Newman's Apologia pro vita sua is remembered as a work of literature, a lasting monument of religious autobiography. Yet it was also a work of religious controversy, perhaps the most ephemeral of literary genres. Indeed, it was primarily a work of controversy; Newman, who almost never wrote except for an occasion, had called upon autobiography as the ultimate debating technique in a dispute which had come to center upon the personal honesty of one of the disputants. Truthfulness was pressed into service in an argument which, after all, was about “truth, for its own sake”, as “a virtue with the Roman clergy.” The artfulness of Newman's candour was successful in its purpose; and in the triumphant vindication of his personal integrity, the original controversy was virtually obliterated, leaving behind a work of autobiographical art.

The concept of a cultural whole is a very fruitful idea for the cultural historian. Involved in it is the assumption that a unity of form pervades the entire culture and that each significant part of the culture—religious, political, social, literary, and so forth—participates in and gives expression to this pervasive form. The assumption is clearly one of great practical importance, for it invites the historian to believe that a close study of one part will throw light upon all others. Accordingly, the present study seeks, by special focus on one aspect of evangelical thought, to help elucidate the pervasive liberal outlook of midnineteenth-century America.

Historians who try to understand encounters between red men and white men in the seventeenth century are immediately confronted with a problem: Indians were not literate, and they left no records of the sort we are accustomed to studying. For centuries the only information about aboriginal populations in the Americas was derived from European narratives, conditioned by viewpoints that harbored an outsider's values. Archaeology added some indigenous references, but the evidence has usually been too meager for adequate generalization. Historians have pursued the goal of avoiding white men's biases and viewing Indian cultures as having an integrity all their own, but that goal has remained an ideal, causing more despair than hope of eventual success. As far as the history of early New Mexico is concerned, the situation is worsened by the fact that most church and government archives were burned during the fighting of 1680–1696.

In 1789, two months after the inauguration of George Washington as president of the “first new nation,” the foundering regime of Louis XVI, in the 802d year of Capetian rule in France, was forced to convene the Estates General. As the French crisis deepened, all of Europe was deeply stirred—and in radically diverse ways. One Sunday morning in the spring of 1791 some Tübingen University students, including the future philosophers Hegel and Schelling, were bold enough to celebrate the revolution's progress by erecting a Freedom Tree in a nearby meadow. A more characteristic response came in August of that year when the Hapsburg Emperor Leopold II, whose sister, Marie Antoinette, had recently been made a prisoner in the Tuilleries, joined the King of Prussia in the Declaration of Pillnitz. This threat of foreign intervention, in turn, awakened the French nation and brought the revolution to a new pitch of excitement. Paris soon heard for the first time the thrilling strains of La Marseillaise. While a citizens army marched off against the forces of Reaction, the newly elected delegates to a constitutional convention made their way to Paris. Then on 20 September 1792, the very day on which the Convention proclaimed the Year One of the French Republic, the Prussian march on Paris was gloriously halted at the battle of Valmy in the Argonne near Belgium.

A period of consensus in American religious historiography has ended, but students of American religion representing a variety of perspectives have recently come to regard Abraham Lincoln, once a subject of great dispute among religionists, as one of the most important and profound of America's theologians and religious leaders, if not the religious center of American history. It is primarily as a spokesman for and symbol of a religious interpretation of American destiny that Lincoln has been placed at this pinnacle, and he has had an especially prominent place in the recent discussion of American civil religion.

The mission of Myron C. Taylor, personal representative of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to Pope Pius XII, remains a strange anomaly in the history of the foreign relations of the United States. Ever since 1867, when an act of Congress terminated diplomatic relations between the republic and the world's oldest diplomatic entity, the United States had been unrepresented at the Vatican City. The short-lived attempt to reconstitute some form of permanent and effective diplomatic presence was born in controversy and lasted only from 1940 to 1950 during the incumbency of the single appointee. When on Taylor's resignation President Truman attempted to appoint a popular second world war general to the post, the outcry in the United States was so heated that the nomination had to be withdrawn and the venture abandoned. What went wrong? Was the storm of protest merely a result of religious bigotry on the part of American Protestantism? Or had Taylor's conduct of his mission been such as to evoke these outraged feelings? Certain episodes of the diplomatic negotiations between the United States and the Vatican have already been published, for example, the polite exchange of courtesies collected and introduced by Taylor himself, Wartime Correspondence between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII. Some more controversial matters, such as the question of the advisability of bombing Rome, were outlined from the American point of view in the Foreign Relations of the United States. Not until the Vatican's recent decision to publish some of its papers from the pontificate of Pius XII, or more particularly until the opening of Taylor's own papers in 1973, has it been possible to study in more detail the curious entanglement of theological, diplomatic and political considerations which governed the United States' relations with the Vatican, and encompassed Taylor's mission from beginning to end.

It is almost a truism that when Charles Darwin's Origin of Species first appeared, in 1859, many people found its evolutionism to be unacceptable for religious reasons. They thought the theory of natural selection working by random variations conflicted with long-held and cherished beliefs about God and His relationship with man and the world. But although the general fact of the religious opposition to Darwinism is well-known, precise questions about the nature of the opposition—if indeed there was total opposition—have yet to be answered fully The present article seeks to go some way towards the asking and answering of such questions, although the discussion will keep to relatively sophisticated thinkers who took both science and religion seriously, and who were therefore concerned to achieve some harmony between the two. It will not deal with those who cared only for either science or religion.

In an essay of the early 1920s, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner offered alternative phrasings for the Protestant liberalism against which his generation was in revolt: one could speak of “the evolutionistic optimism of world-betterment,” or simply of “Christian Americanism.”

To its leaders the Oxford Movement was “the Romance of the nineteenth century” while to its opponents it was nothing less than “disloyalty to Christ and His Truth.” Then, as now, the chief difficulty lay in delineating various characteristics, and this is especially the case with the Anglo-Catholic or “Ritualist” clergy by the end of the Victorian era. The following will be an attempt to place the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism, or Ritualism, into its proper historical context while examining more closely its role within the Oxford Movement and especially its tradition of the “slum priest.”