This article offers a new chapter in the history of the Severan Miaphysite church, the ancestor-institution of the modern-day Syriac Orthodox. It employs the consecration lists in Michael the Syrian’s 12th-century chronicle to investigate changing patterns of authority, and relationships between monasteries and episcopal sees, in a period poorly served by narrative sources. The home monastery of the Miaphysite patriarchs corresponds to shifts in political authority from Abbasid Raqqa, to Hamdanid Aleppo, to Byzantine Melitene, but this did not preclude the survival of local patterns of patronage. Clusters of patronage, identified using historical network analysis, are not geographically segregated, and this helps to explain the relative stability of the network, which did not see major attempts at secession in this period. The patterns in these lists help us to establish the places where narrative sources highlight unusual phenomena, and where the phenomena they report are typical features of the relationships between bishops and monasteries.

This article comparatively examines commentaries by sixteenth-century European reformers on the apostle Paul’s “allegory” in Galatians 4:21–31. Older scholarship on the reformers’ relationship to allegorical exegesis tended to view the reformers as strict literalists, leading to charges that Protestantism created an anti-figurative culture. More recent work, however, has frequently argued that the reformers in fact continued to subtly interpret the Bible allegorically, even to the point that some regularly contradicted their theoretical opposition to allegory in their actual exegetical practice. I argue that a close reading of the reformers’ commentaries on Galatians 4:21–31 challenges both of these interpretations. Rather than seeing the reformers as solely concerned with whether scripture should be read allegorically, this article points to a more nuanced set of questions that the reformers debated concerning the nature, status, and purposes of allegorical exegesis. Understanding these sixteenth-century questions supports seeing a high degree of consistency between various reformers’ hermeneutical theory and their exegetical practice, while also offering a much richer set of considerations for what it means to speak of the reformers’ spectrum of approaches to allegory than has typically been given. The reformers offered no unified approach to allegory but instead gave a rich variety of approaches to this perennial literary and exegetical conundrum.

This article argues that a significant pagan presence in Antioch and the wider Christian East during the lifetime of Evagrius Scholasticus (c. 536–590 CE) provided the impetus for the anti-pagan polemical digressions against the historian Zosimus and the anonymous “idol-maniacs” in his Historia Ecclesiastica. Scholars have argued over the nature of these polemical digressions and the historical situations that precipitated them. Some like Pauline Allen have attributed these digressions to a “tired” rhetorical convention of ecclesiastical historiography. Others have noted the great environmental disasters in Antioch and Persian military incursions in the sixth century as a motivation for stimulating remaining pagans in the region. I argue that the existence of pagans in Antioch and the broader Christian East during the reigns of Justinian (r. 527–565), Justin II (r. 565–678), Tiberius II Constantine (r. 578–582), and Maurice (r. 582–602) necessitated a polemical response by Evagrius in his Historia. Through a careful analysis of contemporary sources during these reigns, such as the Codex Justinianus, John of Ephesus’ Historia Ecclesiastica and Lives of the Eastern Saints, and the Vita of Symeon Stylites the Younger, and building upon the scholarship of Glanville Downey, Michael Whitby, Anthony Kaldellis, Lucy Parker, and others, this essay analyzes how pagan scandals in Antioch, purges throughout the Christian East in the sixth century, and Evagrius’ own personal crises in a city ravaged by war, natural disaster, and plague warranted his inclusion of these polemical digressions.

Scholars, beginning with Hippolyte Delehaye, have long claimed a distinction between eastern and western customs of relic veneration in late antiquity: westerners left martyrial corpses intact and did not translate them, using contact relics instead, while easterners readily moved and divided these relics. They base this distinction on two papal letters from Pope Hormisdas’s legates and from Gregory the Great that distinguish between Roman and Greek customs of relics veneration. Yet scholars have almost totally neglected one piece of late antique evidence highly instructive for this topic: a letter from Eusebios of Thessaloniki, a contemporary of Gregory the Great, responding to a request from the emperor Maurice to send a corporeal relic of the Thessalonian martyr Demetrios. I argue that Eusebios’s letter demonstrates that the distinction between Roman and Greek customs of relic veneration proposed by the papal letters does not hold in late sixth-/early seventh-century Thessaloniki; furthermore, rather than giving evidence for sweeping, regional patterns, these letters all offer reflections on local, municipal customs of relic veneration in Rome and Thessaloniki in response to local imperial customs in Constantinople.

This article argues against the cliché (posited most famously by Alexis de Tocqueville and Carl Schmitt), that there were inherent correspondences between religious and political concepts. Such connections were historically contingent, and had to be forged by polemicists and apologists who eclectically drew upon a variety of sources. This is evident from an examination of differing Presbyterian reactions to the French Revolution. John Brown in Scotland combined an aristocratic Presbyterian ecclesiology with a Burkean view of authority to argue for an anti-democratic conception of “representative government.” By contrast, the Scottish-American Alexander McLeod synthesized radical Presbyterian political theology with Painite ideas of “representative democracy.” Thus representation emerged as the key concept in both authors, yet its compatibility with democracy was an open question. The examples of Brown and McLeod also show that religion, as much as “secular” politics, had to grapple with and re-imagine “democracy.”

The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.

This essay studies gender in medieval heresy by focusing on an inquisitorial trial in Milan in 1300. The inquisitors investigated a small group of devotees of a deceased penitent woman named Guglielma for venerating her as the Holy Spirit. A noble Humiliati nun, who would become Guglielma’s pope in a coming new age, and a wealthy layman cooperated as the devotees’ leaders. On the surface, the devotees seemed to have reversed gender roles, which late medieval male clergy-female mystic partnerships exemplified. Through an analysis of the surviving records, this article demonstrates that, instead of inverting gender expectations as the inquisitors assumed, the devotees’ vision of a new age – somewhat infused with Joachimism – and the co-leadership of the nun and the layman developed out of transcending the gender binary. As a result, the devotees saw Guglielma not as a co-redeemer with Christ but as the Holy Spirit who comforted them, would convert non-Christians, and had helped unite the devotees, even those of opposing political factions, into a family. Rejecting violent rupture as well as binary gender roles, their future age, which would begin with the nonviolent replacement of the Roman Church, would both preserve Milan’s social hierarchy and eschew binary gender roles.

This article examines the Halle-Herrnhut controversy from 1727 to 1737 by foregrounding the role of the Moravian mission program and the spiritual agency of lay believers in shaping ecclesiastical politics. Moving beyond the conventional focus on theological disputes and personal animosities between the Franckes and Count Zinzendorf, the analysis will examine how Moravian missionaries and common believers were represented and rhetorically mobilized within a transatlantic correspondence network as symbols of ecclesiastical disruption and spiritual populism. Drawing on unpublished German-language letters exchanged among Halle Pietists and their allies, the article reveals how concerns about denominational proximity, spiritual authority, and institutional control were rhetorically projected onto Moravian expansionary initiatives. The controversy, which unfolded across Europe, British North America, and as far east as India, was less about doctrinal precision than about reputational anxieties and competing visions of Protestant community. Moravian believers, who were often lay artisans, refugees, and itinerant missionaries, emerged as symbolic figures whose perceived spiritual agency threatened the coherence of Halle’s program of reform. By tracing how elite actors invoked these believers in polemical discourse, the article offers a new categorical lens for understanding the politics of mission, conversion, and ecclesiology in the eighteenth-century Protestant Atlantic world.

On July 16, 1919, the Holy Office issued a decree declaring the teachings of the Theosophical Society incompatible with Catholic doctrine and forbidding the faithful from participating in its activities. Drawing on previously unexamined Vatican archival materials, this article reconstructs the five-year investigation that led to the decree and situates it within a longer institutional experience through which the Church confronted and regulated emerging spiritualities in an era of intense secularization. By analyzing the reports produced by different consultors, the article shows how Theosophy was interpreted through inherited classificatory frameworks shaped by earlier encounters with animal magnetism, Spiritualism, and occultism, and then refracted through the anti-modernist polemics of the early twentieth century. More broadly, the case sheds light on how the Vatican attempted to govern new forms of transnational religiosity that challenged established modes of ecclesiastical authority.

Christian Connection women – Deborah Peirce, Harriet Livermore, and Rebecca Miller – who penned three of America’s earliest defenses of a woman’s right to preach from 1820 to 1841, conceived of themselves not only as exhorters, evangelists, and preachers but also as interpreters of the Bible. This analysis of their distinctive hermeneutical strategies demonstrates how they interpreted Philippians 4:2–3 as ballast for Christian Connection female laborers to preach and how they exploited the church’s distinction between worship and business meetings to limit Paul’s injunction to silence (1 Corinthians 14:34–35) to business meetings only. It illuminates their distinctive contributions as biblical interpreters by setting their defenses alongside influential commentaries written by men, Sarah Grimké’s defense of women’s preaching (1838), and memoirs authored by early American women preachers. Without the writings of Peirce, Livermore, and Miller, it might be possible to draw an artificial bifurcation in antebellum Christianity between interpretation and experience, that is, between commentaries and Grimké’s Letters, whose primary purpose is to interpret the Bible without explicit reference to experience, and the memoirs of women called to preach, for whom the ascendant attribute of their call was an experience that no text or interpretation could invalidate. These Christian Connection defenses mitigate such a dichotomy.

In the annual presidential address to the American Society of Church History (ASCH), Esther Chung-Kim discusses the pivotal role of pastors, physicians, and lay healers in responding to poverty and illness in early modern Europe. She offers that their involvement shaped both social welfare and medical care. Reflecting the values of biblical examples, both Catholics and Protestants established institutions to support the sick and poor. Promoting practices of care for the sick, religious leaders, pious physicians, and lay healers promoted charity through medicine, in various efforts to expand access to care. Protestant reformers sought to shift responses to illness away from saintly intercession and instead toward direct appeals to God and natural medicine, seen as a divine gift. In some cities, Reformed ordinances mandated medical support for the poor by institutionalizing care during epidemics. The convergence of religious and medical reform, aided by print culture, resulted in Christian thinkers recognizing medicine as a form of God’s providence in nature (thereby encouraging a positive view of medicine), and physicians promoting religious reform in their medical treatises. In the early modern era, Catholics and Protestants both strengthened the link between Christianity and medicine with theological and practical ways to show care and concern for the sick.

Excommunication – being summarily cut off from the sacraments of the Catholic Church – was the logical, if extreme, expression of Ultramontanism, and of the paternal metaphor enshrined at its heart. It was the ultimate weapon in the Church’s battle with critics who sought to undercut or challenge its chosen role as privileged mediator between the state apparatus and the people, whether this came in the form of open rebellion against said state, or in the demand for individual intellectual freedom, or both. Studying the infamous cases of nineteenth-century excommunicates, Joseph Guibord and Louis Riel (together with their predecessors, the ill–fated Patriotes) yields important insights into the nature of excommunication, both when it “worked” (from the perspective of those who imposed it) and, just as crucially, when it did not.

This article analyzes how A. Dean Byrd, an assistant commissioner of LDS Social Services, advanced reparative therapy for Latter-day Saint (LDS) men at the turn of the twenty-first century. Byrd argued that Mormon men’s “unwanted same-sex attractions” stemmed from deficient gender identities that could be “repaired” by cultivating traditional masculinity. Rather than originating these ideas, he synthesized gender-essentialist themes from LDS pastoral discourse into a systematic therapeutic program grounded in the doctrine of eternal gender. Reading Byrd’s writings along the grain, this article shows how his model masculinized Mormon patriarchs while rendering women less visible as therapeutic subjects, framing conversion therapy in LDS contexts as a gendered project aimed at restoring male ecclesiastical authority. Byrd’s collaborations with Catholic and evangelical therapists through organizations such as the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality further reveal reparative therapy as a shared gender ideology that united conservative Mormons with a broader family values coalition amid a moral panic over homosexuality. Yet Byrd’s distinctly Mormon cosmology exposed the limits of conservative Christian ecumenism. Situating Byrd at the intersection of LDS soteriology, gender, and the religious right, this article illuminates how one Mormon therapist participated in and unsettled the networks shaping late twentieth-century responses to queer belonging.

The desegregation of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) offers a critical case study for scholars of American religious history, illuminating how white evangelical institutions responded to the racial transformations of the post-civil rights era. Unlike southern evangelical colleges that defended segregation on overt theological grounds, DTS never explicitly framed its exclusion of Black students within a scriptural mandate. Instead, the seminary’s shift from racial exclusion to intentional Black student recruitment in the 1970s reflects what Martin Luther King Jr. once described as a “more cautious than courageous” approach. Anchored in biblical literalism, DTS president John Walvoord’s reluctance to use scripture to justify segregation played a key role in the school’s transformation. This article fills a gap in the historiography by examining how institutional culture, theological commitments, and broader cultural pressures converged to produce a quiet and incremental model of desegregation—neither overtly racist nor actively prophetic—offering a more complex portrait of evangelicalism and race in the second half of the twentieth century.

During the Cold War, various political forces sought to shape the mindset of the Chinese diaspora. One understudied cultural influence that played an important role in reaching overseas Chinese was Chinese Christian literature. Focusing on Dengta (Lighthouse, 1956–1967), the first Chinese Christian magazine aimed at non-Christian communities in the diaspora, this study examines how the magazine developed an evangelical discourse that engaged with the cultural and spiritual identities of the Chinese diaspora amid political and ideological conflicts. Published in Hong Kong, which emerged as a hub for Chinese Christian literature in the post-war period, the magazine reflects a pivotal shift in Chinese Christian publishing: the start of a global movement aimed at evangelizing overseas Chinese. To appeal to the diaspora, Dengta adopted an ethnic and cultural rhetoric of Chineseness and presented Christian ideals in a context that resonated with the experiences of the Chinese diaspora. I argue that the Chineseness promoted by Dengta helped construct a transregional and transnational sense of belonging for overseas Chinese by framing a blend of traditional Chinese culture and modern knowledge within a Christian cosmic worldview. This study foregrounds the evangelical efforts of Christian literary workers to shape the diasporic experience amid the political tensions of the Cold War.

In the decades that followed the American Civil War, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians across the Northern United States embarked on a massive centrally coordinated church-building program. Just as capitalists and politicians poured resources into the American West and South to consolidate and cohere the newly reunited nation under a single economic and political order, these Northern Protestants also hoped to bind the republic’s sections with a homogenous faith by bankrolling a continental network of church edifices across the country.

This article explores the role of the postbellum Protestant church-building endeavor in the broader process of national consolidation. It argues that the movement was nationally consolidative in three ways. Firstly, by pooling and re-distributing capital from wealthier congregations to their needier counterparts, the church-building organizations themselves brought greater uniformity and unity to the process of Protestant expansion in the United States. Secondly, the movement was compelled by a powerful religio-political philosophy of church-building the author terms “republican ecclesiology,” which endowed the Protestant edifice with a key infrastructural role in national reunification as a stabilizing bastion of piety and patriotism, especially in the American West. Finally, church-building advocates believed that the cross-continental financial networks forged between benefactors and beneficiaries consolidated the nation spiritually by creating a more united body of Protestant believers all invested – emotionally as well as financially – in their compatriots’ salvations.

Mark Noll famously began his 1994 book, “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Through the narrative of author Rachel Held Evans’s life, this article explores the intellectual state of the evangelical tradition during her lifetime, 1981–2019. Evans, a prolific author, blogger, and social media voice, was raised in conservative evangelicalism in Birmingham, Alabama, and Dayton, Tennessee. Her intellectual journey and abundant reading led her to challenge conservative evangelical views of gender and sexuality, creation, and hell, while holding to historic Christian beliefs. After experiencing rejection in-person and online from conservatives, especially Reformed Protestants associated with New Calvinism, she eventually renounced her beloved faith tradition of origin, evangelicalism. I argue that Evans’s faith trajectory illuminates the intellectual weaknesses of evangelicalism that Noll identified in 1994 and suggests that these weaknesses did not ameliorate in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The intellectual state of evangelicalism, and its attendant political dimensions, was a key factor in Evans’s reluctant separation from evangelicalism, as it was for many of her contemporaries.

American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABTS), founded as a black Baptist school in 1924, sprung from an unusual partnership between black and white Baptists in the Jim Crow South. The black National Baptist Convention (NBC) and white Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) jointly funded and governed the Nashville seminary, emphasizing from the outset the strength of their common Baptist identity, though persistent frictions reared up with regularity. The relationship between two leaders involved with ABTS in the mid-twentieth century – National Baptist David V. Jemison and Southern Baptist Eugene P. Alldredge – offers an intriguing lens for viewing the hopes and pitfalls that attended Baptist interracialism in the segregated South. Their correspondence in the 1940s reveals a growing friendship and fellowship as they collaborated in seminary work and bonded over their likeminded Baptist convictions, followed by an abrupt rift after Alldredge’s paternalistic meddling in NBC politics led Jemison to defend black Baptist autonomy. Thus, the Jemison–Alldredge relationship poignantly illustrates two conflicting realities facing such attempts at Baptist interracialism: Baptist identity did offer a legitimate nexus for interracial fellowship, yet the racial hierarchy and prejudices of a segregated society also circumscribed those efforts, as black Baptists walked a tightrope between assuaging white concerns and maintaining their own independence.

In the volatile year 1968, just weeks after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, an editor in the Roanoke World-News noted a strange new pop cultural phenomenon. Christian folk and rock music had arrived. Jonathan Guest, an Anglican pastor from Liverpool, and Chuck Hess, a Roanoke, Virginia man, had begun to perform for teen groups and college students. “We are reaching young people in their idiom with their type of music,” Chuck exclaimed. Put simply, Chuck believed that “if Christianity is to be relevant, it must be relevant today, and we think we can make it so with new forms of music and lyrics.” (World-News, June 29, 1968) Others who joined the early God rock craze included the shambling amateur pop rock group the Crusaders, the psychedelic rockers Mind Garage, and the young rockabilly gospel shouter Isabel Baker. From these inauspicious beginnings, Christian pop music would develop into a billion-dollar industry by the 1990s.

During the first half of the 20th century, Brazilian Protestants turned to their pens and periodicals to defend the legitimacy and beneficial nature of their presence in a majority Catholic nation. This period—spanning Brazil’s first republic, Getúlio Vargas’s authoritarian Estado novo, and the developmentalist era of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961)—witnessed several regime changes and new national constitutions. Amid these political shifts, the Brazilian Catholic church sought to increase its cultural and symbolic dominance in the country. Meanwhile, several Brazilian Protestant groups came together to form the Confederação Evangélica do Brasil (CEB) in 1934, both to coordinate Protestant educational and social work and defend freedom of Protestant religious expression. With their denominational roots in Brazil extending less than one hundred years and their ties to US mission boards making them appear suspiciously foreign, Brazilian Protestants vehemently defended their patriotism. Relying on the writings of many CEB leaders, the organization’s periodical Unum corpus, and biannual reports, I argue that the Brazilian ecumenical leaders used several strategies to create a rhetorical defense of Brazilian Protestant legitimacy. They expressed occasional appreciation for Brazilian Catholics, celebrated Brazilian Protestant history and public recognition of contemporary Brazilian Protestants, and stridently opposed Catholic attempts to achieve cultural or social dominance. I also argue that because they maintained a constant defensive posture, the Brazilian Protestant ecumenists of the 1930s–1950s embraced a vision of ecumenism that explicitly excluded Roman Catholicism.