In his influential discussion of early Christian ascetic renunciation, Peter Brown announced that “Christian men used women ‘to think with’ in order to verbalize their own nagging concern with the stance that the Church should take with the world.” Brown's statement encapsulates the particular difficulties facing students of the history of women in the early Christian period. The most basic difficulty is that we possess very few texts by women from this period until well into the Middle Ages. We can point to the diary of the third-century martyr Perpetua, the complex and recondite Vergilian and Homeric centos (“stitch-verses”) of the aristocrat Proba and the empress Eudocia, and perhaps one or two other arguable examples. With a dearth of women's own voices, can historians be expected to reconstruct women's lives? This paucity of “first-person” texts is coupled with a more serious theoretical difficulty facing historians of all periods whose main “evidence” consists of literary and rhetorically informed texts. Scholars are much less confident today in our ability to peel back layers of male rhetoric and find the “real” woman concealed underneath. Brown's comment underscores this rhetorical skepticism by asking whether these texts are even “about” women at all. Others following Brown's lead have understood texts that are ostensibly to or about women as concerned primarily with issues of male authority and identity. In Brown's words, women were good “to think with,” but the subject of that “thought” was inevitably male. Despite these technical and theoretical difficulties, however, I do not think we are witnessing the final and absolute erasure of women from ancient Christian history.

A number of historians have indicated, perhaps unconsciously, that the concept of religious movement would be useful in reference to seventeenth-century English religious history. But while some have used the term “movement” in describing some religious initiatives, no one has explored the implications of that concept for understanding either religious life or the England of that day. Rather, we continue to force things into the terms of “church” and “sect,” with apologies for a loose fit. And yet a disestablished Catholicism, as well as Puritanism, Quakerism, and an emerging ideological “Anglicanism,” are transformed when understood as movements.

During the late nineteenth century, James Walker Hood was bishop of the North Carolina Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and grand master of the North Carolina Grand Lodge of Prince Hall Masons. In his forty-four years as bishop, half of that time as senior bishop of the denomination, Reverend Hood was instrumental in planting and nurturing his denomination's churches throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. Founder of North Carolina's denominational newspaper and college, author of five books including two histories of the AMEZ Church, appointed assistant superintendent of public instruction and magistrate in his adopted state, Hood's career represented the broad mainstream of black denominational leaders who came to the South from the North during and after the Civil War. Concurrently, Grand Master Hood superintended the southern jurisdiction of the Prince Hall Masonic Grand Lodge of New York and acted as a moving force behind the creation of the region's black Masonic lodges—often founding these secret male societies in the same places as his fledgling churches. At his death in 1918, the Masonic Quarterly Review hailed Hood as “one of the strong pillars of our foundation.” If Bishop Hood's life was indeed, according to his recent biographer, “a prism through which to understand black denominational leadership in the South during the period 1860–1920,” then what does his leadership of both the Prince Hall Lodge and the AMEZ Church tell us about the nexus of fraternal lodges and African American Christianity at the turn of the twentieth century?

Speaking before the Commission d'étude sur les laics et l'Église (Commission Dumont) in 1970, Jean-Paul Gignac articulated the feelings of many when he stated that although the church had greatly furthered the survival of French Canadians, the men and women of his own generation had been “strangely traumatized” by Catholicism. At one level, their perplexity can be read as but the obvious response to the travails of Quebec Catholicism in the 1960s. For many decades prior to 1960, the Catholic Church had been successful in imposing on most of Quebec society what appeared to be a unanimity of social and cultural values. But after the mid-1960s, an increasingly evident decline of religious practice, the abandonment of the priesthood by many clergy, the indifference of young people to Roman Catholicism, marked the rapid erosion of the church's social and cultural authority. That erosion was marked in many ways: the deconfessionalization of many Catholic educational and social welfare institutions; the creation of a new pluralist society through state intervention; the rise of a secular “neonationalism“ baserd upon economics, language, and the power of the state instead of a common religious faith; and, at a popular level, the replacement of Christianity by the secular values of a mass-market, North American consumer society. Together these developments, termed the “Quiet Revolution” by historians, decisively marginalized the social and cultural role of Catholicism within Quebec society.

The fields of Native American religious traditions and American religious history have reached something of a shared critical juncture. Although there has been a long standing scholarly interest on writing about missions to Native Americans from a variety of viewpoints, recent years have seen the publication of a number of fresh considerations of the diversity and texture of Native American Christianity—or better, native Christianities. Native communities have long woven the stories, signs, and practices of the Christian tradition into the fabric of their lifeways, in rich and resourceful ways, even under the direst of colonizing circumstances. But only recently has scholarship begun to take this fuller texture into account: most recently, Native and Christian (1996), edited by James Treat; Native American Religious Identity (1998), edited by Jace Weaver; Sergei Kan's Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries; Clara Sue Kidwell's Choctaws and Missionaries; and Christopher Vecsey's multivolume study of the varieties of native Catholicism, of which volume two, The Paths of Kateri's Kin (1998), is of most interest here. This recent scholarship reflects new perspectives of native scholars entering the field and more publications that anthologize a range of native Christian viewpoints into single volumes. It has also to do with more sustained accountability among normative scholars to native communities and the way that consultants in those communities imagine their religious lives.