Origen of Alexandria's works contain a seeming contradiction concerning Mary's virginity. He affirms multiple times that Mary remained a virgin after Christ's birth and throughout life, yet one of his homilies on the Gospel of Luke declares that Christ “opened the womb” of his mother—an action many readers equate with destruction of virginity. How can Origen claim that Mary remained virginal if her hymen tissue was no longer intact? Scholars commonly solve the problem by characterizing his thought as self-contradictory or by concluding that he prioritizes Mary's lack of sexual experience over her loss of physical intactness. This essay resolves the contradiction more fully through attention to divergent models for female genital anatomy that circulated in antiquity. Origen, like most thinkers during and before his time, probably did not believe that female virgins have hymens. For him, the terminology of “closed” and “opened” wombs refers not to virginity but to fertility. Scholarly readers have been misled by certain other authors’ uses of this vocabulary and by Jerome's Latin translation of the homily, which draws on a different anatomical model. For Origen, Mary is a virginal mother not in spite of a broken hymen, but without possessing a hymen in the first place.

Expanding upon recent work on the heterogeneity of Catholicism and the challenges facing Tridentine reformers, this article examines local religion in two “extreme” settings: the village republic of Gersau in Central Switzerland and the missionary territory of the Custody of the Holy Land. Following conceptual remarks, the authors sketch the distinct secular contexts as well the phased evolution of localized networks for the administration of the cure of souls, the latter starting in the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, respectively. A consistently comparative approach reveals notable similarities—in terms of expanding spiritual provision and better record keeping—alongside substantial differences—especially between the clearly demarcated territorial parishes in the Alps and a more punctual system of sacrament centers in Palestine. At Gersau, where diocesan structures were weak, the church operated under the close supervision of a commune with extensive powers stretching to the rights of advowson and benefice administration. Around Jerusalem, the Franciscans—whose custos acted as the vicar apostolic—used material incentives to win over converts from other Christian denominations. Building on recent reassessments of the post-Tridentine Church, both examples thus underline the strong position of the laity in the confessional age and the need to acknowledge local sociopolitical as well as organizational factors in the formation of early modern Catholicism.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus was redefining its ever-growing organization. Starting with the generals Mercurian and Acquaviva, the order attempted to leave behind the open spaces devoted to retired forms of prayer so as to put the full weight of the institution on its practical ministries. However, such an advance against contemplative prayer did not lack challenges. The present work aims to rescue a hardly studied critical prose in the midst of those changes: the case of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco de Ribera. This article suggests that Salamanca's professor used his words to defend contemplative prayer. For this purpose, he utilized a device of great scope in the Catholic universe during the Counter-Reformation: the hagiographic narrative. It is proposed here that the vita appears as a mechanism of dispute not only outside but also inside Roman Catholicism. In this sense, the hagiography was a platform of debate within the order. Far from being a purely repetitive text, Ribera's biography of the Castilian visionary and reformer Teresa of Ávila shows the exaltation of a form of prayer that he gladly projected to the group of all believers and especially to the Society of Jesus.

Historians of American religion generally agree that religious debates over slavery were characterized by a reliance on the plain meaning of the Bible. According to the conventional wisdom, antebellum Americans were uninterested in or even overtly hostile to tradition and church history. However, a close study of pro- and antislavery literature complicates this picture of ahistorical biblicism. For some defenders of slavery, not merely the Bible but also Christian tradition supported their position, and these Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists mined the past for examples of Christian slaveholding. On the other hand, both white and Black antislavery authors used religious history to bolster their cases against the peculiar institution, with African Americans leading the way in developing an antislavery account of the Christian past. The previously unnoticed historical dimensions of religious arguments over slavery prove central to understanding why these debates failed, while also modifying how we conceive of scripture, tradition, and religious authority in nineteenth-century America. Arguments over slavery show that religious Americans—even many who claimed to be biblicists—did not read the Bible alone but always alongside and in relation to other texts, traditions, and interpreters.

This paper aims to examine political, ecclesiastic, and theological changes in Switzerland during the time of the nineteenth-century culture wars. It analyzes the reforms of the churches undertaken during that period in correlation with the evolution of various social and cultural elements, in particular the ever-greater confessional diversity within the territory and the demand for religious freedom. After an initial general accounting of the history of Swiss institutions (state, Catholic, and Protestant national churches), the article explores an example of a liberal church reform that took place in Geneva in 1873: the creation of a Catholic Church defined simultaneously as Christian, national, liberal, and related to the German Old Catholic movement. It fashioned a new community in keeping with the idea that freedom of conscience should be implemented within the church, thereby meeting strong resistance from Roman Catholics. The article closes with a return to the broader Swiss context, arguing that freedom of belief and of worship was finally enshrined in the 1874 Swiss constitution as a result of the growing divisions among Christians over the compatibility of liberal values with Christian theology and the subsequent rise of a new confessionalism.

Even though after the October Revolution in 1917 the Bolsheviks enjoyed uninterrupted power and pursued radical secularist objectives, the majority of female monastic communities in Nizhnii Novgorod province were able to survive much longer than their counterparts in the French and Mexican Revolutions. Using the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross as a case study, this article shows how—despite extremely challenging conditions and the hostility of the Soviet state—female monastic communities proved to be remarkably resilient and managed to exploit openings created by both the Bolsheviks’ strategy for subverting them and conflicts between Soviet authorities. The resiliency of the community at the Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross stemmed from the solidarity, flexibility, and leadership skills it cultivated prior to World War I through the combination of its religious character and practices and its communal organization. By the early 1920s, the community had adapted effectively to post-civil war Soviet urban conditions and was able to survive local attempts to dissolve it. But by the late 1920s, the survival of the community had become intolerable for Soviet authorities, who—like the revolutionary regimes in France and Mexico—ultimately resorted to compulsory means to “liquidate” the community between 1927 and 1935.

The turn of the twentieth century represents an incisive moment in religious thought and theological education. Scholars across Europe and North America were wrestling with the twin influences of Protestant Liberalism and Roman Catholic Modernism, the questions they raised for how to conceive of the origins of Christianity, and how to make them palatable to a rapidly changing world. In her most recent monograph, The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, Elizabeth A. Clark explores these questions in the lives and work of three of the era's most influential figures. Her work stands at the center of this forum, with four distinguished scholars considering its implications.

I am grateful for this rich and sumptuously detailed book by Elizabeth A. Clark on a neglected subject. Her splendid book is a reminder that although the early twentieth-century liberal and modernist scholars of early Christian history are largely forgotten—and tend to be derided when remembered—they strove with integrity and intelligence to be good historicists. I appreciate that the liberals of this period wanted Christianity to play a constructive role in society and tried to secure a place in the academy for the study of early Christian history. Still, they believed so intently in the superiority of their white middle-class culture that they could not see this belief as a form of prejudice.

From the three historians of early Christianity whose lives and careers Elizabeth Clark discusses in The Fathers Refounded—Arthur Cushman McGiffert of Union Theological Seminary in New York, George LaPiana at Harvard Divinity School, and Shirley Jackson Case from the University of Chicago Divinity School—there breathes a palpable air of white, upper-middle-class liberal Protestant complacency and intellectual superiority. Modernists all, they know they are on the winning side of truth because they are confident that they are on the winning side of time. Summarizing McGiffert's distinction between ancient and contemporary Christianity, Clark writes: “Only in modernity, when God's immanence was championed, was the dualism between human and divine in Christ overcome.” “Christ, if he was human,” McGiffert believed, “must be divine, as all men are.” McGiffert's historiography shimmers with Emersonian confidence and ebullience. In his assumption—his assertion—of “only in,” we hear the ringing sound of modernity's triumphant temporality.

The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth Clark's magnificent sequel to Founding the Fathers, describes in abundant detail how the overlapping disciplines of early church history and patristics became established in several American universities. It examines the work of three historians of early Christianity and their accomplishments and difficulties—and along the way it reminds its readers more than once that historical investigation poses a danger to the security of religious dogmatists. Take, for instance, the work of George LaPiana: As an Italian exile and historical scholar whose investigations of early Christian associations in Rome undermined the accustomed Roman Catholic story of apostolic succession and episcopal authority, his work could be ignored during his lifetime by the triumphalist representatives of seemingly unquestioned dogma. An example is the work of LaPiana's American contemporary, Monsignor Joseph (“Butch”) Fenton, writing only a few years before the Second Vatican Council would vindicate the historical approach when it endorsed patristic theology as an inspiration for aggiornamento, the “updating” of Catholic thought.

Elizabeth A. Clark's immensely learned new book, The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, which follows directly on her examination of the nineteenth century in Founding the Fathers: Early Church History and Protestant Professors in Nineteenth-Century America, is a joy to read and from which to learn about the histories of our discipline, the history of Christianity. Chiefly, the book documents, through in-depth study of three fascinating figures, the severance of the field of “church history” from “theology” and, in particular, its pivotal moments within Protestant and Catholic “modernism.”

My thanks to Maria Doerfler for organizing a session at the January 2020 meeting of the American Society of Church History on my book The Fathers Refounded: Protestant Liberalism, Roman Catholic Modernism, and the Teaching of Ancient Christianity in Early Twentieth-Century America, to the editors of Church History for suggesting that the (revised) papers from the session could find a home in print, and, especially, to the panelists for their insightful comments.