bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Safety of supplementing infant formula with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids and Bifidobacterium lactis in term infants: a randomised controlled trial
Authors: Gibson Robert A. , Barclay Denis , Marshall Helen , Moulin Julie , Maire Jean-Claude , Makrides Maria
Published: January 2009

Probiotics and long-chain PUFA (LC-PUFA) may be beneficial supplements for infants who are not breast-fed. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the safety of an infant formula containing the LC-PUFA DHA and arachidonic acid (AA) and the probiotic Bifidobacterium lactis by comparing the growth rate of infants fed the supplemented and unsupplemented formulas. One hundred and forty-two healthy, term infants were enrolled in a single-centre, randomised, double-blind, controlled, parallel-group trial, and allocated to receive either standard or probiotic and LC-PUFA-containing experimental formulas. The infants were fed with their assigned formulas for 7 months. The primary outcome (weight gain) and the secondary outcomes (length, head circumference and formula tolerance) were measured throughout the study. LC-PUFA status was assessed at 4 months of age and immune response to childhood vaccines was measured at 7 months of age. There was no significant difference in growth between the two groups. The 90 % CI for the difference in mean weight gain was − 0·08, 3·1 g in the intention-to-treat population and 0·1–3·8 g in the per protocol population, which lay within the predefined boundaries of equivalence, − 3·9–3·9. There were no significant differences in mean length and head circumference. DHA and AA concentrations were higher in infants in the experimental formula group compared with the control formula group. No influence of the supplements on the response to vaccines was observed. Growth characteristics of term infants fed the starter formula containing a probiotic and LC-PUFA were similar to standard formula-fed infants.
Foxe's Martyrs
Authors: Bauer Walter E.
Published: January 2009

Obviously, the most valuable parts of Foxe's Acts and Monuments are the accounts which he gives of the disciplinary measures by means of which the ecclesiastical authorities of England endeavored to make good their claim to supreme jurisdiction over the faith and morals of their subjects, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII and that of Mary. Although Foxe repeatedly stated that he “professed no such title to write of martyrs,” it was as a history of ecclesiastical persecution primarily, that the work was hailed with delight by all factions of English Protestants. The public lost no time dubbing it “Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” the title by which it has ever since been popularly known. Those who had safely lived through the dreadful tempora Mariana, either as exiles abroad or as heretics at home, eagerly scanned its pages for some mention of relatives or acquaintances who had perished in the flames rekindled by Mary and her councillors. Many of its readers, not looking for it, were no doubt gratified as well as surprised to find their own names woven into the story of religious and patriotic heroism, a factor which contributed not a little to the enormous popularity of the work. It was not, then, for the history of the Waldenses or the Turks or the Husites that people turned to the Acts and Monuments, at least not primarily; their chief interest lay in Foxe's history of the English martyrs —Lollard, Henrician, and Marian.
Sources of Jefferson's Ecclesiastical Views
Authors: Mott Royden J.
Published: January 2009

Disestablishment of the church and religious liberty in Virginia were achievements of the democratic movement of the Revolutionary period, but they were not by any means mere by-products of American independence. It should be remembered that ecclesiastical home-rule had been the forerunner of complete political independence, and that after the famous “Parson's Case” of 1763 colonial autonomy in church affairs was assured. Independence, therefore, did not necessitate disestablishment. In spite of the acute opposition to the Establishment before 1775, due to the rapid spread of the Baptists throughout the state, it was maintained until 1779, its abolition was stubbornly resisted by conservative elements in Virginia, and full religious freedom did not become law until 1786. The solution of the relation of church and state consequently awaited the new order.
Lutheranism and The Reformed Faith on the Continent
Authors: Keller Adolf
Published: January 2009

It is a well known fact that the Lutheran Reformation has found entrance mostly into the nations of the Germanic race. The larger part of Germany and the northern countries around the Baltic Sea are Lutheran. Lutheranism has also gathered small groups in France, Holland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, but it is safe to say that there exists a certain affinity between the Lutheran faith and the Germanic race. The Reformed faith, in the form of Calvinism or of the Zwinglian Reformation, has a more international character. From its birthplaces in Zürich and Geneva it penetrated into France, Holland, Scotland, Hungary, Lithuania, and conquered even the House of Hohenzollern. The relationship between the two confessions, considered from a statistical point of view, has undergone but little change in the last few centuries. The most important alterations perhaps have taken place as a result of the union in the Church of Prussia and of the formation of the Czechoslovak Church of the Czech Brethren. The Reformed faith has been nearly extinguished in Russia where the larger parishes disappeared or were dissolved into Lutheran parishes. In Greece a young Presbyterian church is in the process of formation, and was considerably increased by the emigration of Greek refugees from Anatolia where the Southern Presbyterians had planted a hopeful missionary church.
Augustine of Hippo, Servus Servorum Christi
Authors: Beaver R. Pierce
Published: January 2009

The age of Saint Augustine was for the episcopate of the West a period of training for future duties. Before the end of the fifth century, in almost every community the real leader, both in temporal and spiritual matters, was the bishop. During the next two centuries there came into being the medieval prelate, a prince in the church and in the state; but the foundations of his ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction had already been laid by the early part of the fifth century. The African bishops shared with their colleagues of the other western provinces the same line of evolution, until it was interrupted, first by the Vandal invasion, and then by the Islamic conquest. However, by that time Augustine of Hippo, Alypius of Thagaste, the primate Aurelius of Carthage, and their fellow-bishops had made contributions of permanent value to the whole church, and they had created a noble standard of duty and conduct to be emulated by prelates of a later day.
The Apostolic Fathers' First Thousand Years
Authors: Grant Robert M.
Published: January 2009

The writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (a term used by the Monophysite Severus of Antioch in the sixth century) present us not only with a fascinating theological literature but also with some difficult problems in regard to its nature. Thomas Elborowe translated Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas and entitled his published work (London, 1668) “a prospect of the primitive Christianity, as it was left by Christ to his apostles, by the apostles to their disciples Saint Polycarp and Holy Ignatius, both contemporaries with and disciples to the Holy Evangelist and Apostle Saint John.” The neatness of this part of the prospect was somewhat marred by the inclusion of Barnabas. “His following epistle indeed,” Elborowe wrote, “may not prove so very acceptable to some, in regard of his strange explications of scripture, which are not after the modern and more refined mode. But it is to be noted that, when he wrote, Christianity was but in the cradle, and scarce advanced into her morning dress.” Nearly three hundred years later Mgr. G. Jouassard, writing in the Mélanges de science religieuse (1957), was facing problems not unlike those stated or implied by Elborowe. What is the value of the Apostolic Fathers? What kind of authority do they have? Are they any more valuable than such a document as the Epistle of the Apostles? They are hard to classify as literature and they come from a long period of time. Both “apostolic” and “fathers” are words which ascribe more importance to them than they really deserve.
Calvin as an Ecumenical Churchman
Authors: McNeill John T.
Published: January 2009

Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

We may begin here, though it is where Calvin's work ended. His friendships, labors, struggles, and studies had as their aim to be “useful to the Church of God.” It was in Geneva that they had been fellow-laborers, but it is not merely to the Church of Geneva that he thinks their labor to have been useful. It was a contribution to a far wider community, the Church of God, that has no boundaries narrower than the communion of believers, the divine society extending over all the world and throughout all the ages of mankind's history. The Holy Catholic Church was for him a universal reality, however hidden from men's eyes through the prevailing abuses and the proud assumptions of those who claimed to rule and speak for the Church.
The Weber Thesis Reexamined
Authors: Hudson Winthrop S.
Published: January 2009

For more than fifty years the Weber thesis, which attributed to Calvinism a decisive influence in the development of modern capitalism, has been vigorously debated. In his celebrated essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Calvinism (1904), Max Weber had suggested that Calvinism contributed to the rise of capitalism in various ways—by relaxing the restraints which hitherto had largely served to impede its growth; by fostering the economic virtues of diligence, frugality, honesty, prudence, and sobriety; and, most of all, by providing a psychological fillip to the development of the “spirit” of capitalism, “the temper of single-minded concentration upon pecuniary gain.” The controversy precipitated by the publication of Weber's essay engendered considerable heat that often served to obscure the points at issue, but over the years the continuing discussion has served to remove many of the issues from the area of debate and to narrow the focus of the central issue that remains.
From Coercion to Persuasion: Another Look at the Rise of Religious Liberty and the Emergence of Denominationalism
Authors: Mead Sidney E.
Published: January 2009

So far as religious affairs are concerned, the colonial period of our history begins with the planting of the first permanent English colony in 1607, guided by the intention to perpetuate in the new land the religious patterns to which the mother country had grown accustomed. Chief of these for our purposes was uniformity enforced by the civil power. The period culminates just 180 years later with the complete rejection of this central intention in the provisions for national religious freedom in the Constitution (1787) and First Amendment (1791).
The Origins of Clerical Celibacy in the Western Church
Authors: Frazee Charles A.
Published: January 2009

In the present discussion within the Roman Catholic Church over the requirement of clerical celibacy, the arguments generally center on the ascetical value of the practice. Pope Paul VI speaks of celibacy as a “precious jewel” leading to a life of selflessness for the man who seeks to follow Jesus Christ in the priesthood. When priests themselves talk about the subject, it is often in terms of its symbolic value as a total commitment to the service of the Lord. It is further seen as a practical measure, following Saint Paul's view that the unmarried state frees the ordained minister from the cares of personal family life so that he may devote himself entirely to the concerns of the whole Christian community.
The Problem of the History of Religion in America
Authors: Ahlstrom Sydney E.
Published: January 2009

Half a year before this paper was read before a plenary session of the American Academy of Religion (26 October 1969), the program committee had requested an essay dealing in some comprehensive way with the field of American religious history. Because I would in any case have to be thinking about the introduction to my own “religious history of the American people,” I agreed. The title was sufficiently broad; and goodness knows the problems of this subject area are sufficiently large. Aside from innumerable large and small questions of fact there are the countless questions of emphasis and interpretation, not to mention the problem of discerning an overarching theme. I also confess great sympathy with Max Lerner's comment on the ten years he spent onAmerica as a Civilization(1957). “I found when I came to the end of the decade,” he said, “that a number of things I had written about America were no longer valid. The American civilization had been changing drastically right under my fingertips as I was writing about it.” The present-day historian's predicament is, if anything, more difficult than Lerner's in that the sixties, by contrast with the fifties, have experienced a veritable earthquake of revisionism which has profoundly altered our interpretation of the entire course of American history. By reason of its screaming moral dilemmas, moreover, the decade had an especially rude impact on long accepted views of religious history. But enough of this: let us consider the substantive questions.
Totalitarianism: Introduction
Authors: Dietrich Donald J.
Published: January 2009

Our understanding of the types and meaningful levels of resistance to Hitler's rule has broadened as more complex and reflective studies have unremittingly exposed the political, social, and cultural dynamics supporting the Holocaust and its significance for our culture. Analyses of how and why the Holocaust erupted in Nazi-controlled Europe have elicited studies on the tools and methods of terror in the Third Reich. The works of both Eric Johnson and Robert Gellately, for example, have helped crystallize our understanding of the phenomenon that individual Germans living out their hopes, fears, and, frequently, petty jealousies made operant the ideological and physical terror that empowered the Nazi oppression. The Gestapo and courts, of course, formally carried out the brutalization of society, but they were assisted by countless Germans in fulfilling the Nazi agenda.
Heretics and Jews in the Writings of Ademar of Chabannes and the Origins of Medieval Anti-Semitism
Authors: Frassetto Michael
Published: January 2009

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.
Monasteries without Walls: Secret Monasticism in the Soviet Union, 1928–39.
Authors: Wynot Jennifer
Published: January 2009

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.
Reflections on Regionalism and U.S. Religious History
Authors: Carroll Bret E.
Published: January 2009

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.
The Shift from Church and State to Religions as Public Life in Modern Europe
Authors: McIntire C. T.
Published: January 2009

The theme of church and state in modern Europe lay well-situated within the positivist genre of historical study, which served as the dominant model in the profession for generations and in some sense still does. The keystone of the positivist edifice was the commitment to the universality of reason and the efficacy of reason in achieving definitive histories written by professional historians. The functioning of rationality in historical study was exemplified in the stream of history books about male elite subjects—politics, war, diplomacy, the institutions of the state and the church, and the ideas of canonical thinkers—which flowed from the pens of male European and North American academic historians since the late nineteenth century.
“The Abominable Crime of Onan”: Catholic Pastoral Practice and Family Limitation in the United States, 1875–1919
Authors: Tentler Leslie Woodcock
Published: January 2009

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.
Who Needs Enemies? Jews and Judaism in Anti-Nazi Religious Discourse
Authors: Haynes Stephen R.
Published: January 2009

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,
Does American Religion Have a Center?
Authors: Porterfield Amanda
Published: January 2009

Undoubtedly, there are many centers to American religion—many topoi around which the wide-ranging multitude of historical developments associated with American religion might be seen to coalesce. Among the several that spring to mind—commitment to family, gender negotiation, concern for religious experience, freedom, conscience, millennial eschatology, respect for the Bible, social reform, desire for salvation (and there must be numerous others beyond my ken)—I see the myth of the Puritans as a good candidate for premier topos. In recommending it as a central category for organizing multiple forms and dimensions of American religion, I do not mean to draw attention to the Puritans in the exactitude of their historical existence, but rather to the myth of the Puritans as religious founders.
American Religious History—Decentered with Many Centers
Authors: Stein Stephen J.
Published: January 2009

This panel poses the question, “Is there acenterto American religious history?” We historians live in a world and work in a period when the politically correct answer to the question is, “Of course not!” In this day of decentered religious historiography the celebration of radical diversity seems to prohibit any other response. In our publications and teaching we set out to expose readers and students to the rich religious pluralism in America. We catalogue the traditions that reach back to colonial times, the communities that filled out the wider spectrum of religious options during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, and the new religious movements that have appeared since the midpoint of the past century. One publication that provides a contemporary index to this inclusive catalogical approach is J. Gordon Mellon'sEncyclopedia of American Religions, which in its fifth edition filled 1,150 pages with data regarding more than 2,100 discrete religious organizations in America, from the Aaronic Order to the Zoroastrian Associations in North America.
Is There a Center to American Religious History?
Authors: Trollinger William Vance
Published: January 2009

Over the past few years I have been dealing with a narrow version of this question, as it has applied to the history of Protestantism in the twentieth century. In our book,Re-Forming the Center: American Protestantism, 1900 to the Present, Douglas Jacobsen and I argued that the two-party model of Protestantism in the United States—conservative vs. liberal, fundamentalist vs. modernist, and so on—does not take into account the remarkable complexity and diversity of the Protestant religious experience in America, and in some sense presents distorted picture of that reality. There were scholars—including Martin Marty, who generously contributed a dissenting essay to our volume—who felt that we had overstated our brief against the two-party paradigm. More relevant for our purposes this evening, there were a number of reviewers who agreed with our critique of the two-party paradigm, but who also expressed disappointment that we provided only the barest outlines of a new or better metaphor or model to explain twentieth-century American Protestantism. While I had not gone into this project thinking that we would end the day with a new interpretive paradigm, I certainly was not surprised by this critique. The very first time I gave a paper on some of our preliminary findings, there was a scholar of U.S. religious history in the audience who squirmed throughout the entirety of my remarks; when I finished, before I had the chance to ask for questions, she blurted out: “I find your argument pretty convincing, but if you can't give me a new model to replace the old one, how am I supposed to teach my course on the history of American Protestantism?” Well, we broaden the topic from Protestantism in the United States to religion in the United States, it would seem that, in many ways, this is the issue we are addressing this evening.
“Does American Religious History Have a Center?” Reflections
Authors: Williams Peter W.
Published: January 2009

The three essays presented in this session raise issues that remind me of two classic representations of the problem of interpretation. In the Japanese film Rashomon, four differing and incompatible accounts of the same event are presented by the central characters, leaving the viewer to wonder which, if any, is the “true” version. Similarly, in the “Doubloon” chapter of Melville's Moby Dick, Captain Ahab nails a Spanish gold coin to the mast as a potential reward for the first man to spot the white whale; subsequently, each member of the crew gazes at the doubloon and falls into his own unique chain of associations that it evokes. Each of these fictional situations evokes the dilemma of the historian in general and the religious historian in particular: how can I deliver an accurate, persuasive, and satisfying account of my material, given the inevitable differences in perception and value that separate me not only from my professional peers but from the vast numbers of individuals and groups whose account might well be different from mine? As Stephen Stein indicates, the dilemma is not purely “academic,” since our students expect a coherent narrative from us, and will inevitably go away frustrated if we simply give them fragments that seem to form no discernible whole.
Historical and Systematic Theology in the Mirror of Church History: The Lessons of “Ordination” in Sixteenth-Century Saxony
Authors: Kittelson James M.
Published: January 2009

Leopold von Ranke is probably best known for his dictum that written history must mirror the pastwie 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 historymanquéthat would benefit from combining the methods, presuppositions, and findings of the two approaches.
Without Comment or Controversy: The G.I. Bill and Catholic Colleges
Authors: Edmondson Elizabeth A.
Published: January 2009

In a 1999 speech at the Yale Law School, former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed was asked to explain how school vouchers could be constitutional. The questioner argued that voucher programs that allowed government money to be used at religious schools would violate the constitutional separation of church and state. In reply, Reed argued, in part, that the voucher system was really nothing new. He failed to see the difference, he said, between the program he was advocating and an earlier program under which the federal government had paid for hundreds of thousands of individuals to go to religious schools. That program, he said, was the G.I. Bill.
Post-secularism Marginalizes the University: A Rejoinder to Hollinger
Authors: Sommerville C. John
Published: January 2009

Like David Hollinger I think that the history of secularization, or as he prefers, de-Christianization, has been unduly avoided and might well be at the center of contemporary American historiography. As he says, this ought to bring religious history more into the mainstream. But I would like to develop some of his points in a different way than he does in the recent “Perspectives” section inChurch History. Our differences derive from the fact that he sees secularization as a default value, the absence of a distraction, whereas I focus on secularism, something substantial and ideological. I hope that adopting that perspective may make sense of his main puzzle, which is why religion “persists” in America even though it has lost all the recent debates. Indeed I would like to turn his question around, to suggest that secularism is failing and that we should start thinking in terms of a “post-secular” society. This could mean, contrary to Hollinger's implication, that America is not lagging in this area but might be “ahead” of Europe.
Why Is There So Much Christianity in the United States? A Reply to Sommerville
Authors: Hollinger David A.
Published: January 2009

If we are going to explain the slow pace of de-Christianization for the United States relative to other industrialized societies in the North Atlantic West, we might well begin with the church-state relationship. The absence of an established church in the United States has enabled religious affiliation to function, like other voluntary organizations in “civil society,” as mediators between the individual and the nation. I conimented on this rather old idea in a book C. John Sommerville is kind enough to cite in another connection,Science, Jews, and Secular Culture, but since he does not take up this point, I will develop it a bit further here, before reacting to Sommerville's other concerns as expressed in his refreshingly fair-minded rejoinder to my essay in the March 2001 issue ofChurch History.
Historical Fact and Exegetical Fiction in the CarolingianVita S. Sualonis
Authors: Coon Lynda L.
Published: January 2009

The nineteenth-century editor of Ermenrich of Ellwangen's (ca. 814–74)Vita Sualonis, Oswald Holder-Egger, dismissed the Carolingian hagiographer's sermon on the Anglo-Saxon hermit Sualo as historically unimportant because of its heavy reliance on oral traditions, its turgid prose style, and its clumsy Latin grammar. Holder-Egger found fault with the “ahistoricism” of Ermenrich'sVita—a scholarly stance no doubt influenced by the historicism of his day that privileged “the basic story as the primary object or goal of research.” For the late-nineteenth century, the recovery and reconstruction of an original source (an archetype or Urtext) from which all other derivative and secondary versions sprang was the ultimate task of historical inquiry. Such an Urtext, once unearthed, would then present the true, uncontaminated story of what had happened in the past, and the historian who successfully excavated an Urtype would assume the role of truth teller.
Masculinity, Reform, and Clerical Culture: Narratives of Episcopal Holiness in the Gregorian Era
Authors: Miller Maureen C.
Published: January 2009

Historical narrations of the Gregorian Reform tend to cultivate a certainmachismo. The traditional narrative emphasizes a struggle for dominance between two men, Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV, which escalated from epistolary sparring to armed combat and culminated in a dramatic scene in which one man was on his knees before the other at Canossa. Even the newer narratives, such as the late Karl Leyser's “Gregorian Revolution,” while highlighting broad social and religious transformations attendant upon the movement, still privilege a revolutionary cadre, a handful of reformers (all male, of course) gathered around Gregory VII, who artfully channeled the discontents of the masses into a permanent reordering of western society.
The Communication of Friendship: Gasparo Contarini's Letters to Hermits at Camaldoli
Authors: Furey Constance
Published: January 2009

The modern idea that to converse means to talk, to exchange ideas with another person, emerged between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Before that time, and throughout the Middle Ages,conversatiowas a state of being or a way of life. To converse was to commune with God or other people, particularly in the context of religious communities. John Bossy says that this definitional shift from conduct to dialogue is one indication of how Christianity changed from a medieval system that promoted communal solidarity into a modern religion that emphasized morality and civility. John O'Malley similarly underscores the importance of the new meaning of conversation by pointing out that one of the Jesuit innovations was to make conversation a “ministry of the word” practiced in and through confession and spiritual exercises. But how did contemporaries experience the transformation of conversation from “togetherness” to “dialogue”? Apart from the Jesuit practices, do we have any way of discerning whether sixteenth-century Christians experienced conversation as a religious praxis?
Karlstadt'sChristag Predig:Prophetic Rhetoric in an “Evangelical” Mass
Authors: Leroux Neil R.
Published: January 2009

Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1486–1541), one of the most prolific authors of the Reformation, is one of the most difficult for historians to classify. He produced about ninety published writings, which were printed in about 213 editions. “Among evangelical authors during the years 1518–1525, Karlstadt, after Martin Luther (1483–1546), published the largest number of works in German; and, after Luther's, his works had the second-largest number of editions.” Indeed, on these grounds “it is a safe assumption that Karlstadt's activities as a publicist had a major impact.” Yet during several years of his career, his writings had to be printed and read secretly. He even gave up his academic responsibilities for a time. However, his battles against images and, later, against Luther's doctrine of the Lord's Supper, both influenced the whole course of the Reformation in Germany and beyond.
“Between the Refrigerator and the Wildfire”: Aimee Semple McPherson, Pentecostalism, and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy
Authors: Sutton Matthew A.
Published: January 2009

Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the way-ward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?
Introduction
Authors: Wacker Grant
Published: January 2009

From the early nineteenth century through the middle twentieth century, foreign and domestic missionaries ranked among the most conspicuous figures of American religious history. In many quarters they still do. “Don't apologize,” one academic quipped at a conference in India. “All Americans are missionaries.”
“Friends to Your Souls”: Jonathan Edwards' Indian Pastorate and the Doctrine of Original Sin
Authors: Wheeler Rachel
Published: January 2009

In the summer of 1756, Jonathan Edwards preached a simple yet extraordinary sermon to his Indian congregation at Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he had served as missionary for five years. He counseled his listeners that God “advises us to be friends to our own souls” by seeking after holiness. Edwards encouraged his Indian congregants to take tender care of their souls, to “forsake wickedness and seek after Holiness” and not to “act the part of Enemies of Enemies [sic] to your soul.“ This sermon could scarcely have been more different from one delivered to a gathering of the town's English children just a month earlier, in which Edwards railed at them that he would “rather go into Sodom and preach to the men of Sodom than preach to you and should have a great deal more hopes of success.” In this same sermon, Edwards demanded, “should I now think it worthy of my while to preach to you … were it not that I knew that God is almighty and he can make the word pierce your hearts tho' it be harder than a rock?”
“Is It Worse to Follow Mahomet than the Devil?” Early American Uses of Islam
Authors: Kidd Thomas S.
Published: January 2009

In the last public act before his death, Benjamin Franklin parodied a proslavery speech in Congress by comparing it to a fictitious proslavery address “anno 1687” by a North African Muslim, a pirate named Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. Like proslavery southerners, the Algerian argued that he could not countenance the end of Christian slavery because it would hurt the interests of the Algerian state, there would be no way to compensate the Muslim slave masters, and nothing could safely be done with the freed slaves. Franklin's salvo against slavery was published in 1790 in major northern newspapers. His use of Muslims and Islamic images is one of the most famous in eighteenth-century America, but not unique. Islamic references pepper the public documents of early America, demonstrating that many were not only aware of the religion but also ready to use it as a rhetorical tool of argument. A close look at the uses of Islam in Anglo-American writing before 1800 shows that Franklin's use of the proslavery argument was another version of a well-established tradition: citing the similarities between an opponent's views and the “beliefs” of Islam as a means to discredit one's adversaries. Over the course of the eighteenth century, rhetorical uses of Islam became increasingly secularized. Early in the century, Islam was typically used for religious purposes in religious debates while later commentators often took knowledge “derived” from observations of despotic Islamic states to support political points. Although one should hesitate to describe early Americans as conversant with Islam, they certainly conversed about Islam regularly.
The New Divinity and the Origins of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
Authors: Kling David W.
Published: January 2009

The theological influence of the New Divinity in the formation and character of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) is uncontested among scholars of American religious history and missions. Since the mid nineteenth century, both partisans of missions and nearly all scholarly observers have attributed the origins of the modern American Protestant missionary spirit to the writings of Jonathan Edwards and his self-appointed heirs, those Congregational ministers who came to be called New Divinity men. Edwards proposed a theology of cosmic redemption and supplied the exemplary missionary model inLife of Brainerd(1749), his most popular and most frequently reprinted work. Samuel Hopkins then furnished a theological rationale for missions by revising Edwards' aesthetic concept of “disinterested benevolence” into a practical one of self-denial for the greater glory of God's kingdom and the betterment of humankind.
Pearl S. Buck and the Waning of the Missionary Impulse
Authors: Wacker Grant
Published: January 2009

Figuring out exactly when the American missionary impulse started to wane is not an easy task. Some would say that the first nail in the coffin was Hannah Adams's 1784Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects, purportedly an “impartial and comprehensive survey” of world religions. Others, looking at the millions of dollars that evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics continued to pour into the missionary effort at the end of the twentieth century, might well ask, incredulously, “What coffin?”
On Teaching the History of Christianity: Traditions and Presuppositions
Authors: Holifield E. Brooks
Published: January 2009

In his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1920, Robert Hastings Nichols observed that he had discovered, in his reading of previous addresses, “no mention of the reading of a paper dealing with what is the occupation of almost half of our members, the teaching of Church History,” or, as he preferred to call it, the teaching of “Christianity in History.” He decided, therefore, to talk about pedagogy. He devoted most of his address to answering the question why history should be taught in the theological seminary, arguing that it trained students to weigh evidence, calculate motives, trace causes, and estimate the power of social movements. It nurtured a certain kind of intellectual and moral capacity.
Defacement: Practical Theology, Politics, or Prejudice: The Case of the North Portal of Bourges
Authors: Jennings Margaret , Kilcoyne Francis P.
Published: January 2009

The Cathedral of St. Étienne at Bourges, which Ribault justly styles “un chef d'oeuvre gothique” (a Gothic masterpiece), did not escape the Huguenot depredations of 1562. Especially vulnerable to the pikes and pry-bars of the Reformers were the choir screen in front of the main altar, the north and south doorways commemorating respectively Mary in Majesty and Christ in Majesty, and several areas of the West facade: the jamb statues (whose subjects are currently unknown), the spandrel sculptures under the dado that celebrated events of the Christian scriptures and of the book of Genesis, and the five extensively carved tympana dedicated from right to left as one faces them:
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the “Judeo-centric” Strand of Puritan Millenarianism
Authors: Cogley Richard W.
Published: January 2009

For the American Puritan minister Increase Mather, the battle of Armageddon would be “the most terrible day of battel that ever was.” “Asia is like to be in a flame of war between Israelites and Turks,” he wrote inThe Mystery of Israel's Salvation, “[and] Europe between the followers of the Lamb and the followers of the beast.” In the Asian and European spheres of action, or so Mather anticipated, God's Israelite and Protestant armies would “overthrow great Kingdoms, and make Nations desolate, and bring defenced Cities into ruinous heaps.” The inevitable victory would reshape the course of history, for the destruction of Roman Catholic and Ottoman power would be accompanied by the conversion of the Jews and the lost tribes of Israel to Christianity and by their restoration to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Then would come the birth of the millennium in Jerusalem and the subsequent spread of the kingdom of Jesus Christ throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world.
“A Great Religious Octopus”: Church and State at Virginia's Constitutional Convention, 1901–1902
Authors: Buckley Thomas E.
Published: January 2009

A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage “a great crime against civilization and Christianity.” At the age of seventy-two, Goode was the grand old man of the convention. A graduate of the University of Virginia and life-long Democrat, he had served in the state legislature, the Secession Convention of 1861, the Confederate legislature, and the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment as Solicitor General of the United States in 1885. Goode reflected the mentality of the vast majority of convention delegates when he stated that African Americans were incapable of education or citizenship. “The omniscient Ruler of the Universe … made [them] inferior,” he proclaimed, and sometime in the future, when the North knew better, the Fifteenth Amendment would be repealed.
“In My Extremity I Turned to Gandhi”: American Pacifists, Christianity, and Gandhian Nonviolence, 1915–1941
Authors: Danielson Leilah C.
Published: January 2009

American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.
Trinitarian Love Mysticism: Ruusbroec, Hadewijch, and the Gendered Experience of the Divine
Authors: Boon Jessica A.
Published: January 2009

In the early part of the fourteenth century, a parish priest in Brussels came into the possession of a manuscript containing the vernacular letters, visions, and poetry of a woman known only as “beata Hadewijch.” The priest prized the manuscript, even recommending it to his fellow conventuals decades later, and included its primary tropes of courtly love mysticism (Minnemystik) as an essential part of many of his writings on the active, interior, and contemplative ways to mystical union. This local priest turned canon regular, Jan van Ruusbroec (1292–1381), has been celebrated for centuries for his Trinitarian theology, for his speculative or essence mysticism, and for his negative theology—but Ruusbroec's reliance on Hadewijch's metaphor of courtly love has only recently become a subject of scholarly study. An examination of the parallels between Hadewijch and Ruusbroec's theology, a heavily Trinitarian theology conveyed by means of the metaphor ofMinne, not only serves to expand our comprehension of their theologies, but also provides a unique perspective on the religious experience of medieval men and women.
Melanchthonian Method as a Guide to Reading Confessions of Faith: The Index of the Book of Concord and Late Reformation Learning
Authors: Kolb Robert
Published: January 2009

Horst Kunze, the contemporary German authority on indexing, writes, “An index is not a tool that has its own independent existence. It is an aid for the use of another literary object. It is like a signpost. Like a signpost it has no other purpose than to point the way in certain directions.” Indices seldom attract scholarly investigation. Casual users accept the index as a more or less objective guide to the contents of a book. However, the index prepared in 1580 for the initial publication of the Book of Concord, appearing in several of its first printings, was designed to point in specific directions, to cultivate a particular way for its primary audience to read the volume and put it to use. It took the form of loci communes—topics—as they had been developed a generation earlier by Martin Luther's Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon for the proper, fruitful, study of theology. By selecting the doctrinal topics and categories into which pastors and teachers were to organize the content of this volume for their own use, this index offers one of the first theological commentaries on the Book of Concord. The index also reveals how Melanchthon's theological method continued to dominate the way the heirs of the Wittenberg Reformation thought—in spite of the fact that it directs readers away from and against the theology of some of Melanchthon's followers whom scholars have dubbed with his name, “Philippists.” (In fact, some contemporaries objected to the Book because they believed it to be anti-Melanchthonian.)
Was There a Reformation in the Sixteenth Century?
Authors: Hillerbrand Hans J.
Published: January 2009

Reflections on historiographical developments in the history of Christianity tend to be a rather dry matter. Though dry, however, such reflections are important, since historiographical emphases not only tell us where scholarship has been in the past, but also—since we are directed to look at thelonge durée—why we are where we are. Historians tend to be, alas, a herd of independent minds, and there are vogues in scholarship no less than there are in haute couture. A generation ago, few historians used such terms as “discourse,” “construction,” “close reading,” “intertextuality” even as monographs—even splendid monographs—on a burgomaster's daughter would have issued only from the pen of a secondary school teacher in Germany.