Traditionally, the British reaction to the League of Nations has been narrated in terms of an almost uniform acceptance. British Churches, in particular, have been seen as among its most enthusiastic supporters and principal campaigners for its creation. In fact, a significant amount of debate over the League erupted in the Church of England and the Free Churches. In these debates, Christian Socialists emerged as passionate League enthusiasts and conservative premillenarians as equally passionate opponents. Throughout, many of the key church leaders who were publicly supportive of the League continued to harbour deep private reservations.

Cyprian attacked the claim of the confessing martyr to give absolution independent of the more formal authority of a bishop on the grounds that this practice was radically new. But Cyprian ignored the antiquity of the martyr tradition. The act of confession that involved acute physical suffering had itself been sufficient for ordination earlier, just as it had been sufficient to replace baptism. Reconciliation of an apostate previously took place by offering and giving the eucharist without a separate, episcopal act in the form of imposition of hands. Cyprian's case thus rested on a fundamental reinterpretation of the theology of martyrdom in the interests of extending episcopal control into new areas of church life.

The beginning of Elizabeth i's reign was a happy and confident time for committed English Protestants in spite of their doubtful and precarious position in the world. They had almost miraculously survived both the death of their Protestant king, Edward vi, and the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary, and her foreign husband, Philip n of Spain. It seemed that God was testing Protestantism in England. Since he allowed Elizabeth to succeed to the throne, Protestantism, it seemed, had passed the test. As a result early English Protestants confidently began to formulate their place in both the world and history while attacking the established positions of their Catholic opponents. English Catholics defended themselves from these attacks and replied with some of their own. This debate over the historical situation of the Church of England continued through the reign of James i and beyond. During the course of the debate both sides commented frequently and necessarily on what they thought was Martin Luther's place in church history.

This paper examines the process of radicalisation of Monsignor Ivan Illich during the 1960s, having as its setting Cuernavaca, Mexico – a creative, fluid space where Illich was in contact with Bishop Méndez Arceo, Erich Fromm and Gregorio Lemercier. Illich's writings and the reports from the centres led by him are placed here in context, and it is argued that his encounter with psychoanalysis in Cuernavaca shaped his critique of the Church as an institution. The radicalisation of his concept of the Church reached a high point with the publication of ‘The seamy side of charity’ and ‘The vanishing clergyman’, both in 1967.

This note is a transcription of two hitherto unknown letters of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester (c.1497–1555), found in an early seventeenth-century Catholic commonplace book (Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng. th. b. 2). Composed in late August or early September 1547 and addressed to several of the royal Visitors of Winchester, the letters are a delaying tactic in Gardiner's ongoing resistance to the Edwardian Injunctions and the ‘Book of homilies’, an attempt to win time until the calling of the parliamentary session. The strongly theological content of the letters challenges traditional characterisations of Gardiner as primarily a legalist.

According to Western canonists, husband and wife had a debt towards one another: they were obliged to render sexual intercourse on demand. This article looks at the differences and similarities of the ‘marital debt’ in Byzantium and the West in order to evaluate whether this concept can be applied to Byzantine couples. It argues that, contrary to the West, in Byzantium there was no fixed linguistic terminology or sophisticated rules to describe a sexual obligation between spouses. Ultimately, there was also less need for one as sexual intercourse within marriage was not considered sinful and needed no justification.

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.