Many religious traditions attempt to regulate the sexual practices of their members. Generally, their main tool for doing so is prescribing with whom one may or may not have intimate relations. Forbidden partners might include, for example, members of the same sex, relatives, or people of other religious and ethnic groups. Additional methods for defining how and when intimate relations are permissible are also not unheard of. For example, sexual relations using certain positions or occurring on certain days or hours or in certain places might be declared sinful. The three main Bible-related religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all have in their toolboxes these various regulatory instruments; many other religious groups use them as well.

Regardless of the historiographical arguments made over the course of the last century regarding the relationship between Baptists and Anabaptists in the seventeenth century, every historian of Christianity must concede at least a typological connection between the two movements. Seventeenth-century Baptists shared numerous theological convictions with their sixteenth-century forerunners, including the novel ideas of the separation of church and state, the freedom of the individual conscience, and a voluntary ecclesiology which restricted the practice of baptism and church membership to professing adult Christians. Historians have likewise noted that the two movements differed from their magisterial Protestant counterparts in that each viewed its movement as a restoration of the church to first-century practices rather than as a mere reformation of the church to some previous era of perceived relative purity which remained under the auspices of government.

One goal of this essay is to offer an exploratory, historiographical analysis of the conquest account in the book of Joshua, an analysis that focuses upon the sociocultural milieu of ancient Judah. I propose to show how this narrative of conquest might have contributed to discourse(s) among the literate Judean community that perpetuated the text, and I will offer a few thoughts on the potential relationship between the narrative and the supposed cultic reforms of the late seventh century b.c.e. A number of biblical scholars have argued that the late monarchic period gave rise to the conquest story as recounted in Joshua. In this essay, I would like to pay special attention to precisely how this narrative might have functioned within the milieu of the late monarchic period, thus refining our understanding of the narrative's contribution to the discourses of this era and our knowledge of its relationship to other narratives that were probably extant at the same time. In other words, what particular features of the narrative might have had special import in this period? Specifically, I will argue that the narrative reveals certain discursive statements about Yahweh's cultic supremacy and about important cultic sites in late monarchic Judah, and that this is evident in particular narratival features that are present in the text.

The Acts of Peter (hereafter Acts Pet.) contains an account of the destruction of an imperial statue by an exorcised demon, a statue that is subsequently miraculously restored by its owner Marcellus with the help of prayer and the apostle Peter. Although scholars seldom examine this episode in significant detail, when they have addressed it, they have for the most part agreed that it is an indication of the anti-imperial stance of the text generally and an attack on the legitimacy of the imperial cult more specifically. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, given that the majority of the other apocryphal Acts of the apostles (hereafter AAA) do seem to exhibit this vein of hostility, and this corpus is often interpreted as something of a homogeneous whole.

At the time of his death in October 1958, Pope Pius XII was remembered as a great and good man who had worked tirelessly for peace throughout his -nineteen-year pontificate. World leaders paid him fulsome tributes, and -accounts of his life and the details of his funeral were posted on the front pages of many of the world's leading newspapers and seen by hundreds of thousands on newsreels and television. Within the Catholic Church, Pius was the last of the great monarchical popes, a man who had lived his entire life within the framework of Vatican diplomacy, as an ambassador for two popes, secretary of state for one pope, and a detail-observant manager for close to two decades as pope himself. He was praised also for his support of new movements in the life of the church, notably a modern approach to the study of Scripture and the beginnings of significant reforms to the liturgy. There was, too, some relief that the stultification of the last years of the pope's life and fears of a new anti-Modernist campaign were over. The outpouring of grief at his passing was genuine, but there was a palpable sense that something had changed; an era was closing.