In the fourth and early fifth centuries Christians laid claim to the land of Palestine. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the investment of the land of Palestine and its places with Christian historical and cultural meanings, and to trace its remapping as the “holy land.” This map was not a figurative representation of geographical and cultural features; as with all maps, it was an idea. The Christian “holy land” is also an idea, one which did not exist at the beginning of the fourth century, but which, by the mid-fifth century, was a place constructed of a rich texture of places, beliefs, actions, and texts, based in the notion that the landscape provided evidence of biblical truths. When Constantine became a Christian, there was no “holy land”; however, over the succeeding one hundred and thirty years Christians marked and identified many of their holy places in Palestine. The map-makers in this transformation were emperors, bishops, monastics, holy women, and pilgrims who claimed the holy places for Christianity, constructing the land as topographically Christian and mediating this view of their world through their pilgrim paths, buildings, liturgies, and texts. The idea of mapping is used here as an aid to understanding the formation of cultural viewpoints and the validation of ideas and actions that informed the construction of the “holy land.”

In 1320, Pope John XXII launched a doctrinal enterprise of some import: the assimilation of practices of black magic into the crime of heresy. As was his custom, John sought the opinion of experts before taking a final decision that would entail, among other consequences, extending the jurisdiction of the inquisition to cover cases of black magic. In his recent study on medieval demonology, Alain Boureau has suggested that the question that truly concerned the pope was not witchcraft or ritual magic per se, but the role of the devil in these practices. Boureau based his thesis on a wide-ranging theory of late medieval representations of individual subjectivity and society, on the principle of “pact” or covenant between two free-willing parties. Away from old, static forms of social hierarchization, the fourteenth century favors a contractual structure that places the emphasis on the voluntary nature of the relation between individuals in society and between humans and God. Boureau develops his argument on the basis of the response offered by one of the members of the 1320 commission, the Franciscan Enrico del Carretto. Bishop of Lucca, Enrico had been among the experts in charge of judging the orthodoxy of the Franciscan Spirituals in 1318, and had also participated in the discussion towards the preparation of the bull Cum inter nonnullos. We are thus in the presence of one of John XXII's curial cohort. Boureau accords particular value to Enrico's response because he is the only member of the commission who seems to draw attention to the real efficacity of demonic causality in black magic, thus offering the first explicit evidence of the tournant demonologique taking place in the medieval Church between the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.

In 1345 a manuscript accompanied by a letter arrived at the Dominican convent of Maria Medingen in southern Germany. The sender, a secular priest named Heinrich of Nördlingen, and the primary recipient, the Dominican visionary nun Margaret Ebner, had already enjoyed an extended correspondence, interspersed with a few intense face-to-face visits in the convent. Because the manuscript arriving that day was a thirteenth-century woman's mystical treatise (the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Godhead), and because Margaret and her sisters in the convent Maria Medingen used this woman's text in what could initially seem peculiar and dynamic ways, this manuscript and these letters can tell us much about the authority and performance of women's mysticism in medieval religion. Mechthild's and Heinrich's texts serve as key examples, which reveal how women's mystical texts were authoritative in the history of Christianity. Namely, medieval audiences assessed mystical authority on the basis of the text's ability to produce the experience in them, and mystical texts required proper performance in order to unleash their generative power.

“The Catholic Worker movement is evolving in ways its founders didn't anticipate,” declared a recent article in the National Catholic Reporter, explaining that the movement has evolved from a community of single people to a network that includes many family-centered houses of hospitality. Such media perceptions are widely shared by Catholic Worker families. “In 1933,” explained Julia Occhiogrosso of the Las Vegas Catholic Worker, “Dorothy [Day] didn't give us models for families who want to minister to the poor, Catholic Worker style.” These claims demand a more sustained historical analysis. Just how new are Catholic Worker families? What historical factors contributed to their emergence? Who did create the models for the dozens of families that today are feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoners, and bending swords into plowshares?

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a fundamental shift in the character of the Christian religion—namely, a massive expansion and shift of its center of gravity southward. During this period, Christianity experienced a transformation from a predominantly Western religion to a world religion largely defined by non-Western adherents in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. From 1970 to 2005, the size of the Southern Church increased two and a half times to over 1.25 billion members. By the early twenty-first century, 60 percent of all professing Christians lived in the global South and East. The most dynamic source of church growth during this period was Independent (evangelical or Pentecostal) Protestant groups, which increased at nearly twice the rate of other Christian affiliations. The spread of evangelical Protestantism represents a truly global phenomenon and has included large populations in East and Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas.