In past iterations of ecclesiastical historical writings and teachings, there has not always been sufficient acknowledgment of the encounters between Christians and their religious Others. This article is an exercise in diachronic comparative interreligious encounter: a Muslim-Christian engagement in the eighth century CE and a Jewish-Christian epistolary exchange in the seventeenth century CE. The former took place in Baghdad in the court of a caliph, whereas the latter took place between individuals in London and the Hague, between Baruch Spinoza and Henry Oldenburg. While it might be tempting to highlight the narratives of conversion away from one religion into another—whether from Christianity to Islam, Christianity to Judaism, or vice versa—in current historiography, it also seems that quotidian realities of interreligious exchange often do not lead to such conversions, and yet leave the participants better informed and further enlightened about the practice and pursuit of their own religion. The following two accounts are neither triumphalist nor tragic. Patriarch Timothy and Caliph al-Mahdī's exchange in eighth-century Baghdad shows the degree to which divine identity and Christian apophasis mattered. The letter exchanges between Spinoza and his interlocutors also show the degree to which divine mystery as ontological demarcator for both the doctrine of the Trinity and corresponding Christology, as well as Spinoza's repudiation of both, mattered. Lastly, these two examples of interreligious engagements show a pathway of encounter which does not dismiss or cancel the religious Other.

This article offers an interpretation of the actions of the Franciscan Juan de Albuquerque as bishop of the first Catholic diocese in Asia. The analysis considers the local impacts of the episcopal government and the connectivities of its action, particularly through comparison with similar processes adopted in Spanish America. Based on a wide range of historical sources and cross-referencing them, it investigates how Albuquerque governed in three stages: first, describing the enormous challenges he faced; second, outlining his profile; and third, proposing a reconstruction of his government and the implications it had on the dissemination of Catholicism. The hypothesis raised at the outset is that, in Asia, the Bishop of Goa built a structure that was inspired by the matrix and dynamics of the Portuguese dioceses, which were then adapted to the specificities of the local situation. Accordingly, it is necessary to review the thesis of Charles Boxer, for whom the dynamics of evangelization in the spaces overseen by the Iberian empires from the 16th century onwards were generated essentially by the missionaries from the regular clergy and by the monarchies. By shifting the focus to the actions of a single bishop, the article demonstrates that Albuquerque, the diocesan church he created from scratch, and the secular clergy should not be underestimated.

From 1603 until the mid-nineteenth century, weekly bills of mortality were printed and published in London, providing detailed statistics on births, deaths, and plague fatalities for each parish. This article analyzes the currency of the bills and their numbers in English religious thought during and after the four great plague epidemics London experienced in the course of the seventeenth century (1603–1604, 1625–1626, 1636, and 1665–1666). A broad survey of sermons, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and dialogues from these years reveals not only the bills’ ubiquity as an index of divine punishments, but the new kinds of intellectual work made possible by a multiplicity of numbers keyed to times and places. Claims about the moral, doctrinal, and political meanings behind the plague could now be made with an unprecedented specificity and sophistication, seized upon by High Church Anglicans, Puritans, and Dissenters alike. As an episode in the history of empirical theology, the bills’ ecclesiastical reception vindicates theology's central place in the epistemological transformations of the early modern period, as well as the influence of new kinds of empirical data on the parameters of religious thought.

This article situates George Whitefield's accounting controversies of the 1740s in the local public accounting cultures of colonial America. It argues that Whitefield developed a novel “commercial theology” and funding strategy for his Georgia orphanage that he believed would allow God to shape every aspect of the institution. While Whitefield's published financial accounts initially provoked little commentary, his critics began to use accounting as an “impartial” tool to disprove the minister's theology. The bold theological claims and lack of institutional oversight embedded in Whitefield's accounts violated the norms of public accounting, and his critics stated that an independent audit was the only way to clear the minister's name. The audit worked, and the combination of Whitefield's experience managing a transatlantic institution and his accounting controversies caused the minister to change his commercial theology. This article uses Whitefield's accounting controversies to make two overarching arguments. First, it argues that religious institutions were key parts of the local public accounting systems that shaped the development of financial ethics in colonial America. Second, it argues that financial accounts both shaped and reflected the religious assumptions of the bookkeepers who produced them.

This article considers the existence of a distinctive form of fundamentalism in the northern-Irish province of Ulster. It does so by examining the Protestant minorities that grew significantly in the decades after the Ulster revival of 1859. These evangelical others are important because their members were more likely to have fundamentalist tendencies than those who belonged to the main Protestant churches. The existing scholarship on fundamentalism in Northern Ireland focuses on Ian Paisley (1926–2014), who was a life-long adversary of Irish republican separatism and a self-identified fundamentalist. Yet, the focus on Paisley draws attention away from the potential origin of fundamentalism in the early twentieth century that is associated with religious revival in the early 1920s and the heresy trial of a “modernist” Presbyterian professor in 1927. George Marsden's classic study defined fundamentalism as an American phenomenon, yet, with Paisley and developments in the 1920s in mind, he noted that “Ulster appears to be an exception.”1 To what extent was that true? Was there a constituency of potential fundamentalists in the north of Ireland in the early twentieth century? If there was, did the social and political circumstances of the region and period produce a distinctive Ulster variety of fundamentalism?

As a revivalist who appeared to have initiated a world-wide awakening of Christianity and was also an early leader of the fundamentalist movement, Reuben A. Torrey is generally regarded as a major figure in the early twentieth-century history of evangelicalism. By tracing its origins and results, this article attributes Torrey's rise to prominence in the global evangelical movement to the evangelistic campaign he conducted in Australia in 1902. Setting this episode in the context of the history of international revivalism, it identifies Torrey as the first global revivalist in influence as well as geographical range. In place of the traditional providential interpretation, the analysis proposes the alignment of the revivalist theology, methods, and achievement exhibited in the Australian campaign with the hopes and expectations of the preexisting conservative evangelical subculture as a “functionalist” explanation of Torrey's impact. As the reason for Torrey's transformed standing in the evangelical movement in America and the wider world, the 1902 Australian campaign also emerges as a revealing case study of the dynamics of global evangelicalism and the function of international revivalism at the beginning of the twentieth century.