This article explores the conspicuous role of singing in the hagiographical construction of saintly women in the thirteenth-century Diocese of Liège. The constellation of Lives about Liégeois women occupies a prominent place in the “origin story” of the new spirituality in the later Middle Ages. However, one aspect of these women's perceived religiosity—their musical and vocal talent—though omnipresent in the sources, has received only sparse attention from scholarship. This article focuses on two of the most important Lives in this group, those of Mary of Oignies and Christina of Sint-Truiden, and demonstrates that hagiographers, mobilizing liturgical vocabulary and ritual ideas identifiable to a local audience, consistently represented women's singing as magnificent ritual performance. By doing so, the hagiographers highlighted these women's privileged access to the divine and distinct potency as intercessors for the living and the dead. This article also intends to show the highly sophisticated ways in which Latin liturgy and its vernacular appropriation, popular ideas and scholastic theories about music were negotiated, developed, and together contributed to a distinctive religious rhetoric in the articulation of female sanctity in thirteenth-century Europe.

The Baptist movement in Cromwellian Ireland displayed a number of distinctive features. Adherents of the movement regularly claimed to have heightened spiritual experiences, which in a number of cases included firsthand encounters with the devil. This article observes the political contexts in which these claims were made while analyzing attempts by Baptist leaders to promote a more critical spirituality and counter illegitimate claims to supernatural experience. It argues that these unusual experiences, reflective more of their geographical than their denominational context, were rhetorically enabled, and Baptist leaders would struggle to both sustain and contain claims to spiritual experience.

This article analyzes the procedure of the Maltese diocesan court in dealing with clerical misconduct in the second half of the eighteenth century. The clergy were accused especially of physical and verbal abuse as well as of sexual incontinence. They were given a fair hearing, being assisted by a lawyer, presenting their own witnesses, and having the right to appeal the sentence. The article also discusses how the court tried to protect the clergy's honor and reputation in an attempt to avoid anticlericalism. Convicted priests could stop proceedings against them with a fine, and those of them guilty of immoral behavior were assigned another parish or else transferred to an oratory where they did penance.

This article takes as its central site of interrogation the stone sculpture of Kagawa Toyohiko (1888–1960) in the Washington National Cathedral, asking how a statue of a Japanese Christian leader came to be constructed inside one of America's most important religious institutions. At first glance, the statue appears to be a simple instance of commemoration for an individual who dedicated his life to helping the poor and spreading the gospel within his native country of Japan. What emerges from a close examination of the National Cathedral's archives, however, is the story of a religious leader whose international standing and reputation underwent a significant shift over the course of his career. By tracing the construction of Kagawa's image as a globally renowned Christian pacifist during the interwar period, and the challenges to this image brought on by his subsequent wartime activities, this study seeks to place the Cathedral's building of the statue into historical context. In doing so, it illuminates the politics of national representation inherent in this project of cross-cultural commemoration, while also highlighting the lessons it offers about the rise and fall of Christian internationalism in the mid-twentieth century.

Rose Prince was a young Indigenous woman who lived during the first half of the twentieth century, spending most of her short life in a Catholic residential school near Fraser Lake, British Columbia, Canada. Shy and retiring in life, Rose's venerators believe that her understated devotion was rewarded by a postmortem miracle generally reserved only for God's greatest saints: incorruption. The Catholic hierarchy and Rose's Carrier people, though at odds on much else, are unanimous that the Lejac Indian Residential School unwittingly hosted a saint between its opening in 1922 and Prince's death in 1949, and the two groups seek together to honor her with an annual pilgrimage to her gravesite. But this fragile unanimity exists in dynamic tension with the two groups’ divergent interpretations of Prince's holiness, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of residential schools. For some within the Catholic hierarchy, Rose's sanctity provides a powerful justification for the much-critiqued assimilative educational system. For many Carrier, however, Prince is its starkest repudiation. For them, Rose was—and is—the heart of a heartless world, incarnating gentle compassion in a system that, while it trumpeted these Christian virtues, itself was notably lacking in them.

Based on oral history interviews and archival sources, this essay analyzes the religious affiliation between Sora villagers in the highlands of eastern India with Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) members in the American Midwest. The relationship between these distinct groups transposed a pattern of interactions between highlands and lowlands in upland Asia to a new globalized space in the late twentieth century. Conceiving of “conversion” as a broad analytic trope to discuss various individual, group, and organizational transformations, this essay argues that “converts” in the Sora highlands and American plains instrumentalized their relationships with the other for their own ends. In the Americans, the Sora found a new patron for long-standing client-patron relationships between highlands people and valley people. In the Sora, the Americans found an “indigenous other” who could be used to justify reforms within their local church body along more cosmopolitan lines. As an upshot of these interactions, Sora and Americans effectively reterritorialized older patterns of “hills” and “valleys” that had been deterritorialized by state-sponsored modernization. Thus, the hills and valleys of upland Asia found a surprising afterlife within the space of a global Christian denomination.