Approximately one third of the world is Christian, and half of those are Roman Catholics. The demographics alone make writing a global history of Catholicism a mammoth task. To attempt the impossible, Professor John T. McGreevy of Notre Dame University has tackled a theme that plays itself out over multiple centuries and diverse cultural settings—the conversation, negotiation, tension, and conflict between traditionalism and modernization. Given that conservatism and progressivism shift meanings according to historical context, the implications of each position in situ are complex and surprising. Only a scholar of McGreevy's maturity and erudition could hope to succeed in such a bold enterprise.

The activity of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński as the Primate of Poland occurred in a period when Poland did not maintain diplomatic relations with the Holy See. The period between 1948 and 1981 can be divided, from the perspective of the Warsaw authorities, into three subperiods: no relations and no talks (informal and official), 1948–1965; negotiations, 1965–1974; and working contacts, 1974–1981. The years 1964–1978 were also the period of the apogee of the Vatican's Ostpolitik carried out by Msgr Agostino Casaroli, under the auspices of Pope Paul VI. Cardinal Wyszyński was directly involved four times in talks on the arrangement of Polish–Vatican relations: in 1951, 1957, 1963, and 1965. With time, however, the primate gained more and more distance from the purposefulness of establishing relations between the Holy See and communist states. It should be added that from the beginning of the 1970s, the primate was quite critical of the effects of the Vatican's so-called Ostpolitik. At the end of the pontificate of Paul VI, an open conflict arose between the Secretariat of State and the Primate of Poland, which was resolved only with the election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope.

My thanks to the reviewers for their insightful comments and to the editors of Church History, most especially Jon Butler, for shepherding the reviews. Having once served as a Church History editor, I appreciate his labors even more.

Emilio Comba, a leading Waldensian historian in the nineteenth century, was a strong advocate for nation-building in post-unification Italy. This article examines the relationship between Comba's “making Italians” endeavors and his historical writings, focusing mainly on his appropriation of the preceding confessional framework. As a fervent nationalist and evangelical pastor, Comba believed that true Risorgimento required not only political independence but also a religious reform of the Italian nation that would restore Italians to the original Religion of Christ. He envisioned this national reform as a realization of both liberty and the Gospel within the universal history of the Christian religion. Comba employed historical writings to support his claims, attempting to demonstrate how Italy was a perennially Protestant nation on the one hand and to serve as a magistra vitae for fellow citizens on the other. This article argues that Comba relied on a genealogical narrative structure inherited from the early modern protestant historiography in presenting his national history. By recasting its composition according to a category of the nation, he transformed a confessional genealogy of the true church into a national one. From a broader perspective, this article calls for further reflection on the role that the early modern intellectual framework played in the process of modern nation-building.

On the cover page of the September 23, 1922, issue of the Chicago Defender, editor Robert S. Abbott announced Go-to-a-White-Church Sunday. Less than a month later, the Federal Council of Churches announced its inaugural Race Relations Sunday. Through a comparative analysis of these two events, this article reconsiders historians’ tendency to assume and emphasize a shared faith across racial lines when discussing interracial religious practice in various historical contexts. Go-to-a-White-Church Sunday was intended both to introduce white churchgoers to black respectability and to provide moral guidance to white churchgoers, whose racism rendered their faith something other than true Christianity. Notwithstanding ceremonial nods to interracial religious brotherhood, Abbott's campaign hinged more so on shared understandings of respectability than on shared Christian faith. While the FCC's Race Relations Sunday differed in its valorization of white Christianity, with proclamations that interracial religious brotherhood was sufficient to solve “the race problem,” both events displayed a shared faith in the power of interracial proximity in itself to accomplish their respective ends. Historians have replicated this problematic faith in interracial proximity by using language of racial transcendence and writing as if interracial religious practice is egalitarian unless proven otherwise. This article calls for more critical, contextually mindful approaches.

This article studies the act of suggesting symbolic meanings for Christian divine office in medieval Europe. Twentieth-century anthropology placed great emphasis on the anthropologist as an interpreter of symbolic meanings of ritual, but while using indigenous explanations, it did not address explication as a social practice. The phenomenon of systematic symbolical explanation in medieval Europe, I propose, invites a shift in research questions from “what does ritual signify?” to “who proposes symbolic values for ritual, from which position, to whom, when, and why?” The first part of the article analyzes the ninth-century pioneering work of Amalar of Metz, while the second part turns to the heyday of the allegorical enterprise in the twelfth century, in the work of authors such as Rupert of Deutz and Honorius Augustudinensis. Applied to liturgy, the allegorical practice is shown to function as a sophisticated tool to address diversity and historical change, and as a contemplative means to rejuvenate ritual and afford delight in light of contemporary challenges.

Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception history, the book begins with a chapter on Eusebius's life and work, focusing on his Ecclesiastical History and its relation to his Chronicle as well as other historical and non-historical genres with which he engaged. Subsequent chapters examine the reception of his work in the Christian Roman Empire of late antiquity, the non-Greek East, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantium, before turning to the rediscovery of Eusebius in diverse early modern contexts and his reception in modern scholarship including the implications of his historiographical work for future historians. The essays that comprise this roundtable, followed by the author's response, continue this important conversation about Eusebius and his legacy.

This article examines one of the first court-martial of a US soldier for the murder of a Korean civilian. In December 1951, Pang Hwa-il died from injuries sustained at the hands of four American soldiers during a late-night search of a home he was visiting. Many acts of violence perpetrated by the US military against Korean civilians like Pang during the Korean War went unaccounted for. However, his death would receive public attention in the United States because he was the associate general secretary of the Korean National Council of Churches. Responding to public pressure, the US military eventually started an investigation approximately two months after the incident took place. By examining the circumstances surrounding Pang's murder, the subsequent trial, and its aftermath, this article challenges a standard characterization of the relationship among missionaries, Korean Protestants, and the US military during the 1950s as a close partnership. The American government, the military, and missionaries had all carefully cultivated a narrative that the US and a Christian South Korea were allies against communism. However, Pang, a Korean Christian leader, was killed by a US soldier, not a communist enemy. Furthermore, the US military's initial delay in bringing Pang's assailants to trial and the light sentence that was handed down shocked both Korean and American observers. As this incident reveals, the US military valued the lives of its Korean allies less than American lives, calling into question the American government's claims that it was working in partnership with South Koreans.

This article tracks the surprising history of a love ballad about a lost sweetheart that went on to become a celebrated gospel hymn about the rural roots of America's greatness. Titled “The Little Brown Church,” but sometimes called “The Church in the Wildwood,” the song's evolution speaks to the ways in which nostalgia became central to the social and religious imagination of those American Protestants call themselves “evangelicals.” Though it first appeared in college songbooks after its publication in 1865, “The Little Brown Church” eventually became a favorite of evangelists, revivalists, and other gospel singers at the dawn of the twentieth century. For these new singers, “The Little Brown Church” spoke to more than just the simple faith they wished to restore. It also illustrated the centrality of white Protestants to the American experience at a moment when the hold these believers had on the nation was beginning to slip. And they would alter both the lyrics and the church's history to bring the two in line. The process not only reveals how nostalgia for a bygone era became vital to those who think of themselves as evangelicals in the twentieth century, but also how evangelicalism itself is something of a historical construction.

This article attempts to develop a more systematic theoretical framework for investigating the international dissemination of devotional books in early modern times. In terms of the concept of cultural translation, the devotional genre offered fertile ground for the dynamics of selection, appropriation, decontextualization, and recontextualization. In this study, a case is made around one particular bestseller: The Practice of Piety, written by the Welsh clergyman Lewis Bayly (c.1575–1631). By studying this book's various editions and translations, we are able to consider more clearly the circumstances under which a devotional book and its textual content were governed by these dynamics. We are also able to gain greater understanding and insight into some of the actors involved: how, by whom, through which channels, and for which audiences. The primary analysis focuses on the language area of the source text: the English-speaking world. It also looks at some of the areas that, first, differ from the original context in terms of the confessional communities in which Bayly's book was translated, printed, and read; and second, for which the production, distribution, and reception of Bayly's text has been sufficiently studied, namely the Dutch- and German-language areas. The result is a premise that offers a springboard for further investigation into the dynamics at play in the international circulation of devotional books—especially in terms of text, illustration, and reading behavior.

This book completes the magnificent two-volume work that Mark Noll began with In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492–1783 (2016), or to say the same thing differently, it completes the trilogy of his summing-up books that he began with America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (2002). Like its two predecessors, America's Book contains capsule summaries of arguments that Noll has proffered in several of his many previous books, especially on US American evangelicalism and the Civil War. Moreover, it ranges comprehensively over the vast expanse of US American religious history in meaning-of-it-all fashion, with Noll's customary acumen. No scholar tires of the accolade “magisterial,” which Noll earned for America's God and In the Beginning Was the Word. This book completes a magisterial trilogy by lucidly, astutely, learnedly, and generously covering its waterfront, and by disciplining the entire exposition with a twofold argument that yields a third argument.

At 846 pages, Mark Noll's history of what he labels America's Protestant Bible civilization certainly has the feel of encyclopedic comprehensiveness. That this hefty volume is but the second portion of Noll's larger history of the Bible in America only adds to the sense of grand summation: the synoptic account of how the scriptures have shaped the nation—its public life, moral order, political divisions, and otherworldly hopes. It is a story filled not only with Protestant successes—the massive publishing program of the American Bible Society or the scriptural suffusion of popular hymnody and everyday devotion—but also with Protestant failures, most obviously in the way nothing-but-the-Bible moral reasoning compounded the abiding divisions over slavery. Indeed, at the end of the day, Noll presents this as a story of loss more than triumph: the decline and fragmentation of a Protestant Bible civilization that had been built amid all the contingencies of a new republic. That narrative arc carries an obvious element of regret that could certainly feed a white evangelical nostalgia for a Christian America, but that is clearly not Noll's intent. Especially on matters of slavery and race, his account is one far more of reproof than reclamation.

The 1930s Dust Bowl on the Great Plains was one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in history. Over-farming, severe drought, and high winds primed dust storms. Depopulation occurred in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico. All was made worse by the economic crisis. While historians have written extensively about the Dust Bowl, its causes and its effects, there is little detailed scholarship on the religious dimensions of this ecological tragedy. This article examines some of the important ways that the Dust Bowl shaped Protestant religious life and popular theology just as it prompted denominational relief campaigns, educational efforts, and conservation work. It looks particularly at Congregationalists, Baptists, Methodists, holiness groups, and Pentecostals. Reactions to the Dust Bowl reveal patterns of thinking about and acting on ecology, social concern, migration, millennialism, and new federal relief efforts. An examination of the growing historical fragmentation of white Protestantism is central to this article. In this era of environmental ruin and mass migration to the West, religious groups and individuals offered vastly different solutions and interpretations, foreshadowing later political and cultural conflicts. In the 1930s, long before the birth of modern environmentalism, Protestants were asking why things had gone so horribly wrong and what, if anything, could be done about it.

Mark A. Noll's insightful and comprehensive survey of the Bible as foundational to American history skillfully nuances this contested topic. While some might describe the United States as a Bible republic, Noll, in stunningly dense detail and documentation, correctly calls the nation a Bible civilization. In drawing this crucial distinction, Noll demonstrates that the Bible and Biblical literacy underlay discourse about politics, culture, and citizenship while at the same time he shows that religious neutrality was enshrined as a national norm in not privileging in the civic sphere one religion over another. After the “proprietary” churches that once exercised disproportionate influence in the public square yielded to a competitive religious marketplace, Methodists emerged in buttressing the body politic through the power of private piety. This disengagement from overt public involvements—a signature attribute of Wesleyan whites—paralleled what the American Bible Society designed in maintaining Biblical primacy in the life of the nation. Distribution of scriptures, especially on the expanding frontier, without doctrinal note or denominational advocacy would sustain the Bible as a glue holding together the American polis and sustaining this body of scriptures as “America's book.”

If a random member of the American Society of Church History (ASCH) were asked to select four individuals to go on a new Mount Rushmore of “Most Influential American Religious Historians,” I would wager that Mark Noll would make the cut pretty easily. After many years of laboring in the deep trenches of undergraduate education at Wheaton College, and then the even deeper trenches of graduate education at the University of Notre Dame, he now brings us America's Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911, the second in a brace of massively researched studies of the Bible's role in American life.

Mark Noll's new book is a masterpiece. A monumental work of scholarship and erudition, America's Book merits respect for its artistry as well. The writing is lucid and well crafted. Always judicious, circumspect, and fair-minded, America's Book moves the reader right along, one page to the next, through 846 pages not counting front matter, in a story of enormous importance for understanding religion's role in American life.

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.

This article evaluates Origen's criticism of Christian participation in the Roman army in relation to two prominent themes in his writings: the moral progress of the Christian and the role of demons in God's providence. I argue that, for Origen, to be a Christian is to be a soldier, albeit one whose adversaries are not human combatants, but the Devil and his angels. The battle is won when Christians refrain from sinning, attaining moral perfection through their study of the scriptures, and adoption of ascetic practices. By avoiding the physical battlefield, Christians remain unsullied by the passions that inflame the soldier, enabling them to fight demons more effectively. But this spiritual combat is not without risks to the physical body. As Origen's Exhortation to Martyrdom attests, execution could be the providentially ordered outcome of a Christian's combat against demons. Origen presents the violent persecution of Christians as consistent with divine providence and martyrdom as a gift of God to the church. His opposition to Christian military participation is rooted neither in a wholesale rejection of warfare nor a deep respect for embodied life, but in his concern for human moral progress—progress that could be advanced by providentially sanctioned violence.

This article examines the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as a history of trauma for Chinese Protestant intellectuals. Using Cai Yongchun—a graduate of Yenching and Columbia University—as an example, the article aims to 1) demonstrate the overwhelming conformity demanded by the Communist regime and 2) analyze how Christians like Cai sought to align with official lines through intellectual reconstruction. In sum, the party viewed Christian intellectuals as deeply suspect due to their religious and Western affiliations, thus targeting them in successive campaigns that began in the 1950s and culminated in the Cultural Revolution. Despite state marginalization, Christian intellectuals like Cai persisted in their patriotism, eager to remain relevant even amid ideological fanaticism. Active adaptation as such, however, facilitated the hegemonic project of revolutionary subject formation that championed the Communist leadership as the custodian of truth. Cai came to experience a fundamental and perpetual denial of the self, pressuring him to become an ever more faithful follower of Mao and his words. Nevertheless, the proletarian redemption proved elusive, and the old Christian identity resilient.