In 1866, after a fall on the ice left her in despair of ever being able to walk again, Mary Baker Patterson (later Mary Baker Eddy) picked up her Bible and began reading stories of the healings performed by Jesus. As she lay in bed, picturing Jesus commanding the lame to rise and demons to be gone, her own sense of the power of Divine Love became so strong that she stood up and walked, knowing that she was completely healed. Free from the weakness, pain, and fear that had plagued her life for decades, Eddy became a forceful and successful leader, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist who devoted the rest of her life to teaching others to know the healing power of Divine Love.

In one of our earliest descriptions of meditation on the crucifix, Aelred of Rievaulx (d.1166) described the body on the cross, pierced by the soldier's lance, as food and urged the female recluses for whom he wrote not only to contemplate it but also to eat it in gladness: “Hasten, linger not, eat the honeycomb with your honey, drink your wine with your milk. The blood is changed into wine to inebriate you, the water into milk to nourish you.” Marsha Dutton, who has written so movingly of Cistercian piety, speaks of this as a eucharistic interpretation of the literal, physical reality of the crucifixion and points to the parallel with Berengar of Tours' oath at the synod of Rome in 1079: “The bread and wine which are placed on the altar … are changed substantially into the true and proper vivifying body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord and after the consecration there are the true body of Christ which was born of the virgin … and the true blood of Christ which flowed from his side … in their real nature and true substance.”

Although many scholars now recognize the turn of the millennium as the key point in the development of medieval civilization and the birth of Europe, there remains a tendency to look to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as the period in which cultural and intellectual norms emerged that would define medieval civilization. This cultural flourishing, long ago recognized as a renaissance by Charles Henry Haskins, has, in recent years, taken on more ominous tones. Certainly this was a period of great intellectual fervor, but it was also, as R. I. Moore has shown, a time of persecution. Just as medieval theologians offered positive definitions of the Christian faith and Christian society, they defined the “other”—the enemy who stood in stark contrast to all that was true and good in society. And in Western Christendom there were no greater enemies than the Jew and the heretic. Indeed, it has generally been recognized that Jewish fortunes increasingly worsened during the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

In the century when heretics in the Netherlands were persecuted, the Dutch Revolt occurred, and events took place that ultimately led to the National Synod of Dordrecht (1618–19), religion and society were clearly interwoven. Research on this period is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach, such as the one used, to remarkable effect, in the recent studies on the cities of the Reformation (Städteforschung). In the Netherlands, the study of the Reformation in urban settings has also become an important field, one in which both church and “secular” historians have made valuable contributions. Historical work on the period after the Synod of Dordrecht displays, however, far less interest in the relationship between religion and society. Despite this shift in historical focus, religion remained a formative factor in the public life of the Dutch Republic long after 1620. The established church retained its central position in society and continued to influence the design and the development of Dutch culture. The religious community regarded its norms as the basis of civil society. The church wanted to create a social practice in which religion played an influential role in urban life and in the ethics of everyday living.

Homoousios is one of the most important words in the Christian theological vocabulary, since it was used at the Council of Nicaea to express the divine consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. However, long and complicated debates have not yet produced any significant agreement among scholars concerning its origin and meaning.

By almost any measure, the study of ancient Christian history is alive and well, even if one limits one's view to the North American scene. Over the last three decades the number of publications in the field, both books and articles, has grown considerably, fueling (among other things) the astonishing success of the Journal of Early Christian Studies, founded by the North American Patristic Society (NAPS) a decade'ago. Each year the program of the annual meeting of NAPS features more papers and attracts more participants (even though they must stay in less than ideal, even appropriately monastic, dormitory rooms). The number of papers on early Christian topics at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (as well as the American Philological Association) is very impressive.

In 1563, just five years after Elizabeth ascended to the throne, John Foxe published the first edition of his Acts and Monuments. Part ecclesiastical history, part martyrology, part English chronicle, and entirely Protestant, this enormously popular work had a significant impact upon its age. The dedicatory letter to the Queen in this first edition begins with an elaborate woodcut of the letter C, in which Elizabeth sits enthroned. [See Figure 1.] This C is the beginning of the word “Constantine.” Foxe writes: “Constantine the greate and mightie Emperour, the sonne of Helene an Englyshe woman of this youre Realme and countrie (moste Christian and renowned Pryncesse Queene Elizabeth) … pacified and established the churche of Christ, being long before under persecution almost … 400 years” (1563 Pref. vi). Thus Foxe immediately emphasizes the supposed Englishness of Constantine and builds upon this link between Rome and Britain by implying that, just as Constantine had delivered the Christians from an age of persecution, so had Elizabeth. But there is another parallel that Foxe is interested in establishing, at which he hints as the letter continues. Foxe tells the story of how Constantine once traveled to Caesaria, where he promised to grant Eusebius, the Bishop, whatever he wanted for the good of the church: “The good and godly Byshop … made this petition, onely to obtaine at his maiesties hand under his seale and letters autentique, free leave and license through al the monarchie of Rome … to searche out the names, sufferinges and actes, of all such as suffered in al that time of persecution before, for the testimonie and faith of Christ Jesus” (1563 Pref., vi).

The hymns of evangelical Protestantism are the most widely used spiritual texts in American history. Sacred lyrics like “All hail the power of Jesus' name,” “Jesus, lover of my soul,” “How firm a foundation,” and “When I survey the wondrous cross” have been sung, preached, and prayed by millions of Americans since the eighteenth century. At worship, revivals, youth services, conferences, conventions, and colleges, and in the family circle, these hymns have been ceaselessly repeated in an unending round of living oral tradition. Since the Great Awakening two and a half centuries ago, the churches of the evangelical tradition have published tens of thousands of hymn texts and tunes. This continuous popularity since colonial times establishes hymnody as a crucial expression of American evangelical religiousness.

Leopold von Ranke is probably best known for his dictum that written history must mirror the past wie es eigentlich gewesen. Practicing historians nonetheless know that even the greatest masters of their craft inevitably bring their own histories with them to their work. As a case in point, two decades ago Robert M. Kingdon observed in his address as incoming President of the American Society of Church History that students of the Catholic Reformation tend to focus their attention on institutions and practices, while Protestants and Lutherans in particular give center stage to the history of doctrine. Both, faithful to their own traditions, therefore produce a church history manqué that would benefit from combining the methods, presuppositions, and findings of the two approaches.

When discussing the state of religion during the Soviet period, those following the traditional historical interpretation have held that the Communist Party successfully eradicated religion, particularly Russian Orthodoxy. While vestiges may have remained in rural areas, the Russian Orthodox Church as an institution was destroyed. Churches and monasteries stood in ruins as testaments to the victory of atheism over religion.

For centuries, from its Roman endorsement as imperial cult around the year 400 to its revolutionary disestablishment in the 1790s, the Christian religion laid claim to the allegiance of Europe's peoples, even a right to set policies about Jews. This fateful historical conjunction between the making of Europe and the spread of Christian allegiance rested upon an ever-changing mix of custom, law, and conviction, religious in coloration but political, social, and cultural in expression. Diverse practices and patterns, worked out over centuries, became so tightly interwoven that to pull on one was to stretch or unravel another. To call for religious purity or poverty was to upset social and legal custom; to round up heretics was to secure political order, and the reverse; to see into the end-state of things presaged, for some, the overthrow of Roman prelacy as the reign of Babylon, whence its reverse: to manage time and chronology was to stabilize the standing order.

By the 1930s few Catholics in the United States could have been unaware of their church's absolute prohibition on contraception. A widely-publicized papal encyclical had spoken to the issue in 1930, even as various Protestant churches were for the first time giving a public blessing to the practice of birth control in marriage. Growing numbers of American Catholics had been exposed since at least 1920 to frank and vigorous preaching on the subject in the context of parish missions. (Missions are probably best understood as the Catholic analogue of a revival.) And by the early 1930s Catholic periodicals and pamphlets addressed the question of birth control more frequently and directly than ever before. As a Chicago Jesuit acknowledged in 1933, “Practically every priest who is close to the people admits that contraception is the hardest problem of the confessional today.” A major depression accounted in part for the hardness of the problem. But it was more fundamentally caused by the laity's heightened awareness of their church's stance on birth control and their growing consciousness of this position as a defining attribute of Catholic identity.

A teenage Catholic girl lies immobilized in her bed in Worcester, Massachusetts, her dark hair gathered in pink satin ribbons, her lacy nightgown spread neatly around her. The pleasing effect of a damsel in a pre-Raphaelite painting is broken by the sight of a tracheotomy tube in her neck attached to a ventilator, and a feeding tube in her stomach. For the last six years the American media has provided glimpses into the curious vegetative existence of Audrey Santo (1984–), who has lain in a coma-like state since a swimming pool accident at the age of three. Despite the girl's lack of consciousness and brain function, she has been credited as the conduit for extraordinary events in her home which have included bleeding hosts, stigmata, weeping statues, exuding walls, and physical healings. Audrey's popularity is largely a media creation, stemming from a 1996 televised documentary film about her on EWTN, a Christian broadcasting network in Alabama, which spawned a deluge of requests to the Santo family from people wanting to make a pilgrimage to see their daughter.

There can be no question but that the great principles of freedom of conscience, separation of church and state and voluntarism in religion, so basic in American Protestantism and so essential to democracy, ultimately are derived from the Anabaptists of the Reformation period.

With these confident words, Harold S. Bender introduced the main theme of his presidential address at the fifty-fifth meeting of the American Society of Church History, held at Columbia University on 28 Dec. 1943. In the decades that followed, Bender's speech—which he titled.

The Church of England, being the state church of an imperial nation of diverse peoples and creeds, had to contend with provocative controversies in the early twentieth century leading up to the First World War. Perhaps the greatest was secularization, which gained momenturn in the previous century.2 The last fifty years of the nineteenth century proved threatening for church leaders. Horace Mann's 1851 religious census in England and Wales, although controversial, insinuated church attendance was much lower in Great Britain than previously perceived. Causing more anxiety, the State Church consistently lost authority over many of its traditions, including administering burial grounds and the last rights ceremony.3 Additionally Ecclesiastical courts gave up authority to the civic courts of British society.

The concept of region has been perhaps the most important in the historical study of religious geography in the United States. Its centrality is due at least in part to its having been proposed as an organizing principle at the inception of that field in its modern form by historian Edwin Scott Gaustad and geographer Wilbur Zelinsky about four decades ago. But the concept has been, and remains, highly problematic. This brief essay first explores the development and problematization of regionalism in U.S. religious history, and then offers potential new bases for its continuing vitality.

Since 1970, when Church History last published a review of Pietist scholarship, there have been significant contributions to almost all areas of the field. Research on Pietism—once the distinct province of German church historians—has become increasingly international as well as interdisciplinary in scope as Germanists, musicologists, social historians, and historians of Christianity explore the influence of this movement in Europe and the New World. The yearbook Pietismus und Neuzeit, the magisterial four volume handbook Geschichte des Pietismus, and the first International Pietism Congress in 2001 all testify to the vitality of current scholarship in this field. As much recent scholarship makes clear, Pietist research can contribute significantly to how historians understand the development of Christianity in the last three hundred years.

The so-called German Church Struggle has been a subject of scholarly study and popular interest for several decades. For obvious reasons, the minority of Germans who opposed the Nazis in word or in deed have become compelling symbols of courage and resistance, human reminders of the auspicious role religion can play in situations of political crisis. Rarely, however, has the discourse of anti-Nazi resistance been analyzed in terms of its assumptions concerning Jews, their role in Germany, or their historical destiny. When these assumptions are illuminated, it is apparent that despite their opposition to National Socialism and its encroachment in the affairs of the church, Christian resistors to Nazism transmitted concepts of Jews and Judaism that did little to ameliorate, and often exacerbated, the anti-Semitic environment in interwar Germany,

In 1895, Wilbur F. Crafts opened on office in Washington, D.C. and proclaimed himself a Christian lobbyist. Over the next quarter century, until his death in 1922, he mobilized churches and individual Christians to pressure Congress on behalf of bills, some he had written, to limit divorce, to control sexuality, and to restrict or prohibit the use of narcotics and alcohol. He also led an unsuccessful campaign for federal censorship of the movies. Crafts deserves more attention than historians of American religion have paid him. His legislative accomplishments render his career important in itself, but an analysis of his theology and lobbying efforts also helps historians better conceptualize social Christianity and the social gospel.