As both substance and symbol, bread played a foundational role in the domestic and spiritual culture of Latin monasticism. Early medieval monks and nuns were expected to bake for themselves as part of their commitment to humility and self-sufficiency, and monastic rules and hagiography demonstrate that this daily bread was, like sacramental bread, a conduit for divine intercession. Monks’ participation in the eucharistic debates of the ninth to eleventh centuries reflected their spiritual formation in a Benedictine tradition that valued baking as spiritual labor and understood all bread to be potentially mutable and miraculous. From the eleventh century on, as the number of ordained monks grew and private masses proliferated in monastic churches, monastic customaries devoted considerable attention to the Eucharist’s evolving materiality and emphasized the monk-priest’s privileged status as a producer of holy matter. Regulatory texts also demonstrate that the rise of exacting new processes for confecting the host further eroded the fragile boundary between consecrated and unconsecrated bread in monasteries, with the latter becoming a focal point for concerns about purity, waste, and abuse that mirrored contemporary anxieties about the Eucharist.

This article argues that scandal functions as a key narrative technology in late ancient Christian historiography. Rather than treating scandal as anecdote or moral failure, ecclesiastical historians use it as a structured way of arranging deviant bodies, contested practices, and moments of exposure to produce claims about Christian truth. Through recurring controversies, this study traces how biblical stories are reworked by authors such as Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret to stabilize doctrine, police boundaries, and articulate Christian identity. Across these writers, scandal emerges as a method of historical control, not merely a record of past conflict but a means of containing theological ambiguity and disciplining memory. By foregrounding scandal as a historiographical strategy, this article exposes how Christian histories were crafted through narrative forms that made orthodoxy appear inevitable and deviation unmistakable.

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 offers a new historical reading of Nicholas of Cusa’s early ecclesiology by re-situating his speculative writings of the 1440s within the crisis of late medieval conciliarism at the Council of Basel (1431–1437). Challenging the dominant narrative of a rupture between the conciliar jurist of De concordantia catholica and the speculative theologian of De docta ignorantia and De coniecturis, it argues that Cusanus’s later works constitute a reflective continuation of problems first exposed in conciliar practice. Read in this light, Basel appears not merely as the failure of conciliar constitutionalism but as a generative moment that reshaped debates on ecclesial authority and unity. Through the notion of the ecclesia coniecturalis, articulated in 1442, Cusanus reconceives the Church as a visible unity mediated through conjectural and equitable practices rather than juridical closure. The article thus reframes both Cusanus’s development and the historical significance of late medieval conciliarism.

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 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.

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 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.

The bestselling book, If Christ Came to Chicago, was published in 1894. It was a work of sensationalist, exposé journalism, documenting with titillating details the city’s rampant vice, dire social problems such as unemployment and homelessness, and corrupt officials and politicians. The book was, among other things, a contribution to the Social Gospel movement. It even inspired Charles M. Sheldon’s bestselling novel, In His Steps (1896), with its refrain, “What would Jesus do?” The author of If Christ Came to Chicago, W. T. Stead (1849–1912), however, was an Englishman. Stead’s earlier efforts at the New Journalism had been focused upon London, including his “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” articles and ghostwriting In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) for the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth. When he turned to the Windy City, however, Stead was attacked for being an interloper, a foreigner who should not have presumed to pronounce a harsh judgment upon an American city. One of his responses to this charge was to try to recast himself as an insider through evoking the category of “our common English-speaking race.” This article explores transatlantic crossings, collaborations, and condemnations. Stead himself died in one of the greatest failed transatlantic crossings of the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic.

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.

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.

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.