Our bodies, like the poor, are always with us. They are the mechanism through which we apprehend the world, and as such—as the inescapable point of contact between subjective consciousness and objective “reality”— the body becomes a primary medium of cultural communication and bearer of cultural meanings. Paradoxically, this is nowhere clearer than in the case of ascetics like Margherita da Cortona, who wage unremitting war on their bodies during their lives and whose bodily remains in consequence are enshrined and revered. It was through her body that Margherita, like other illiterate holy women, could project a spiritual message that carried beyond the range of her voice; and it was to her body that people flocked after her death, endowing it with sacred values and social significance.

Of all the divisions and crises that the Catholic church endured in its first fifteen hundred years of existence, none was so destructive as the Great Schism (1378–1417). For forty years learned theologians and doctors of canon law argued over whether the pontiff residing in Rome or in Avignon was the true pope. The effects of the schism upon the highly organized administration of the church were disastrous, as were its effects upon society in general. Countless clerics fought over claims to benefices with appointees from the other obedience; the revenues of the church, quite impressive in the mid-fourteenth century, shrank precipitously; and opportunistic rulers especially in Italy did not hesitate to wage private wars under the banner of one or the other papacy, or to prey upon the actual holdings of the church.

The studies by Julie Ellison, Barbara Packer, and Wesley T. Mott demonstrate that Emerson's exposure to German biblical criticism worked steadily on his religious mind. While the former studies focus on the problem of the relation of faith to history and the more inclusive problem of the shift away from an evidentialist christology, the present study wants to show that the confrontation with German biblical criticism issued in the case of William and Ralph Waldo Emerson in a decisive change of profession and a break with the ministerial office. Moreover, this study also sets out to demonstrate that Ralph Waldo Emerson's appropriation of German biblical criticism presented an important anticipation of the intuitional doctrines of Transcendentalism. When William Emerson, following the example of such American Göttingen students as George Ticknor and Edward Everett, journeyed to Göttingen in 1824 he experienced a professional crisis triggered by the critical methods of the Göttingen exegetes J. G. Eichhorn and J. D. Michaelis. The biblical criticism which prevailed in Göttingen posed a threat for Unitarians not so much because of the depreciation of supernatural revelation as because of the very method with which this disparagement was brought about. The questioning of the historicity of the biblical narratives characteristic of the so-called “higher criticism” practiced at Göttingen cut against the grain of the Unitarian biblical tradition which regarded the biblical narratives as a factually reliable repository of “the history of Christ.” “There is no other theory,” Andrews Norton observed with regard to higher criticism, “in which propositions ready to weaken man's faith in the genuineness of the Gospels, are so elaborately and plausibly introduced.”

This article seeks to demonstrate how Monsignor Gustavo Juan Franceschi (1871–1957) became a friend of the newly created state of Israel when only twenty years earlier he had maintained that Jews constituted Argentina's major political problem. This intellectual transformation will be traced through a consideration of Franceschi's writings about the Jews. As a prominent member of the Catholic church and a strong advocate of Argentine nationalism, his views also reflected the generally ambivalent and suspicious attitude which that powerful institution held regarding Jews. However, following the devastation of European Jewry during World War II and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Franceschi's opinion of Jews moderated, resulting in greater understanding. Before presenting Franceschi's views, a consideration of Argentine Catholic nationalism will be provided in order to place these opinions within a proper context.

While most of the cases that led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 had to do with firings of professors who had championed controversial political views, the AAUP founders were also concerned about dismissals on religious grounds. One case especially, that of Lafayette College, is particularly revealing not only of the character of the religious issues involved but also of the attitudes toward religion of those who defined what became the standard twentieth-century American concepts of academic freedom. Reflections on the religious dimensions of the construction of academic freedom in America also have important implications for religiously oriented higher education and scholarship today.