Our bodies, like the poor, are always with us. They are the mechanism through which we apprehend the world, and as such—as the inescapable point of contact between subjective consciousness and objective “reality”— the body becomes a primary medium of cultural communication and bearer of cultural meanings. Paradoxically, this is nowhere clearer than in the case of ascetics like Margherita da Cortona, who wage unremitting war on their bodies during their lives and whose bodily remains in consequence are enshrined and revered. It was through her body that Margherita, like other illiterate holy women, could project a spiritual message that carried beyond the range of her voice; and it was to her body that people flocked after her death, endowing it with sacred values and social significance.

As is well known, the Corpus Dionysiacum (CD) first appeared on the stage of history in the first quarter of the sixth century; what is less well known is that within a generation of its appearance the CD was commented upon by an Orthodox author, John of Scythopolis (d.c. 548). Thereafter, the CD was circulated in a much expanded format—prefaced with John's Prologue and annotated with his Scholia. John's interpretive work, so close in time to the composition of the CD itself, holds forth the promise of great insight into the earliest stage of the reception of the Areopagite's works in the Christian East. Unfortunately, with the passing of time, John's remarks became so intermingled with the comments of later authors (such as Maximus the Confessor and Germanus of Constantinople) that until quite recently modern scholars have been unable to isolate John's Scholia with any degree of certainty. However, investigations of the Scholia are now entering a new stage, thanks in large part to the labors of Beate Regina Suchla. As she has demonstrated in a series of recent publications, it is possible to recover John's work through an early Syriac translation of the Scholia and a shorter Greek recension, both of which preserve the earliest version of the Scholia, that authored by John. To date, however, she has published results for the scholia on the Divine Names alone. Using a similar approach, the authors of this article have tentatively identified John's comments on the rest of the CD as well. It is now possible to begin examining thematic aspects of John's Scholia and to understand something of his intentions in commenting upon the CD. With this goal in mind, we here investigate John's comments on a number of intertwined issues, chiefly, the Christology of Apollinaris and the authenticity of the works of Dionysius.

What follows is a bibliography that is long on titles and short on adjectives; it seemed out of place for one commentator to try to discuss the pluses and minuses of so many books, not all of which he had seen; reviews of which he could not possibly all have remembered or trusted; most of which he could not have had time or occasion yet to read. Nevertheless, this endeavor should be helpful in locating and classifying hundreds of books.

During the fifth century of our common era the Latin church fathers struggled to explain how we humans are saved and why it seems that not all humans are saved. Most of these attempts pivoted on the writings of Augustine of Hippo. The fathers either borrowed from Augustine's thought, adapted it, or reacted to it. Beginning with the generation of theologians who thrived at the end of Augustine's life and just following his death, there arose a tendency in the western church to moderate his more extreme positions concerning grace and predestination by realigning them with accepted church tradition. This tradition includes those Christian doctrines which were held and promoted most widely by theologians—up to, but not including, Augustine himself—whom the early church accepted as orthodox.

Of all the divisions and crises that the Catholic church endured in its first fifteen hundred years of existence, none was so destructive as the Great Schism (1378–1417). For forty years learned theologians and doctors of canon law argued over whether the pontiff residing in Rome or in Avignon was the true pope. The effects of the schism upon the highly organized administration of the church were disastrous, as were its effects upon society in general. Countless clerics fought over claims to benefices with appointees from the other obedience; the revenues of the church, quite impressive in the mid-fourteenth century, shrank precipitously; and opportunistic rulers especially in Italy did not hesitate to wage private wars under the banner of one or the other papacy, or to prey upon the actual holdings of the church.

During the past two decades, a spate of interpretive studies has addressed the spirituality of regular canons in the twelfth century. Caroline Bynum's Docere Verbo et Exemplo, most notably, has established that there was a distinctive canonical perspective on medieval religious reform. In Bynum's work in particular, the works of two Augustinian canons of the Order of Prémontré, Anselm of Havelberg (d. 1158) and Philip of Harvengt (d. 1183), figure importantly. Both Anselm and Philip—the one a bishop on the Slavic frontier and the other abbot of a double community in Brabant—were prominent apologists for their order's place among a proliferation of new religious groups. But recent scholarship has so far suggested no particular community of ideas between these two eminent twelfth-century Premonstratensians. Nor, more generally, has the ideology and spirituality of canons of their order, founded in 1121 by the Belgian nobleman Norbert of Xanten, been set clearly apart in more than name from the thought and practice of other groups of contemporary Augustinians.

The secularization process in western society, first clearly discernible in the Italian Renaissance, reached a certain plateau at the beginning of the twentieth century. Whatever else might be meant by “the secularization process,” it meant at least, and means in these pages, the gradual deposition of religion from almost every structure and dimension of society except, perhaps, the most private and personal. To thoughtful individuals possessed of mature religious convictions secularization sometimes seemed to portend the end of religion generally: not by law or sword, but simply by social absorption. To meet this challenge, not by denouncing the secularization process nor modernity in general, but simply by sharing their own thoughts on religion and what its role might or should be in the newly secularized western world, a group of prominent London-based men formed in 1904 the London Society for the Study of Religion. The pages which follow are a study of this Society's origins.

In the nineteenth century the West truly rediscovered Palestine. A land many western observers had long considered fallen from its former glory was roused amid its Ottoman occupation to abide the hopes, dreams, and designs not only of aspiring Jewish nationalists but of British and American diplomats, explorers, archaeologists, adventurers, Christian pilgrims, missionaries, and others in that great entourage which Naomi Shepherd has dubbed the “zealous intruders.” Protestant missionaries in the Levant, to the extent that they established an early and enduring physical presence in the Holy Land and a living link with evangelical churches in Europe, Britain, and America, played a memorable, if limited, role in this modern reopening of Palestine to the West.

Italians have long been the exception to generalizations about ethnic American Catholicism. As early as the 1880s, American bishops considered them a “problem.” In 1946, Henry J. Browne summarized the “problem”: Italians did not regularly attend mass, did not receive the sacraments, did not contribute to the support of the church, did not educate their children in their faith, did not respect the clergy, and did not appreciate that they should be doing better in all these areas. Although Browne's work has become the subject of revisionist criticism among students of Italian American Catholicism, specialists in other aspects of American Catholicism have incorporated into their work generalizations generated by the Italian-American experts.James Sanders's study of Chicago parochial schools referred to Italians as least likely to support such schools. David J. O'Brien's history of the diocese of Syracuse emphasizes the difficulties Italians faced and the troubles they created for the clergy and hierarchy. Dolan's survey of American Catholic history has a large bibliography on which to base its conclusion that “thereligion of the [southern Italian] people was not the same as the official religion of the church.

The studies by Julie Ellison, Barbara Packer, and Wesley T. Mott demonstrate that Emerson's exposure to German biblical criticism worked steadily on his religious mind. While the former studies focus on the problem of the relation of faith to history and the more inclusive problem of the shift away from an evidentialist christology, the present study wants to show that the confrontation with German biblical criticism issued in the case of William and Ralph Waldo Emerson in a decisive change of profession and a break with the ministerial office. Moreover, this study also sets out to demonstrate that Ralph Waldo Emerson's appropriation of German biblical criticism presented an important anticipation of the intuitional doctrines of Transcendentalism. When William Emerson, following the example of such American Göttingen students as George Ticknor and Edward Everett, journeyed to Göttingen in 1824 he experienced a professional crisis triggered by the critical methods of the Göttingen exegetes J. G. Eichhorn and J. D. Michaelis. The biblical criticism which prevailed in Göttingen posed a threat for Unitarians not so much because of the depreciation of supernatural revelation as because of the very method with which this disparagement was brought about. The questioning of the historicity of the biblical narratives characteristic of the so-called “higher criticism” practiced at Göttingen cut against the grain of the Unitarian biblical tradition which regarded the biblical narratives as a factually reliable repository of “the history of Christ.” “There is no other theory,” Andrews Norton observed with regard to higher criticism, “in which propositions ready to weaken man's faith in the genuineness of the Gospels, are so elaborately and plausibly introduced.”

Known in the United States as the Vincentian Fathers, the Congregation of the Mission is a religious community founded during the early seventeenth century by the French priest Vincent de Paul for the purpose of revitalizing religious life in rural areas through the preaching of parish missions. Such missions began with a sermon on repentance that urged people to make a general confession of all their past sins. The priests continued with a protracted catechesis that lasted for several weeks to several months. In time, Vincent de Paul realized the futility of pumping new life into a parish only to leave it in the hands of an inept or lax pastor. So the Vincentians began establishing seminaries to educate and prepare good priests. Thus parish missions and the training of clergy became the two cardinal tasks of that community.

This article seeks to demonstrate how Monsignor Gustavo Juan Franceschi (1871–1957) became a friend of the newly created state of Israel when only twenty years earlier he had maintained that Jews constituted Argentina's major political problem. This intellectual transformation will be traced through a consideration of Franceschi's writings about the Jews. As a prominent member of the Catholic church and a strong advocate of Argentine nationalism, his views also reflected the generally ambivalent and suspicious attitude which that powerful institution held regarding Jews. However, following the devastation of European Jewry during World War II and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Franceschi's opinion of Jews moderated, resulting in greater understanding. Before presenting Franceschi's views, a consideration of Argentine Catholic nationalism will be provided in order to place these opinions within a proper context.

Protestant churches in the early twentieth century were vexed by dwindling attendance, a clear sign of their declining social authority. The Reverend William C. Skeath complained about “the masses of the passively religious who have closed their ears to the sermon subject and their doors to pastoral visitation.” Likewise, in How to Fill the Pews, Ernest Eugene Elliott said that because no more than two-fifths of church members went to church on any given Sunday, the church had ceased to be the chief forum in American public life.

Discussion about theological developments in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s has focused on the influence of European “crisis theology” and Reinhold Niebuhr. This approach, however, has overlooked the cooperative work carried out by the theologians and churchmen who pushed American Protestant thought towards neo-orthodoxy. At the core of this movement stood a group of young theologians who shared a generational identity, having known each other as student leaders in the YMCA, Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM), and the World's Student Christian Federation (WSCF). Among them were men and women who later held academic positions at America's most prestigious Protestant seminaries: Henry P. Van Dusen, John C. Bennett, the Niebuhr brothers, Walter M. Horton, Edwin E. Aubrey, Georgia Harkness, Robert L. Calhoun, John Mackay, Samuel McCrea Cavert, and the layman Francis P. Miller.

While most of the cases that led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 had to do with firings of professors who had championed controversial political views, the AAUP founders were also concerned about dismissals on religious grounds. One case especially, that of Lafayette College, is particularly revealing not only of the character of the religious issues involved but also of the attitudes toward religion of those who defined what became the standard twentieth-century American concepts of academic freedom. Reflections on the religious dimensions of the construction of academic freedom in America also have important implications for religiously oriented higher education and scholarship today.

For American Protestants who were sensitive to the profound social disruptions associated with rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, the twin discoveries of the “alienation” of the working class from Protestant churches and of a rising and vibrant socialist movement caused much consternation and anxious soul-searching. Socialism offered not only a radical critique of American political and economic institutions; it also offered the zeal, symbols, and sense of participation in a world-transforming cause often associated with Christianity itself. The religious alienation of the working class and the appeal of socialism were often causally linked in the minds of socially-conscious Protestant leaders.