Toward the end of the third century Bishop Narcissus of Jerusalem retired to the desert to escape the burdens and intrigues of the episcopate and devote himself to the “philosophic life.” By the sixth century we find much more often the reverse phenomenon—monks, with alleged unwillingness, abandoning the peace and solitude of the desert to engage in active episcopal careers. The intervening period saw the phenomenal spread of the monastic movement and its gradual assimilation by the hierarchy of the church. Monasteries contained rising numbers of ordainedpriests and deacons, and bishops were increasingly chosen from the ranks of monks. This process accelerated in the Christian East to such an extent that from the sixth century on monasteries are said to have served as virtual “seminaries for bishops.”

On 7 May 1437, in a ritual both sad and absurd, the Council of Basel broke apart in discord and disorder. Two factions in the cathedral session that morning, each “simultaneously reading its decree, shouting its Placet and singing its Te Deum,” divided the house on the issue of selecting a site for unification talks with the Church of Constantinople. The council that claimed the authority to rule Christianity in concordantia catholica (in universal harmony), the council that proclaimed its primacy over the pope, demonstrated its incapacity to put its claims into practice. Nicholas of Cusa, a prominent figure in the conciliarists' camp and author of the 1433 treatise Concordantia catholica, the declaration by which the council intended to reassert its supremacy over the papacy, was on the side of the minority that morning. On this occasion the learned conciliarist found himself in the unusual position of supporting Pope Eugenius IV. What had caused his change of mind, or heart, or, at least, position? Had Cusa indeed changed, or beneath this apparent conversion was he constant in his convictions?

In Saducismus Triumphatus: Or, Full and Plain Evidence Concerning Witches and Apparitions (1681), Joseph Glanvill marveled at those so possessed by the devil that they became his mouthpiece: “For Ventriloquy, or speaking from the bottom of the Belly, 'tis a thing I think as strange and difficult to be conceived as any thing in Witchcraft, nor can it, I believe, be performed in any distinctness of articulate sounds, without such assistance of the Spirits, that spoke out of the Daemoniacks.” By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ventriloquism, loosened from the confines of theological debates over demonology, had become a salient category in rationalistic discussions of religion and had taken center stage as a form of enlightened entertainment. This expanded construction of ventriloquy provided a tangible way of thinking about revealed religion as rooted in illusion—that, indeed, various wonders of the devout ear such as divine calls, the voices of demonic possession, prophecy, mystical locutions, oracles, and even the sounds of shamanic spirits had their origins in vocal deceptions that empiricists could pinpoint and magicians could demonstrate. The new ventriloquism, in its sober appraisal of all sectarian enthusiasm and religious credulity, made suspect the very claim that God could speak to or through the human. In performative practice, the ventriloquist's art shifted the focus of learned attention from the divine struggle over the soul to the protean malleability of personal identity, the fears and attractions of imposture, and the sheer pleasures of amusement.

One of the most distinguishing marks of the American South is that religion is more important for the people who live there than for their fellow citizens in the restof the country. When this trait began to identify the region is surprisingly unclear, but it has begun to attract attention from scholars of religion and society who have hitherto been esteemed as students primarily of areas outside the South. The study of religion in Dixie cannot but benefit from this change. After centuries of obsession with thickly settled, college-proud, and printexpressive New England—an area not noted for excessive modesty in thinking about its place in the New World—students of American religion are turning to a region whose history has sustained a selfconsciousness that makes its place in American religious history unique. For studying the American South begins with a dilemma born of ambiguity: whether to treat it as a place or an idea. Sometimes, to be sure, the South appears to be both; but sometimes it is “place” presented as an idea; and sometimes it is a place whose historical experience should have, according to reflective writers, taught Americans historical and moral lessons they have failed to learn. Confusion results in part from the South's contested history not only between the region and the rest of the United States but also among various competing groups within its permeable and frequently indistinct borders. Differences between region and nation will, however, continue to dominate conversation even though the myth of southern distinctiveness may mislead students as much as the myth of its evangelical homogeneity. If inquiry about religion in the South should be sensitive to the many faith communities there, the history of the South will still by contrast provide insight into the broader “American” society.

From a historian's point of view, the Catholic diocesan clergy in the United States look rather like forgotten men. As a group, they have never figured prominently in the scholarly literature. American Catholic history may have had an emphatically clerical bias as late as the 1950s, but the focus then was mainly on the chancery. The parish clergy were almost as neglected as the famously docile laity. The laity have moved in recent years to the forefront of Catholic historical consciousness, and won for themselves a less docile image in the process. But priests have not enjoyed equivalent attention—indeed, in the eyes of at least some practitioners, priests are today mildly suspect as subjects of research. We do not, after all, want a return to the bad old days of “clerical” history. The predictable consequence is a major hole in our church-historical knowledge. Despite the new vitality in American Catholic historical scholarship, we know very little about the history of diocesan priests in the United States—who they were, how they lived and worked, what they thought about their ministry or the people they served.