In the summer of 1926, the Holiness evangelist Andrew Johnson announced the Suspension of his twenty-seven-part attack on “the biological baboon boosters,” serialized in the Pentecostal Herald, so that he could temporarily return to the camp-meeting circuit. No one in the Holiness Community had been agitating more vigorously to “shake the monkey out of the cocoanut tree,” as he described his Crusade, and he wanted to assure his readers that his “lectures against Darwinism and ‘ape to man’ evolution” would never eclipse the gospel of salvation. “There is nothing like an old-fashioned, soul-saving revival of Holy Ghost religion,” declared the bombastic preacher. “So, let it be distinctly understood that the lectures on Evolution are absolutely secondary to the main line work of intense, soul-saving evangelism to which we have been called and in which we expect to remain.”

In 1903, William James began his address to the Emerson centenary gathering at Concord with a meditation on death and memory:

While James's abridgment of Emerson in the address that followed was unusually apt, Emerson has not been as well served by most who have attempted to call his tune.

In the early nineteenth century, when theological disputes centered on suggestions of a kinder, gentler God, Yale's Nathaniel William Taylor brought to fruition America's “one great contribution to the theological thinking of Christendom,” the New Haven theology. Taylor's theology combined elements of Calvinist and Newtonian worldviews and centered on three critical assumptions: the benevolence of God, his moral government, and human free agency. Thus, Taylor held that God was both a wise and powerful creator and a good and just ruler, whose concern for and involvement with his creation extended into contemporary human affairs. Moreover, he believed that men and women were moral agents whose sinfulness was worthy of divine condemnation as well as empirically inevitable, but that human sin was in no way preordained or necessary to the prevailing System of moral government.

The decade of the 1960's was important for American scholars who studied religion. Prospects for employment brightened considerably as public and private universities and Colleges created undergraduate and graduate programs in religious studies. Becoming more self-conscious about their academic identity, professors who staffed these programs founded the American Academy of Religion in 1964, an organization designed to promote scholarship and publication in religion. One index to the growing prominence of religious studies was the survey of humanistic scholarship commissioned by Princeton University's Council on the Humanities and funded by the Ford Foundation. Of the thirteen volumes in this series, two were devoted to the field of religion: Clyde A. Holbrook's Religion, A Humanistic Field (1963), and Religion (1965), a summary of the various fields in religious studies, edited by Paul Ramsey.

The origins of the American-born Churches of Christ are exceedingly complex. While most historians have argued that Churches of Christ separated from Alexander Campbell's Disciples of Christ late in the nineteenth Century, this essay will suggest that the genesis of Churches of Christ was not a matter of Separation from the Disciples at all. Rather, Churches of Christ grew from two early nineteenth-century worldviews that coalesced and intertwined with one another in ways that often defy disentanglement. The first was the apocalyptic perspective of Barton W. Stone; the second was the radically sectarian mentality of the young and brash Alexander Campbell of the Christian Baptist period (1823-1830). As early as the 1830's, these two perspectives wed, brought together in part by the matchmaking power of poverty, marginality, and social estrangement. Together, they clearly shaped a portion of the Stone-Campbell movement that, in due time, would come to be known as a denomination separate from the Disciples; namely, the Churches of Christ.

Lemuel Haynes was a black Congregationalist minister to mostly white churches in New England and New York between 1788 and his death in 1833. Abandoned as an infant, Haynes was reared as an indentured servant in a pious white Massachusetts family. He served in the American Revolution in 1774 and 1775 as a Minute Man and in 1776 as a soldier in the march to Fort Ticonderoga. In 1776, Haynes composed an essay, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts on the Illegality of Slave-keeping.” After the Revolution, he acquired a reputation among his white contemporaries as an inspiring preacher. In 1788, Haynes accepted a call to minister in Rutland, Vermont, where he served for thirty years before being dismissed, perhaps because he was a black man. While at Rutland, he published a number of essays and sermons, including in 1801 The Nature and Importance of True Republicanism and in 1806 Universal Salvation. Universal Salvation ultimately appeared in seventy editions, fifty-four of them within Haynes's lifetime.

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.

On Martha's Vineyard in the late seventeenth Century, a Native American called George suffered from being “Tormented” and “impotent” and sought out a renowned “Powaw,” or shaman, for help. According to Matthew Mayhew, who published the story in 1697, the shaman diagnosed George's troubles as effects of witchcraft and proceeded to “dance around a great fire” with George and other sick Natives “lying by.” Other Natives broke up the dance, claiming that the Powaw himself had “bewitched” the sick, and “threatened to burn him unless he cured the sick man.” Fortunately for the shaman, when he “felt the heat of the fire, the sick immediately recovered.”