This article examines medieval liturgical artifacts that survived the English Reformation by being converted to alternative religious and secular purposes. Exploiting both textual and material evidence, it explores how sacred objects were adapted and altered for a range of domestic and ecclesiastical uses, together with the underlying theological assumptions about adiaphora or “things indifferent” that legitimized such acts of “recycling.” These are situated on a continuum with iconoclasm and approached as dynamic and cyclic processes that offer insight into how Protestantism reconfigured traditions of commemoration and patterns of remembrance. Simultaneously, it recognizes their role in resisting religious change and in preserving tangible traces of the Catholic past, showing how converted objects served to perpetuate and complicate social and cultural memory. The final section investigates the ambiguous longer-term legacies of this reform strategy by probing the significance of growing concerns about the sin of ‘sacrilege’ committed by those who had profaned holy things.

Despite the voluminous literature on the Supreme Court's famous mid-century decisions on religion and public education, detailed investigations of how McCollum (1948), Schempp (1963), and related rulings affected particular Bible courses and the communities that offered them are largely absent. This article offers an in-depth retrospective analysis of one such class, the Dallas High Schools Bible Study Course. One of the longest-running Bible programs in the country, it lasted over six decades, likely attracted over 40,000 students, and provided a model for other communities near and far. Indeed, its textbooks remain in occasional use today. This study contextualizes the course within local religious and civic life, the evolving legal landscape, competing notions of church-state relations, differing sensibilities about religious and ethnic diversity, and larger national trends. Despite the program's Protestant nature, until its final days advocates characterized it as a nonsectarian class that separated church and state. That they did so for so long illustrates the deep-rootedness of their commitments to religious education, how contested the implications of the Supreme Court cases were, and how crucial recognition of geographical variation is for exploring the places of religion in American public education.

This article inquires into the piecemeal, provisional de-marginalization of American irreligion and analyzes the social stakes and strategies of dis/belief's invocation during the long nineteenth century. It does so by considering the era's corpus of American deathbed narratives. It argues that late-century irreligionists mimed and subverted the deathbed strategies of their Christian detractors to convince a skeptical American audience to concede the contested sincerity of their disbelief. For much of the nineteenth century, Christian-produced infidel deathbed narratives mapped the mixture and multiplicity of inner irreligion and interrogated the sincerity of disbelief. In response, irreligionists—initially ambivalent about the interpretability of the deathbed—eventually came to invest it with as much power to prove sincerity as had American Christians. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, irreligionists developed a nationwide network of irreligious dying and selectively, strategically deployed the deathbed's accrued power to prove the uniform sincerity of their disbelief. By the turn of the century, they had largely neutralized the derisive force of the infidel deathbed genre, leaving disbelief a partially, provisionally less marginal and less multiplex marker in American society, and re-tethering themselves to their Christian detractors in the process.

In standard postcolonial political polemics in Uganda, colonial Anglican and Catholic churches have been castigated for fomenting and exacerbating Uganda's political divisions. These polemics overlook the growing ecumenical ties between Catholic and Anglican leaders that began in the 1950s and continued well into the 1980s. In particular, the shared experience of political oppression forged solidarity between erstwhile Catholic and Anglican rivals, especially during the Idi Amin dictatorship of 1971–1979 and the brutal civil war of 1979–1986. Drawing on an array of archival, oral, and secondary sources, this article offers a synthesis of Ugandan Christian leaders’ political engagement during the quarter-century following independence in 1962. I argue that church leaders in the 1960s embraced a politically quiescent, “social development” approach best embodied in the ecumenical Uganda Joint Christian Council. In the early 1970s, Anglican and Catholic leaders slowly withdrew from active collaboration with Amin's regime, embracing an approach I term “prudent recalcitrance,” entailing shifting stances of official silence, private lobbying, and carefully crafted written critiques. Finally, during the political unrest and civil war of the early 1980s, church leaders adopted a posture of “prophetic presence,” standing for and with the people in opposition to Milton Obote's increasingly violent state.

In view of Martin Luther's prominence as a person who changed the course of world history with his Reformation and given the abundance of historical sources on the reformer's life and work, the great extent to which archaeological discoveries of the last fifteen years have shed new and sometimes surprising light on the reformer's life might seem astonishing. The study at hand presents these new insights by introducing the results of archaeological excavations that took place on the premises of Martin Luther's parents’ home in Mansfeld and in the garden of the Luther House in Wittenberg, which for more than thirty years was the home of the reformer. The discoveries made in both places allow new insights into the reformer's and his family's everyday life. They enrich, or even correct, our knowledge about these aspects with fascinating, new, and sometimes surprising facets. The majority of the archaeological finds took place prior to the exhibition “Finding Luther: Archaeologists on the Reformer's Trail” at the State Museum of Prehistory Halle (Saale) (2008/2009) and in the framework of the project “Luther Archaeology” at the State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt (2010–2015). These finds, as well as architectural, archival, and scientific investigations, shed new light on Martin Luther's family background and childhood, on the social status of his parents, as well as on his immediate living environment and the high living standard in his Wittenberg home. Taken together, these conditions reflect his social status as a respected professor of theology, protagonist of the Reformation, and member of the highest social class in Wittenberg. The last section of this study gives an insight into some selected results of further excavations that have been carried out throughout Wittenberg during the last few years. They make it possible to contextualize not only Luther's household but also the consequences of the Reformation within early modern Wittenberg.