In 407, a tribe of barbarian raiders known as Mazices came sweeping off the Libyan desert and devastated one of the first great centers of Christian monasticism, the settlement of Scetis. Scetis was located in a remote desert valley west of the Nile and had been founded around 330 by one of the pioneers of the monastic movement, Macarius the Egyptian (d. 390). Before the attack, it had enjoyed an international reputation for its ascetic rigor and incisive wisdom. Word of the devastation spread rapidly, even to the Latin West. Augustine knew of it and counted it among the great disasters of the time.2 And when the sack of Rome took place a couple of years later, in 410, one of Scetis's survivors, Abba Arsenius, would link the two events: “The world has lost Rome and the monks have lost Scetis.” Scetis's destruction marked a turning point in the history of early Christian monasticism. The site would be resettled a few years later, and in fact would suffer other barbarian raids, notably in 434, 444, and 570. But after this first one, many of its leading monks dispersed and never returned.

In the aftermath of the 1967 “Six Days' War,” 254 ancient inscribed stones were found in forty-four towns and villages of the Golan Heights—241 in Greek, 12 in Hebrew or Aramaic, and 1 in Latin. These stones, along with numerous architectural fragments, served as the basis of the 1996 book by myself and Dan Urman, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in the Golan Heights—a study of settlement patterns of people of the three religions in this region in the early centuries of the common era.1 The area of the Golan heights, roughly the size of Rhode Island, was in antiquity a place of agriculture and, for the most part, small communities. Though historians of religions in the late Roman period have long been aware of the “quartering” of cities, and of the locations of particular religious groups in this or that section of urban areas, we have had little information concerning the ways in which Hellenes, Jews, and Christians took up residence in relation to each other in those rural settings featuring numerous towns and hamlets— most presumably too small to have “zones” for ethnic and religious groups. The surviving artifacts of a number of the Golan sites gave the opportunity for a case study. Part 1 of this article centers on evidence for the locations and possible interactions of members of these religious groups in the Golan from the third to the seventh centuries and entails a summary of findings in the earlier work, while part 2 takes up several lingering questions about religious identity and ways of “marking” it within Golan countryside communities. Both sections can be placed under a rubric of “boundary drawing and religion.”

Over the last twenty-five years it has become common to speak of reformation in the plural instead of the singular. Historians isolate and write about the communal reformation, the urban reformation, the people's or the princes' reformations, and the national reformations of Europe. Some scholars doubt whether these different movements had enough in common to warrant speaking of the Reformation of the sixteenth century. A recent textbook, entitled The European Reformations, justifies its title with the following statement: “In more recent scholarship this ‘conventional sense’ of the Reformation [the traditional unified view] has given way to recognition that there was a plurality of Reformations which interacted with each other: Lutheran, Catholic, Reformed, and dissident movements.”1

In 1868 Ulysses S. Grant remarked that there were three great parties in the United States: the Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church. This was an understandable tribute, given the active role of leading Methodists in his presidential campaign, but it was also a realistic judgment, when set in the context of the denomination's growing political authority over the previous half century. As early as 1819, when, with a quarter of a million members, “the Methodists were becoming quite numerous in the country,” the young exhorter Alfred Branson noted that “politicians… from policy favoured us, though they might be skeptical as to religion,” and gathered at county seats to listen to the preachers of a denomination whose “votes counted as fast at an election as any others.” Ten years later, the newly elected Andrew Jackson stopped at Washington, Pennsylvania, en route from Tennessee to his presidential inauguration. When both Presbyterians and Methodists invited him to attend their services, Old Hickory sought to avoid the political embarrassment of seeming to favor his own church over the fastest-growing religious movement in the country by attending both—the Presbyterians in the morning and the Methodists at night. In Indiana in the early 1840s the church's growing power led the Democrats to nominate for governor a known Methodist, while tarring their Whig opponents with the brush of sectarian bigotry. Nationally, as the combined membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church [MEC] and Methodist Episcopal Church, South [MECS] grew to over one and a half million by the mid-1850s, denominational leaders could be found complaining that the church was so strong that each political party was “eager to make her its tool.” Thus Elijah H. Pilcher, the influential Michigan preacher, found himself in 1856 nominated simultaneously by state Democratic, Republican, and Abolition conventions.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, clergy and professional theologians in the Orthodox Church in Russia found themselves engrossed in debates over the theological nature and “proper” institutional fashioning of the sacred community called “church.” Insofar as this intensive reflection on communal life heatedly addressed issues of religious authority and the role of laypeople in that life, this period in Russian Orthodoxy in many ways lends itself to comparison with two critical points on the time line of the history of Christianity in the West: the Reformation and Vatican II. True, the “evolution” or brewing “revolution” (depending on one's interpretation of those debates) in Russian Orthodoxy never had the chance to become a comparable definitive “event,” largely on account of the political aftermath of the 1917 revolutions.1 Nevertheless, the acute tensions in thinking about “church” that surfaced during that period suggest that had it not been for the sociopolitical events of 1917—events that propelled the Orthodox community into another level of concern—the landscape of Orthodox Christianity in Russia might well have undergone “modernizing” shifts comparable to those in the West.