As eruditi et erudienti who had profited richly from pagan and Christian learning, Augustine and Chrysostom appreciated the power and influence of teachers and of pedagogical techniques. Both viewed God as the teacher, and both were captivated by the divine method of instruction. They saw this method as one of divine accommodation; that is, the Lord adapted his lessons and plan to human capacities. Augustine's and Chrysostom's works are replete with references to, and discussions of, divine accommodation; it is a common aspect of their thought which fits neatly and prominently into a lengthy and vibrant exegetical tradition.

The congregation of Savigny deserves recognition as a notable expression of the monastic revival which characterized the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Savigny itself was founded around 1112 in the forests which join Normandy, Maine, and Brittany by Vital of Mortain, a former hermit and itinerant preacher. Within 35 years, the congregation which developed from the monastery included more than 30 houses in France and England. These Savigniacs were praised effusively by contemporaries as models to be followed. In spite of Savigny's acknowledged importance, however, many aspects of its early history remain relatively unstudied. The only comprehensive treatment of the congregation is a largely hagiographical account compiled by Dom Claude Auvry, prior to Savigny from 1698 to 1712, which finally was edited and published in the late nineteenth century. The paucity of research on Savigny is explained partially by the fact that in 1147 the congregation was absorbed into the Cistercian order and thereby lost its distinctive identity. However, the study of early Savigniac history is valuable not only because of its intrinsic importance but also because an accurate assessment of the effects of the union on the order of Cîteaux will be possible only through an understanding of the congregation prior to 1147.

In August 1940, the poet Wallace Stevens wrote a series of letters to Hi Simons, a Chicago literary critic who had sent Stevens a list of questions concerning various images in his poems. Wary of explanations of poetry that betray the poetic voice, Stevens composed notes which intensified his images, rendering them, if anything, stranger rather than more common. In the course of one letter, he was moved to comment on the nature of poetry itself.

The persecution instituted by the emperor Valerian (AD. 253–260) long has presented modern scholars with several important problems. One of the most pressing questions concerns the reasons behind Valerian's sudden shift in religious policy in 257. Prior to that time the church was largely undisturbed, but the years 257–258 witnessed a series of increasingly severe imperial edicts directed against Christianity. What prompted this sudden reversal of imperial religious policy in 257? Moreover, given the change in the official position, what was the nature of this revised religious policy? The overall picture that emerges out of an attempt to answer these questions indicates that the primary motives behind this persecution were, in fact, religious. Further, the government's religious outlook also encompassed certain related social aims. In order to deal with these issues effectively, however, one first must compare Valerian's religious policy to those of his predecessors from 249 to 253.

In his palace in Prague on 16 December 1585, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II was plainly annoyed. The Holy League of the powerful French Roman Catholic Guise family and their puppet, King Henry III, were putting pressure on their coreligionist to deal with his vassal, Frederick, count of Montbéliard and Württemberg. In a fine hand with many impressive flourishes, Rudolph's secretary prepared the angry emperor's letter to Frederick, warning him “in a friendly way” to obey at once and to send away the French Protestant exiles seeking refuge in the county of Montbéliard. If Frederick refused, he would fall under Rudolph's displeasure and incur imperial wrath and punishment (Kaiserlichen ungnad und straff).

I have long been intrigued with the role of the American churches in dividing the nation and reinforcing the sectional conflict that led to the Civil War. Elsewhere I have argued that evangelical Protestantism was a major bond of unity for the United States during the first part of the nineteenth century; that the chief institutional forms of this faith were the large popular denominations—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, each with nationwide constituencies; that these denominations, increasingly agitated by disputes over slavery, sundered into northern and southern factions long before political rupture, thus opening the first major cleavage between slaveholding and free states; and that the denominational schisms portended and to some extent provoked the crisis of the Union in 1861. What I wish to pursue further in this article is how the regional religion which these schisms both exposed and augmented not only broke a primary bond of national unity but also furnished a persuasive example of sectional independence, encouraged the myth of peaceable secession, reinforced North-South alienation, and heightened the moral outrage which each section felt against the other. The “inner civil war” of the divided churches thus exacerbated the ordeal of the Union and confirmed the nation's course to unrepressed conflict.

The involvement of English women in the radical Protestant movements of the 1640s and 1650s has attracted the attention of a number of modern historians. The hub of such studies is Keith Thomas's provocative 1958 essay, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” which focuses on the expanded role of women in these groups and on the way in which sectarian views indirectly undermined the patriarchal family. More recently, Dorothy Ludlow has studied female preachers in this period, insisting that they were not fanatics but sober women with a distinctive sense of Christian calling who claimed full membership in the Christian community. The more well-known women, such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Cary, have been the subject of recent studies in their own right. For the period after 1660, Pamela Volkman has examined the contrasting ways in which male and female converts to the sects were depicted, noting that women were more likely to be accused of emotional volatility, immorality, or even insanity than were men. These studies have progressed to the point that we are in no danger of overlooking the role of women in English Nonconformity in the mid-seventeenth century.

Recent discussions of the major literary works of the witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have advanced significantly our understanding of this important episode in European history. Clearly, our efforts no longer are controlled by the anticlerical and even antireligious sentiments that corrupted so much late nineteenth-century scholarship on this subject. Yet a more subtle nineteenth-century prejudice still remains with us. We still wish to believe that those who opposed the craze did so because in some fundamental way they were more enlightened, or more rational, or more scientific than those who accepted and even supported witch hunting. Recent anthropological research, however, stressing both the ubiquity and the intellectual integrity of a belief in witches, suggests strongly that this modern viewpoint is probably not correct. Certainly, this prejudice has seriously distorted our understanding of one important contribution to the witch debate, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Modern commentators have invested this book with an aura of scientific rationality that it ill deserves. A closer inspection, I believe, reveals an entirely different source for Scot's ideas and, more importantly, sheds some new light on what it really was that brought witch hunting in Europe to an end.

Before the political and scholarly rediscovery of ethnicity during the past decade, American observers tended to overlook the lingering homeland influences in the lives of this country's immigrant ethnic groups. Scholars here were the world's experts on the consequences which follow international migration: alienation, acculturation, and assimilation. But like their dean, Oscar Handlin, they stressed not the “roots” but the uprootedness of their subjects. According to this tradition, the migrants, torn suddenly from Old World surroundings, had been able to bring with them only a few flimsy pieces of “cultural baggage,” the equivalent of the fragile-looking wicker hampers and precariously bulging cloth bundles with which the newcomers were photographed at Ellis Island but with which they rarely were seen again.

A striking feature of religious life in the United States has been the strength and vitality of the black churches. How is the distinctive character of these churches, as well as their strength and vitality, to be explained and understood?

In the early 1840s a wave of enthusiasm for the socialist theory of Charles Fourier swept through American reform circles. Excited utopians in New York, Boston, and elsewhere in the North divided their efforts between publicizing their version of Fourierism, called “Association,” and building model communities or “phalanxes” to illustrate it. While the history and sociology of their nearly three dozen short-lived communal experiments continue to attract scholarly attention, the Associationists' writings have been relatively neglected. Yet the expositions and arguments that won thousands of converts to Fourierism represent an innovation in American religious thought too important to be forgotten: the first extensive attempt to harness the powerful ideas and symbols of Christianity to the emerging worldview of secular socialism.

Since the eighteenth century, critics and historians have looked with embarrassment and horror at the belief in and persecution of witches in France, as well as in the rest of Europe, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The witchcraft crisis has seemed to be either an example of the evils of traditional religious bigotry or an odd aberration in the march of progress following the Renaissance. Those who defined and propagated the learned theories of witchcraft—its reality and dangers and the need for severe persecution of witches—have been depicted almost universally as oppressive, bigoted extremists. In recent years historians have dealt with witchcraft from new points of view and have provided valuable new information and interpretations, but they still have tended to confirm the traditional images of the writers of demonological tracts. They are horrified and repulsed by the demonologists, whom they see as spokesmen for a unified oppressive upper class.

In the preface to his first study of American Christianity, The Social Sources of Denominationalism, H. Richard Niebuhr gave his reasons for undertaking the book. A course in “Symbolics” he taught as a seminary professor had convinced him that any attempt to distinguish denominations primarily by references to their doctrines or to approach the problem of Christian unity from a purely theological point of view was “artificial and fruitless.” Real understanding required a shift of orientation from theology to history, sociology, and ethics.

A revolution in rural life since the 1940s has produced agribusiness, corporate farms, and situation in which less than five percent of Americans are engaged in farming activities and fewer still work family farms. Richard Hofstadter once observed, “The United States was born in the country and has moved to the city.” Today, when few vestiges remain of “the localistic and personalistic frame of reference, which describes farming and country life effectively all the way through the depression years,” it is important to remember the influence that an idealized picture of rural life had on earlier generations of American intellectuals. Amidst the profound changes in American society produced by industrialization, urbanization, and corporate capitalism, many thinkers adhered to a vision of simpler times—one of grass-— Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York, 1955), p. 23. John L.—Last Minority: The Transforming of Rural Life in America (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), p. xvi; Shover's book is a poignant analysis of the revolution in rural life since the 1940s. Jean Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J., 1970), examines the nostalgia for simpler times in the thought of nine people, including John Dewey, Charles H. Cooley, Jane Addams, Josiah Royce, and Robert E. Park, who identified personally and professionally with urban life.

With the publication of Catholic Revivalism in 1978, Jay P. Dolan transferred the scholarly discussion of nineteenth-century American revivalism to a larger arena. He not only unveiled the Catholic counterpart of a phenomenon hitherto considered exclusively Protestant, but he also demonstrated that potentially fruitful comparisons might be drawn between the Protestant and the Catholic revival experiences. Although twentieth-century evangelism still awaits an inclusive ecumenical treatment along the lines pursued by Dolan, some promising subjects for initial forays into this field have surfaced. This essay focuses upon one minor character in the epic story of American Catholic evangelism, David Goldstein (1870–1958), a convert from Judaism and socialism and a pioneer lay Catholic street lecturer between the world wars.

One of the more frequently cited but less well understood issues involving Eastern Orthodox interests and modern nationalism in the Balkans has been that of the so-called dedicated monasteries. Dedicated monasteries (prek Ionennye or, in Moldavian, inchinat monasteries) were those landed estates, mainly in the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were entrusted to the administration of one or another of the Greek patriarchates, holy places, or monasteries of the Near East so that the profits from the land might be used to sustain Greek Orthodox institutions under Ottoman, Islamic rule. These estates, dating to the first such bequests by Danubian boyars in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, became the loci for monastic institutions which yielded a constant source of revenue to their Orthodox trustees in the Near East up to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Students of Latin American pentecostalism often have viewed it more as a symptom of emerging mass society than as a vital religious force. Studies based on development theory, especially, assume that popular movements in the Third World, such as Brazilian pentecostalism, Spiritism, and Umbanda, may promote national integration by offering marginal peoples rudimentary preparation for civic roles. Presumably the decision-making and leadership experience gained in religious participation later may be applied to community and political activities.

Between 1918 and 1932 representatives from three black denominations— African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal—devised plans to merge into one religious body which they hoped to name the United Methodist Episcopal church. During this period the clergy and laity of these three black denominations debated the advantages and shortcomings of the Birmingham Plan of 1918 and the Pittsburgh proposals of 1927 which sought to create a single black Methodist organization. Opponents of the Birmingham and Pittsburgh agreements feared that organic union would work against their particular denominational interests and destroy their historical identity. Advocates of merger stressed the common religious and racial background of the three churches and argued that black Methodist unity would benefit the nation's black population. By 1932, however, the deep denominational divisions among black Methodists slowed the movement toward merger and undermined efforts to end the religious rivalry among these three important black institutions.

Education is fundamental to any society. In its broadest sense it includes not merely curriculum and educational theory but all of the pressures that help to shape peoples' minds. Education, both formal and informal, is the vehicle through which society transmits its values, its “dreams”, and its worldview to its youth. Precolonial southern Nigerian societies had created educational systems that promoted their own values and moral standards as the guiding principles for their children. The function of such education, in addition to occupational preparation in agriculture, crafts, and religion, was the inculcation of a sense of communal responsibility. Christian missionaries who came in the nineteenth century brought with them European culture and traditions. These traditions were propagated and concretized in the mission schools which were tolerated by the British colonial government. But the colonial government frequently reexamined its views concerning the objectives of the mission schools. During the nationalist period (1945–1960) the nature of politics, particularly in southeastern Nigeria, led to further reevaluation of the basic role of missions in secular education. Then the military officers came to power in 1966. They shared the perspective that the idea of the elimination of mission schools within the Nigerian educational system again should be given serious consideration.

Students of southern Protestantism seldom have interpreted regional Christianity, at least in its major denominational and sectarian expressions, as a force for positive economic or social change. Rather, they have correctly stressed its individualism, pietism, and fusion of religious and cultural values. Yet there have been a few Christians in the South who have been troubled by their region's mores and have boldly sought to change them. From the mid-1930s to the late 1950s a number of these individuals coalesced into a loosely knit interdenominational and interracial association, known after 1936 as the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen (FSC). Over the years this little cadre of Christians propounded a radical critique of twentieth-century southern civilization.