects to express itself in a Scandinavian or Slavic tongue; and, of course, Anabaptism was far less international than the Reformed movement. The linguistic containment of Anabaptism is all the more remarkable for the reason that in principle Anabaptism was much more world-minded and mission-minded—because of the seriousness with which it took the great commission— than any variety of the Magisterial Reformation. Yet when it moved beyond the deeply sinused speech frontier to the East, for example, it did so in ethnically and linguistically closed colonies in Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere. Documents from the pens of Anabaptists in French, a Scandinavian tongue, Polish, Czech, or Italian, surviving from the Reformation Era, could be held between two fingers; while the surviving Anabaptist writings in the international language of the Humanists and the Reformers are even fewer. (In contrast, a good deal of the surviving literary corpus of the Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and especially of the Evangelical Rationalists is in Latin, as well as in the Romance and Slavic tongues and Hungarian.) The little people of Anabaptism were not without recruits and even leadership from former priests and monks with their Latin and an occasional patrician with his Humanist training, but the lingua franca of Anabaptism was German, although progressive modification in idiom was necessary as the radical evangelical gospel was proclaimed by preacher or epistle from North to South.

This article, drawing upon primary field research, analyzes the origins and history of the East African Revival of the 1930s and its ongoing relevance and role in post-genocide Rwanda. Starting as a Holiness-inspired, Anglican movement, the Revival persisted among the Tutsi Diaspora during their exile to refugee camps in Uganda following the 1959 Hutu-led Revolution and has returned with them following the coming to power of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994. The Revival, as it presently experiences a reawakening in the post-genocide church, provides the Tutsi returnees with a spiritual mechanism to explain their plight as refugees and a means by which to heal from decades of suffering. Additionally, a narrative has emerged in which they believe themselves to be a “Chosen People” who found redemption and healing in the refugee camps by embracing the revival spirit. Many Anglican returnees further believe they have been “chosen” to bring healing and reconciliation, through the revivalist tradition, to post-genocide Rwanda. While the return of the Revival tradition in the post-genocide Anglican Church offers potential benefits for Rwanda's reconciliation and recovery, the church must also abandon its apolitical inclinations and challenge the ruling regime in the name of truth, democratization, and justice.

There are growing evidences of a sense of concern with respect to the interpretation accorded Adolf Harnack and his liberal colleagues in the three decades since his death. As a result, appeals have been made for a re-evaluation of liberal theology, and of Harnack in particular. Certainly one of the tasks which is pre-requisite to such a reassessment is a consideration of the historical situation which shaped Harnack's thought and in some measure, at least, determined the options for his own position. Perhaps this article may contribute to this preliminary discussion, and nothing more ambitious than a consideration of Harnack's background and cultural environment, with a concluding characterization of his position, will be attempted here.