John of Damascus (c. 655–745) is a striking figure in church history as a defender of icon veneration and as a Church Father who maintained Byzantine Orthodoxy despite living under Muslim rule. His life amongst Muslims and his association with the Umayyad Melkite Christian community, the Christian Church which attempted to maintain an adherence to Byzantine Orthodoxy after the Arab conquest, is often associated with his defence of icons. However, most scholarship claims that his Three treatises on the divine images were written solely against Byzantine iconoclasm. This article provides a close reading of his Treatises focusing on themes which overlap with contemporary Jewish and Muslim debates on figurative images, arguing that John wrote his Treatises in an attempt to create a seminal Melkite theology on icons for both Byzantine and Umayyad Christians faced with iconoclastic arguments from all three Abrahamic faiths.

Before the First Crusade, Constantine, Helena and Heraclius occupied an important place in the papal vision of the past. They had already been memorialised in the Latin liturgy, especially in the rituals of festivities surrounding the holy cross. The First Crusaders encountered Constantine, Helena and Heraclius as a part of the religious imagery at the very heart of Christian memory: at the Holy Sepulchre. This article presents research into whether and how the elite of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem developed the historical memory of Constantine, Helena and Heraclius, and argues that it was a central element in the political culture of the crusader states.

Between the Council of Basle and the Fifth Lateran Council the papal curia was subject to much pressure to convene a new general council to address the urgent need for a crusade. This essay examines the relationship between the forceful lobbying for a council by Europe's rulers, and the persistence of conciliarist sentiments in society at large, particularly among its educated elite. While secular rulers were exploiting the vulnerability of the popes for their own ends, it would be reductive to interpret their demands for a council as crudely manipulative rather than as the expression of broadly-based fears and aspirations.

The homily is frequently considered by scholars to be a printed address which acted as a substitute sermon in post-Reformation England. This essay provides an important corrective to this view by examining five singly issued homilies in English which were not intended for use in the pulpit and which were published c. 1544–c. 1635. It argues that, as a byword for popery but with recognised longstanding roots in patristic ritual, the term ‘homily’ was contentious in this period. The works investigated within this study reveal how the marginalised homily was transformed into a distinctive genre in its own right.

The mid-seventeenth century turn to moralism in English Protestant theology – exemplified here by ‘Ignorance’ in Bunyan's Pilgrim's progress – involved a clear rejection of the Calvinistic doctrine of the ‘internal testimony’ of Scripture. The upshot was the emergence of a religious impulse that emphasised the salience of a ‘rational account’ of Scripture's credibility. The shift is conventionally traced through Richard Hooker, William Chillingworth and the Cambridge Platonists. Hooker was, however, more Calvinist and Chillingworth more Laudian than has been recognised. The Cambridge Platonists and their ‘latitudinarian’ successors emerged from and were shaped by puritan culture.

This article explores the work and influence of Anglo-Catholicism in the Australian Imperial Force during the Great War, based on reading the wartime correspondence of key AIF Anglo-Catholics, especially that of Canon David Garland and Chaplain William Maitland Woods. Anglo-Catholics were enthusiastic in support of the war, but simultaneously used it to promote Anglo-Catholicism and combat what they perceived to be the errors of non-Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism and the various Protestant groups, opening what might be considered a second front against these religions.

This first publication of the newly-found letter to Gandhi from Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a window into his thinking in the early 1930s, a time of personal formation and of resistance to National Socialism. Western Christianity needed ‘a Christian peace movement’, and Bonhoeffer wanted to learn from Gandhi's movement ‘the meaning of Christian life, of real community life, of truth and love in reality’. The letter includes Bonhoeffer's critique of Western culture and the Church in Europe and America, his hopes for a Church regenerated by the Sermon on the Mount, and his appreciation and critique of Karl Barth

Much current work on early Christianity depends, implicitly or explicitly, on the assumption that lay people actually attended church services (and, hence, listened to and considered sermons by major Church Fathers) more than a few times a year. Whether they attended as ‘Christians’, or simply to engage in various types of material devotion, or out of interest in the religious content to be found in a church, the assumption is that they came.