Liberius of Rome is often portrayed as Athanasius’ strongest ally in the Latin West. His support for Athanasius is said to have begun by the end of his first year in office, when a synod in Rome accepted an Egyptian council's vindication of Athanasius against an Eastern council's excommunication. This article argues that the Roman synod did not ratify the Egyptian council's decisions but rather called for an appeals trial. In so doing Liberius did not defend Athanasius but preserved what he saw as the traditional duties and authority of the Roman see in matters of ecclesiastical discipline.

The letter sent by Kyros of Alexandria to Sergios of Constantinople in 638 appears to contain a chronological contradiction: it implies that Sergios was aware before his death of the election of Severinus as the new bishop of Rome two months earlier. Given the travelling times in the seventh century, this is impossible. The problem originates in a mistake made by Louis Duchesne when calculating the chronology of the popes for his edition of the Liber pontificalis: for the period 619–49, all his dates are one year too late. This change of the chronological framework affects the interpretation of a number of documents.

The chronicle of Robert the Monk is a well-known source for the First Crusade and the most copied First Crusade narrative in the Middle Ages. Though the number of copies decreased after the twelfth century, it increased in the fifteenth, with most of these later copies either being preserved in German-speaking lands or originating from there. It is possible that a First Crusade narrative was needed in fifteenth-century German-speaking lands because of their proximity to the struggle against the Ottomans, and the chronicle of Robert the Monk was the only one widely available for copying.

Early Quakers have not typically been noted for their espousal of political counsel. This article proposes that its cohort powerfully made the case for the ‘counsel of God’ in politics. This counsel was, perhaps paradoxically, both intensively inward, deriving from the light of God within, and universalistic and external, given that counsel could emanate from any individual. This was distinct from most contemporary applications of conciliar rhetoric, although some conceptual and practical similarities are considered. This article explores, finally, the diversity of seventeenth-century conceptions of theological and political counsel alongside that of the Quakers, suggesting further directions for research.

Franz Hildebrandt, a German pastor of Jewish descent, fled Nazi persecution in 1937, making his way to England, where he served as a minister in Cambridge. During the Second World War Hildebrandt worked with the British Broadcasting Corporation as one of a cadre of pastors, mostly refugees of Jewish descent, to preach German-language sermons over the airwaves. This article analyses Hildebrandt's sermons, delivered between 1942 and 1945, to an audience that risked prosecution and even death simply for listening. Within the constraints of a Christian worship service, Hildebrandt offered incisive criticisms of the Nazi regime from a distinctly religious perspective.

This article demonstrates how transnational encounters and exchanges can shape and re-shape Christian beliefs and practices in a globalising world. It does this using the example of a transnational network of neo-charismatic churches called Newfrontiers that was founded in the small towns of Sussex during the 1970s but, by 2011, encompassed almost 850 churches in over sixty countries. Drawing on extensive primary research, this article shows how the theological and practical commitment of Newfrontiers churches to racial reconciliation and the building of diverse congregations was forged over thirty years through encounters between British, South African and Ghanaian Christians.

This article examines the role of the networks and protagonists involved in securing the Bulgarian Church's participation in the seventh Lambeth Conference in London (1930) in their attempt to end the schism between the Bulgarian Church and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople dating from 1872, and to secure a new place for the Bulgarians in the wider ecclesial and political landscape. New evidence, contained in unpublished documents in the Lambeth Palace Archives in London, enables a better understanding of the various connections at work behind the scene, including how the Church of England perceived and responded to complex issues within their own ecumenical strategy and the wider context of British foreign policy.