Hilary of Poitiers and Basil of Ancyra were unlikely companions. The former was a Latin bishop from a backwater part of Gaul who had only recently become immersed in the Trinitarian controversy. The latter was a leading figure in the East, schooled in classical Greek theology and a veteran in the ongoing struggle over the nature of God. It is also true that their political fortunes diverged significantly. Though both Hilary and Basil's parties “lost” at the Synod of Constantinople in 360, Basil thereafter slipped into obscurity while Hilary's pro-Nicenes would eventually secure political and theological victory in 381. This pairing is so unlikely, in fact, that scholars have long been reluctant to acknowledge the depth of Hilary's relationship with Basil. Among other issues, such a relationship creates a number of historiographical problems by challenging the traditional mapping of the various theological and political alignments of the mid-fourth century. In the traditional version, Hilary is commonly portrayed as the “Athanasius of the West,” who, in the late 350s, emerged as the leading supporter of the pro-Nicenes in the West. Basil, on the other hand, is regarded as a “semi-Arian,” who rejected the Nicene doctrine that the Son was homoousios to the Father, preferring instead to call the Son “like according to substance” (homoios kat’ ousian).

Scholars have long recognized that the theological arguments of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa against their opponent Eunomius helped to shape the development of Christian orthodoxy, and thus Christian self-definition, in the late fourth-century Roman Empire. The cultural and theological significance of the strong anti-Judaizing rhetoric contained within these Cappadocian authors’ anti-Eunomian treatises, however, remains largely unexamined. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the critical role of anti-Judaizing rhetoric in the arguments that early Christian leaders Athanasius of Alexandria and Ephrem of Nisibis used against “Arian” Christian opponents in the middle of the fourth century, and the implications of this rhetoric for understanding early Christian-Jewish and intra-Christian relations. Scholars have yet to recognize, however, that anti-Judaizing rhetoric similarly helped to define the terms and consequences of the anti-Eunomian arguments made by Basil, Gregory, and Gregory in the decades that followed. The anti-Judaizing rhetoric of their texts attests to the continuing advantages that these leaders gained by rhetorically associating their Christian opponents with Jews. By claiming that Eunomius and his followers were too Jewish in their beliefs to be Christian, and too Christian in their behaviors to be Jewish, Basil, Gregory, and Gregory deployed anti-Judaizing rhetoric to argue that Eunomians were significantly inferior to both true Christians and Jews. The Cappadocians’ strategic comparisons with Jews and Judaism rhetorically distanced their Eunomian opponents from Christianity and thus strengthened the Cappadocians’ own claims to represent Christian orthodoxy.

In the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians laid claim to the land of Palestine. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the investment of the land of Palestine and its places with Christian historical and cultural meanings, and to trace its remapping as the “holy land.” This map was not a figurative representation of geographical and cultural features; as with all maps, it was an idea. The Christian “holy land” is also an idea, one which did not exist at the beginning of the fourth century, but which, by the mid-fifth century, was a place constructed of a rich texture of places, beliefs, actions, and texts, based in the notion that the landscape provided evidence of biblical truths. When Constantine became a Christian, there was no “holy land”; however, over the succeeding one hundred and thirty years Christians marked and identified many of their holy places in Palestine. The map-makers in this transformation were emperors, bishops, monastics, holy women, and pilgrims who claimed the holy places for Christianity, constructing the land as topographically Christian and mediating this view of their world through their pilgrim paths, buildings, liturgies, and texts. The idea of mapping is used here as an aid to understanding the formation of cultural viewpoints and the validation of ideas and actions that informed the construction of the “holy land.”

Christians of every stripe are bound into faith communities by two sets of identifying metaphors. One, the body of Christ, is derived from the New Testament's account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The other, drawn from Hebraic prophecy, is linked to the understanding that Jesus was of the house and lineage of David. As the crucified Messiah, he stood at the head of the house of Israel as both Lord and Christ. In the practical terms spelled out in the Pauline letters, the first of these metaphorical congeries describes the church as Christ's body, an entity with members and a head. The second turns Christ's followers into a kinship group that is a party to a new covenant with God. Despite its heterogeneity, its inclusion of Gentiles as well as Jews, this group—along with the Jews—is one that the ancient of days selected to be his chosen people.

In 1320, Pope John XXII launched a doctrinal enterprise of some import: the assimilation of practices of black magic into the crime of heresy. As was his custom, John sought the opinion of experts before taking a final decision that would entail, among other consequences, extending the jurisdiction of the inquisition to cover cases of black magic. In his recent study on medieval demonology, Alain Boureau has suggested that the question that truly concerned the pope was not witchcraft or ritual magic per se, but the role of the devil in these practices. Boureau based his thesis on a wide-ranging theory of late medieval representations of individual subjectivity and society, on the principle of “pact” or covenant between two free-willing parties. Away from old, static forms of social hierarchization, the fourteenth century favors a contractual structure that places the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the relation between individuals in society and between humans and God. Boureau develops his argument on the basis of the response offered by one of the members of the 1320 commission, the Franciscan Enrico del Carretto. Bishop of Lucca, Enrico had been among the experts in charge of judging the orthodoxy of the Franciscan Spirituals in 1318, and had also participated in the discussion towards the preparation of the bull Cum inter nonnullos. We are thus in the presence of one of John XXII's curial cohort. Boureau accords particular value to Enrico's response because he is the only member of the commission who seems to draw attention to the real efficacity of demonic causality in black magic, thus offering the first explicit evidence of the tournant demonologique taking place in the medieval Church between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.

What could it mean to a medieval monastic community to own a valuable object? Certainly, property in general was crucial to the survival of a stable community, ideals of poverty and the thirteenth-century Franciscan experiment in radical poverty notwithstanding. More specifically, what did it mean to own not simply a field or mill that generated revenue, but an object that was believed to have power beyond its material qualities? Such objects—saints’ relics and wonder-working images—did of course also generate revenue, but their meaning and role for the monastic community and the wider society could be much richer than that. And what if the monastic community was a convent of nuns, of professed religious women whose lives were shaped not just by the rule they shared with their male counterparts, but also by the codes, both implicit and increasingly explicit, that constrained the range of women's religious activities?

Although the first two of these questions—about monastic property and the religious value of sacred objects—have been extensively discussed in scholarship on the Middle Ages, a specific focus on gender in relation to monastic ownership of sacred objects has not been widely examined. My focus on gender here is generated by two salient aspects of religious life in the twelfth century, the period of this study. First, there was an increasing articulation of the priesthood as the sole means of mediating divine presence, and of that priesthood as exclusively male.

Children are the weakest and most fragile members of their families as well as of the society in which they live. At the same time children embody a potential for growth and renewal that is greater than that of anyone else. On many occasions, ancient and medieval hagiographers from the Caucasus have chosen to convey their message of the need for religious change and conversion from indigenous religions or later on from Islam to Christianity by employing examples that involve children. When these writers promoted the transition from sickness to healing and health, from sterility to fertility, from old to new, from what is wild, misguided, and unlettered to the elevated and advanced state of a society that is educated, and from worshippers that were members of other religions to followers of Christianity, they chose to avail themselves of the image of the child.

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.

In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, interspersed with a few intense face-to-face visits in the convent. Because the manuscript arriving that day was a thirteenth-century woman's mystical treatise (the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead), and because Margaret and her sisters in the convent Maria Medingen used this woman's text in what could initially seem peculiar and dynamic ways, this manuscript and these letters can tell us much about the authority and performance of women's mysticism in medieval religion. Mechthild's and Heinrich's texts serve as key examples, which reveal how women's mystical texts were authoritative in the history of Christianity. Namely, medieval audiences assessed mystical authority on the basis of the text's ability to produce the experience in them, and mystical texts required proper performance in order to unleash their generative power.

Three vernacular religious biographies were written by women about other women around the year 1300: Agnes of Harcourt's Francien Vie d'Isabelle de France (ca. 1283), Felipa of Porcelet's Provençal Vida de la benaurada sancta Doucelina (begun ca. 1297), and Marguerite of Oingt's Franco-Provençal Via seiti Biatrix virgina de Ornaciu (between 1303 and 1310). Although a limited number of similar texts had been composed in Latin dating back to the early Middle Ages, and a few twelfth-century women such as Clemence of Barking had refashioned existing Latin lives of early female martyr-saints into Anglo-Norman verse, the works of Agnes, Felipa, and Marguerite are the first extant vernacular biographies to have been written by European women about other contemporary women. Just as strikingly, after the three examples studied here, few if any analogous works appeared until the later fifteenth century, with most writing by women about other religious women in the intervening period instead being found in “Sister Books” and convent chronicles.

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.

In 1844, the Congregationalist minister Enoch Pond in Bangor, Maine, reminded his fellow clergy that they had been commissioned not only to feed the sheep of their flocks but also to nurture the lambs. Under no circumstances, he cautioned, would a good minister neglect the children, for both Christian parents and their pastors felt “the deepest anxiety” that the children of American parishes would not “receive that wise government, that faithful discipline, that Christian instruction and restraint, which, by the blessing of God, shall result in their speedy conversion, and bring them early and truly into the fold of Christ.” He called for pastors to pray for the children, to convene meetings of praying parents, to pay attention to children during pastoral visits, to impart special instruction to children from the pulpit, to visit their schools, to institute Sunday schools, to teach children the Bible, and to offer catechetical instruction. The devoted pastor would acquaint himself with children, “enter into their feelings, and interest himself in their affairs; and thus engage their affections, and win their confidence.“

Christian clergy in America had long heeded such admonitions. Seventeenth-century Puritan ministers made serious, if sporadic, efforts to teach the catechism, often invited groups of children into their homes for instruction, contended over the implications of the baptismal covenant, and urged parents to teach their offspring religious truths and Christian practices. Eighteenth-century Anglican clergy made similar efforts to instruct children, and their revivalist counter-parts in New England and the Middle Colonies encouraged the conversion of children at younger than customary ages. Jonathan Edwards devoted careful attention to his four-year-old convert Phebe Bartlet, who followed in the path of her converted eleven-year-old brother by announcing, after anguished prayers and cries for mercy, that “the kingdom of God had come” to her.

Fasting has an ancient and revered place in the many religious traditions that human communities have fostered throughout history and across the globe. In India, to take a modern example, Hindu women commonly carry out ritual fasts or vrats. Fasting, particularly in its collective forms, is also frequent and widespread among western groups that scholars have sometimes described as Abrahamic religions. Muslims annually observe Ramadan, a month of fasting, prayer, and celebration. Jews customarily fast, taking no food or drink from sunup to sundown, several days each year and, most notably, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. For medieval Christians, preparation for the holy feasts of Christmas and Easter meant substantial periods of religious preparation, the well-known Advent and Lenten periods complete with fasting and abstinence from certain foods. In contemporary Christian circles, fasting may be less widely practiced, yet it retains an important place among Roman Catholics and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, to cite but two better-known cases. In short, the utilization of food for purposes of religious devotion and piety, whether through fasting or feasting, has been a long-standing custom within and without western religious culture.

Because Mormons could never fully realize their separatist dreams of a visible Zion in North America, the history of Mormonism has involved highly complex contacts and negotiations with non-Mormons. In their attempts to convert, resist, or appease outsiders, Mormons have engaged in a distinctive dialectic of secrecy and self-disclosure, of esoteric rites and public relations. The result has been an extended process of controlled modernization.

Narratives of this process have focused on the 1890 “Manifesto” of LDS President and Prophet Wilford Woodruff, the momentous declaration that Latter-day Saints must cease to contract plural marriages. The Manifesto put an end to the intense federal persecution of the 1880s, when government agents imprisoned or exiled husbands of plural wives, confiscated Mormon assets, abolished Utah women's right to vote, and secularized Mormon schools. President Woodruff's truce with the federal government brought Mormons a relative peace and an important sign of acceptance: the granting of statehood to Utah in 1896.

“The Catholic Worker movement is evolving in ways its founders didn't anticipate,” declared a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, explaining that the movement has evolved from a community of single people to a network that includes many family-centered houses of hospitality. Such media perceptions are widely shared by Catholic Worker families. “In 1933,” explained Julia Occhiogrosso of the Las Vegas Catholic Worker, “Dorothy [Day] didn't give us models for families who want to minister to the poor, Catholic Worker style.” These claims demand a more sustained historical analysis. Just how new are Catholic Worker families? What historical factors contributed to their emergence? Who did create the models for the dozens of families that today are feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoners, and bending swords into plowshares?

In the winter of 1771, the colonial assembly of Pennsylvania received a petition from voters in Lancaster County asking for the construction of a turnpike from the Susquehanna River to Philadelphia. Supporters of the project believed that the new road would spur economic development, and in support of this claim they cited developments in England. England's turnpikes, they argued, had made long-distance travel efficient and safe, had contributed to an expansion of commerce and manufacturing, and had increased the value of agricultural land. Shortly after these claims were published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, John Woolman, a Quaker reformer in Mount Holly, New Jersey, began hearing troubling stories about the English roads. Woolman was best known as an opponent of slavery, but in his writings and travels he had voiced concerns on an array of other economic issues, including exploitative labor relations generally, and the overwork and abuse of animals. In 1772, Woolman was planning to travel in England, and thus he had reason to pay attention to reports about the English roads.

One of the innovations of England's turnpike era was the “flying coach.” This was a carriage pulled by a team of six horses, and it achieved efficiency not so much by running fast as by starting early in the morning and going for long hours continuously. Woolman heard that flying coaches could cover one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and that they “often run over foot people in the dark.”

Historian Wallace Best argues in his Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 (2005) that historically “we have been more accustomed to think of religion as spontaneous and supernatural.” Best maintains that we have seen religion as “something that happens—outside of human control and irrespective of social context.” He wants to challenge this conception of religion by emphasizing the active production of a new religious culture by black Americans in Chicago in the early twentieth century. The agency of lower- and working-class blacks is what Best emphasizes in his rich analysis of religion and culture in black Chicago. Although it is not clear who the “we” is in Best's analysis because he does not cite any sources on this point, I do not quite see things the way that he does. As I will demonstrate in this essay, the historiography on African American religion has not posited a static or “supernatural” conception of religion. What strikes me about the history of interpretations of African American religion is the way in which interpreters have asserted that peoples of African descent were “naturally religious,” which meant that their religion was a product of biology and nature rather than of the “supernatural.” Generally, white interpreters in the early twentieth century set the terms of the debate by arguing that blacks were naturally religious and thus unable to compete in a modern industrial world. The political and social force of such arguments has been keenly observed by black interpreters, who were eager to offer in response a more socially progressive notion of black religion in order to enlist black churches in social reform, to counter images of blacks as inhibited by nature or biology from contributing to the cultural vitality of the nation, and to insist that black religion changed in response to social circumstances (and hence the common claim in the 1940s that it was very much a product, if not an epiphenomenon, of their economic and political condition).

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a fundamental shift in the character of the Christian religion—namely, a massive expansion and shift of its center of gravity southward. During this period, Christianity experienced a transformation from a predominantly Western religion to a world religion largely defined by non-Western adherents in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. From 1970 to 2005, the size of the Southern Church increased two and a half times to over 1.25 billion members. By the early twenty-first century, 60 percent of all professing Christians lived in the global South and East. The most dynamic source of church growth during this period was Independent (evangelical or Pentecostal) Protestant groups, which increased at nearly twice the rate of other Christian affiliations. The spread of evangelical Protestantism represents a truly global phenomenon and has included large populations in East and Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas.

This article looks at the connection between a political movement and the evolution of Christian consciousness. It seeks to answer a series of questions not often asked, in hopes of demonstrating that these questions deserve more attention than they have generated in the past. Historians and mission scholars rightly expend a good deal of effort studying the transition in mission-established churches from European to indigenous control. Missions did more than establish churches, however. They established local Christian cultures. Yet while there is some understanding of what indigenous peoples sought to do when they assumed direction of churches founded by missionaries, there is very little idea of what indigenous peoples have sought to do when they take over local Christian cultures. But, if it is the case that, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, Christianity “stimulated the vernacular,” then the local Christian cultures built upon the vernacular, perhaps more so than the churches missions founded, are the true legacy of the missionary enterprise.

A delegation of Illinois Indians on a diplomatic mission astonished the residents of New Orleans in 1730 with their ardent participation in the Catholic ritual life of the colonial capital. The Jesuit Mathurin le Petit observed that during their three–week stay “[the Illinois] charmed us by their piety, and by their edifying life. Every evening they recited the rosary … and every morning they heard me say Mass.” People crowded into the church to witness the spectacle of “savage” Indians worshiping and singing before the altar. The highlight for the audience was a responsive Gregorian chant in which Ursuline nuns “chanted the first Latin couplet, … and the Illinois continued the other couplets in their language in the same tone.” The Illinois appeared to be very well educated in Catholic practice, pausing during their daily activities to recite a variety of prayers. “To listen to them,” concluded the missionary, “you would easily perceive that they took more delight and pleasure in chanting these holy Canticles, than the generality of the Savages.” Le Petit was correct in a sense. The performance that so delighted the people of New Orleans represented the results of more than a generation of intercultural and linguistic exchange between the Illinois and the French.