Teresa de Cartagena (ca. 1425 – after 1478) was a disabled nun who faced a tripartite predicament as an author: deafness, gender, and her lineage within a Jewish convert family in medieval Spain. Regrettably, scholarship has tended to encapsulate her in a three-walled box (literature, affectivity, mysticism) in which medieval women’s spiritual writings in the vernacular are siloed. Against the prevailing interpretative model of her writing, which is based on enclosure and spatiality, I advocate for a paradigm shift toward a dialectic of absence/presence that underscores the pervasive nature of Teresa’s intellectual concerns and aligns more faithfully with the actual experience of deaf people. Within this perspective, this article seeks to retrieve the depths of Teresa’s intellectual aspirations, recognizing her not merely as a literary figure but also as a theologian and a Bible scholar. I also argue that Teresa is a mystic, and an intellectual one, whose mysticism has more affinity with the revelation of the rational and the enlightenment of the understanding than with the darkening of the mind before the inexpressible. Taking her intellectual vocation with the utmost seriousness, the present account aspires to reposition Teresa not simply as a marginalized writer but as a theologian of the marginalized: the first Spanish woman exegete and theologian, and the first proponent of a theology of disability.

This article examines how the Greek-rite Albanian community of Barile, in the seventeenth-century Kingdom of Naples, negotiated the pressures of post-Tridentine religious reform while preserving elements of its ritual and social identity. In the aftermath of the Council of Trent, ecclesiastical authorities – particularly bishops and inquisitors – sought to regulate devotional life by suppressing practices classified as “superstitious.” These policies were gradually extended to Eastern Christian communities, which had previously enjoyed a degree of liturgical autonomy within the Kingdom of Naples. Focusing on the confrontation between Bishop Deodato Scaglia and the Greek community of Barile, this article explores how local actors responded to increasing pressure to conform to the Latin rite. Drawing on episcopal reports, inquisitorial correspondence, synodal decrees, and documents from the Congregation of Propaganda Fide, the study identifies four recurring patterns of adaptation: control of sacred space, intermarriage, factional organization, and diplomatic negotiation. It argues that practices labeled “superstitions” functioned not only as objects of repression but also as mechanisms through which the community articulated collective identity and negotiated confessional boundaries, showing that post-Tridentine reform operated through continuous negotiation rather than unilateral imposition.

This article examines the shifting nature of gender relations in eighteenth-century New England by looking at the Edwards family’s shared views on marriage and divorce. Rooted in Puritan and Reformed notions, the Edwards family shared an ideology that challenged patriarchal double standards surrounding gender and sexuality. The article looks at writings and private correspondences from the Edwardses to bring to light their vision of marriage as a covenant of companionship that coercion or abuse might dissolve. It particularly examines Hannah Edwards’s writings on gender, female–male relations, and what she termed the male tendency to “domination,” in order to reveal how an elite colonial woman challenged gender norms. The Edwards family fought to broaden the grounds for divorce and emphasized women’s agency rooted in the “law of self-preservation.” With the 1744 “Bad Book” affair and the 1746 Eleanor Gray divorce, the Edwardses resisted legal and social biases favoring men, while also contesting the patriarchal nature of eighteenth-century New England. By drawing on Reformed predecessors, the Edwardses preserved Puritan ideals of equal souls and unequal bodies while opposing the era’s increasingly patriarchal sexual politics.

Historians have pored over the life and career of American evangelist Billy Graham. Robust scholarship surrounds not only his immediate impacts on American religion but his cultivation of the economic elite, his proximity to political power, and even his reshaping of American political geography: scholars have profitably pointed to his unique ties to the South in general and Texas (and its “Big Rich”) in particular. But, throughout it all, one quirk remains little more than a footnote: Graham’s five-decade membership at First Baptist Dallas. In 1953, as his career skyrocketed and propelled him toward international fame, Graham joined the fundamentalist fief of W.A. Criswell, an ardent segregationist and theological firebrand. Using previously uncited archival material, this article argues that Graham’s membership not only alleviated national tensions between postwar evangelicals and southern fundamentalists but also armored Graham with the approbation of theological agitators, punctured the hermetic world of Texas religion, and nationalized a particular “Texas theology” that had developed over decades in pulpits such as First Baptist Dallas. Church membership is no trifling thing, and a sustained exploration of Graham’s decision to join First Baptist therefore reveals a transformative moment in postwar American religion.

The present study aims at contributing to our understanding of the eschatological developments that took place from Late Antiquity to the early Middle Ages, with a focus on Jerome of Stridon. The article contextualizes Jerome’s thought by discussing the development of ancient Christian eschatology, from traditional apocalypticism to the eschatological questions which came to the surface in the Jovinianist, Origenist, and Pelagian controversies at the turn of the fifth century. It is argued that Jerome’s eschatology, as it was expressed in biblical commentaries, as well as polemical works produced in the context of these controversies, had several features which reflected, but also would have contributed to, a larger eschatological shift which marked the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Among these, we find an understanding of personal death as a time of judgment, an emphasis on repentance, as well as the idea that the teachers of the church are responsible for the salvation of the people. It is argued that Jerome’s eschatology combined an emphasis on the need of divine mercy with a defense of human free will.

This article explores the discursive gender consciousness of Korean women in relation to the label of “heathen” and the concepts of the “True” and “New Woman” in the early twentieth century. Engaging with Korean women’s theological writings that appeared in late nineteenth-century print media in Korea as well as with Korean picture brides’ oral interviews, this article argues that Korean women both reinforced and reshaped the prescribed models of domestic bounded womanhood that American women missionaries promoted to them. Spurred by their own religious reinterpretation of gender equality and women’s rights, some Korean women utilized the immigration system of picture marriage to achieve their goals for education and political empowerment in the United States. Although a majority of Americans and Koreans considered the picture marriage system undesirable and backward – a “heathen” practice – both in the United States and Korea, Korean women’s use of this system can be seen as a progressive challenge to Western notions of the ideal woman. This article, therefore, reframes existing historical and scholarly constructions of the “heathen” woman vis-à-vis the “True” and the “New Woman” within a transpacific context.

This article examines formal degradation as a ritual and juridical mechanism for removing criminal priests from the clerical estate in the post-Tridentine Holy Roman Empire. Standardized in the Pontificale Romanum of 1595, degradation inverted the choreography of ordination: vestments, instruments, tonsure, offices, and privileges were publicly stripped away before the offender was surrendered to secular justice. Yet the rite exposed a theological paradox. It could deprive a priest of office, dignity, and lawful ministry, but not erase the indelible sacramental character conferred at ordination. Drawing on liturgical texts, canon law, and surviving cases, the article argues that the ceremony became increasingly exceptional, used chiefly when public scandal demanded ecclesiastical scandal management and cooperation with secular authority.

This article challenges the narrative of ubiquitous late medieval Christian anti-Judaism by presenting Pablo de Santa Maria’s remarkably nuanced portrayal of Judaism (c. 1400–1430). Pablo, the rabbi of Burgos who had become its bishop, lived and wrote at the intersection of Judaism and Christianity. While longstanding historiographical misconceptions about the nature of Pablo’s intellectual and pastoral project have stifled interest in Pablo’s prolific Latin writings, recently scholars like Yosi Yisraeli have argued that these Latin writings actually contain intellectual innovations of profound importance to the development of Christian Hebraism. This article reads Pablo’s Latin writings not primarily within the Christian intellectual tradition but rather as a response to the contemporary phenomenon of large-scale Jewish baptism. Pablo was seeking to negotiate the integration of these baptized Jews into Christianity, which required him to construct positive narratives about Judaism to dispute (or at least complicate) the prevalent negative narratives. More broadly, while recent scholarship has treated Christian narratives of Judaism as emanating from intra-Christian disputes, this article suggests Christian views of Judaism were in fact formed and contested through the persons and identities of baptized Jews.

This article examines the tenure and legacy of Francisco Núñez de la Vega, a Dominican friar who served as Bishop of Chiapas and Soconusco in New Spain from 1682 to 1706. During his career, Núñez investigated allegations of idolatry and non-orthodox rituals practiced by Indigenous ritual specialists in his diocese. These investigations formed the basis of an influential sermon written in 1698 known as the Ninth Pastoral Letter (Carta Novena Pastoral), which inveighed against the magical powers of Indigenous shapeshifters, diviners, and healers pejoratively referred to as nahualistas. These nahualistas held sway in local Indigenous communities long before Europeans invaded the Americas, and they provided an alternative to the good–evil binary endorsed by the Church. This article examines five criminal cases in Chiapas to highlight the influence of Indigenous ritual specialists and the nahualli figure more broadly in the colonial era. Two of these cases (1685 and 1696) took place during Núñez’s tenure as bishop and shed light on his understanding of Native religious beliefs and practices, which had been shaped by European writings on witchcraft since the Middle Ages. The three remaining criminal cases (1721, 1778, and 1801) reveal that Dominican clergy continued to consult Núñez’s Ninth Pastoral Letter long after his death whenever charges of idolatry and nahualism arose. Lastly, this article considers how Núñez attempted to convert his parishioners and how Indigenous ritual specialists continued to influence village life while living in the bishop’s shadow.

This study examines how the Roman Catholic Church formulated and implemented its principal directive during China’s civil war and subsequent regime change in the mid-twentieth century, particularly the obligation that clergy remain at their posts alongside the relocation of seminarians to safer areas. Drawing on newly available Vatican archival materials, it demonstrates that the decision to evacuate seminarians was not solely prompted by the petition of the first Chinese cardinal to the pope, as previously assumed; rather, the Apostolic Internuncio’s shift in position played a decisive role. It further identifies an original Italian version of the directive that differs in sequence and emphasis from the widely circulated Chinese text. Against this background, criticisms of the Internuncio as “the executioner of native priests” require reconsideration. Rather, the study reinterprets him as an adaptive intermediary within the process of policy formation and implementation.

On Thursday night, January 8, 2026, the Miami Hurricanes pulled off a miraculous win against the Ole Miss Rebels in the semifinal of the college football playoffs. With time running out and needing a touchdown to win, the Miami quarterback scanned the end zone looking for an open receiver. Finding none, he tucked the ball under his arm and sprinted to victory. The postgame interview with the Hurricanes’ head coach took an interesting turn. ESPN’s anchor, knowing the Miami coach’s outspoken evangelical faith, said he had a coach who used to tell his players after the pregame prayer, “the other team prays too, so let’s not make God choose.”1 The coach responded with coach-speak, praising preparation, hard work, and Jesus Christ. Early the next morning, a group of ASCH scholars sat in a dimly lit, mahogany-walled room in Chicago. The topic of discussion was the intersection of religion and sports, specifically Paul Putz’s award-winning book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.

During the early years of the Cold War, the United States Information Agency (USIA) used religious propaganda as an ideological weapon. As part of a multifaceted information program, the Agency selected, produced, and translated religious literature for display at its overseas cultural libraries. To counter Soviet propaganda accusing Americans of materialism and greed, a group of liberal Protestants closely associated with the Eisenhower Administration worked to promote an affirming and universalized form of religion that expanded beyond the traditional focus on Judeo-Christian spirituality to include all world religions – Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim. Though these efforts frequently conflicted with those of conservative Protestants, Eisenhower’s propagandists consistently framed American spirituality as recognizing the core values present in all world beliefs in contradistinction to the atheistic Soviet Union. Relying on previously unexamined, declassified USIA documents, this study contributes to scholarship on religion and the Cold War as well as American religious history within the context of state propaganda. It concludes that the exigencies of the Global Cold War contributed to the United States Government’s promotion of religious pluralism during the 1950s by making spiritual inclusion a matter of national security.

Recent studies have emphasized the centrality of late medieval mysticism to Martin Luther’s theology of faith. Building upon such research, I argue that Luther’s Freedom of a Christian (1520) preserves a characteristic tension within medieval mysticism: the cohabitation of human agency alongside divine operation. Whereas external agency (good works) is rejected, Luther reintroduces internal human agency within his theology of faith. Contrary to standard views of Lutheran doctrine, Freedom retains some degree of bidirectionality in the relationship between God and the believer. A comparison with Johannes Tauler highlights both Freedom’s indebtedness to medieval mysticism and its radical simplification of the mystical framework.

This article examines the day-to-day religious lives of Roman Catholic laywomen in the pre-Confederation Canadian Maritimes. Historical scholarship on the religious experiences of Atlantic Canadian women has been sparse and has addressed Protestants more often than Catholics. The rural Catholic Acadian laywomen of this study were builders of their spiritual experiences in both the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of the church. Using the concepts of devotional labor and lived religion, this article foregrounds women’s material production and healing practices. I examine in close detail women from two parishes in southwestern Nova Scotia for which records survive. Women there influenced public experiences of worship by creating or obtaining the materials necessary for liturgical observances. Some laywomen were midwives and, in the frequent absences of priests, regularly baptized newborn children. All these women made do with their less-than-perfect circumstances, working to reconstruct their community’s spiritual integrity during a tenuous period of resettlement following the Acadian deportation.

Traditional narratives of the origin of Andover Theological Seminary and theological education more broadly in the United States focus upon the theological and intellectual justifications for the creation of this first form of graduate education in the United States. Such narratives, however, obscure the political motivations behind Andover’s founding. Jedidiah Morse, one of the primary architects of Andover, designed the school to support his religious, nationalistic, and imperialistic ambitions for the young nation. Morse drew upon his knowledge and experience as a geographer and his antagonism toward democracy to construct a new educational institution with the capacity to support the United States through the production of clergy. This article draws upon Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the spatial humanities to help understand both the establishment and political influence of Andover Theological Seminary. In so doing, it contends that Andover was far more than a theologically focused institution. Instead, it sought to shape the nation through a network of educated clergy committed to settling the North American geography and beyond. Andover was established as part of an evangelical infrastructure designed to undergird the co-constructed projects of religious nationalism and imperialism in the first half of the nineteenth century.

In recent years, a number of high-profile Chinese Christian dissidents, who once championed liberalism, democracy, and constitutionalism in China, have become outspoken supporters of Donald Trump and Christian Nationalism. Complex historical factors led to this change, but this article highlights one important intellectual facet that undergirded many of their arguments for Christian Nationalism. It is a single-origin historical narrative, whereby American freedom came exclusively from Calvinism as testified in the original Westminster Confession and practiced by the New England Puritans. This article traces the historical process through which this single-origin historical narrative was transported from its American roots to contemporary Chinese Christianity. This is a two-part history: the first being the ministry of Charles Chao, Jonathan Chao, and Stephen Tong, who jointly introduced this single-origin narrative to China, and the second being the process through which Yu Jie, an outspoken Chinese Calvinist and Trump supporter, inherited and exaggerated the single-origin narrative. Altogether, this article explores a previously understudied Sino-American connection in the history of contemporary Chinese Christianity.

The Southern Baptist “conservative resurgence” of the 1980s and 1990s is one of the defining events in the alignment of US evangelicals with the Republican Party. Lacking information about internal decision-making processes, existing studies have tended to exaggerate the cohesiveness of the activist network that ultimately captured the denomination. This paper takes a micro-historical approach to trace how movement leaders responded when one of the movement’s stars, evangelist James Robison, began using his ministry to promote charismatic theology that many in the movement viewed as heretical. Focusing on how Southern Baptist conservatives worked out the boundaries of legitimate cooperation in real time, I show that key conservatives initially tried to convince Robison to walk back his charismatic turn and rejoin the Southern Baptist mainstream. Their ultimate failure set the pattern for the movement’s subsequent opposition to charismatics and clarifies the relationship between the Southern Baptist Convention and the broader Christian Right coalition.

This article analyzes the history of the campaign for the canonization of Christopher Columbus in the nineteenth century, the reformulation of the models of sainthood and, more generally, discourses that tried to explain the role of Catholicism in the development of Western civilization. I argue that the campaign was conceived as an apology for the contribution of Catholicism to the birth of the modern world and had, from its origins, a marked anti-Protestant character. Although the idea for the campaign originated in France, this campaign was characterized by its strong transnational dimension, involving Catholics on both sides of the Atlantic. In this sense, promoting a saint between two continents had a geopolitical dimension, reinforcing Rome’s connection with the Americas and, in particular, North America.

This article examines the intellectual formation of Johannes Schütte, Superior General of the Society of the Divine Word (SVD) and a central figure in the drafting of Ad Gentes Divinitus, the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 decree on mission. Drawing on Schütte’s missionary writings and SVD archival materials, this article argues that his decade in China – which ended in imprisonment and expulsion by Communist authorities in the early 1950s – decisively shaped his vision of Catholic reform. Branded an agent of Western imperialism, Schütte came to recognize what he called “grains of truth” in Communist critiques of the missionary enterprise, pushing him to reassess the structural weaknesses of foreign-controlled mission work. The article further situates Schütte’s career within the broader history of decolonization: China’s revolutionary expulsion of missionaries functioned much like formal independence movements elsewhere, accelerating institutional and theological change within the Church. By insisting that the Church take root in local cultures rather than reproduce Western forms, Ad Gentes turned the lessons of missionary failure into a new ecclesiological program. In tracing Schütte’s trajectory, the article contributes to three areas of scholarship: the long history of decolonization, the relationship between Cold War anti-Communism and Catholic reform, and the role of China in the global history of twentieth-century Christianity.

This exchange began in Chicago as a roundtable at the American Society for Church History’s annual conference in January 2026. It brought together scholars whose work has pushed the study of American liberal Protestantism in pathbreaking directions. In Chicago, we discussed how we came to study liberal Protestantism, how we defined the boundaries of this community, how we understood its place in American history and the history of liberalism, and the relationship between clergy and laity. After a lively conversation with an engaged audience, Church History invited the panelists to reflect further on these important questions and to print our discussion in this journal. The following exchange took place by correspondence during February and March 2026. We invited Thomas A. Tweed, who attended the original panel, to write a response. His thoughtful meditations on the meaning of “liberal” and “liberalism” appear after our exchange.