Only a few months after Calvin's death, August 1564 to be precise, Theodore Beza composed a preface for the posthumous French edition of Calvin's commentary on the book of Joshua: it took the form of a brief biography of the reformer. Describing the death of Calvin, Beza recalled the sadness that invaded Geneva on the announcement of the death of the prophet of God: “The following night, and the day after as well, there was much weeping in the city. For the body of the city mourned the prophet of the Lord, the poor flock of the Church wept the departure of its faithful shepherd, the school lamented the loss of its true doctor and master, and all in general wept for their true father and consoler, after God.”

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.”

History, Hayden White remarks, has no distinctively historical method, but borrows its models and methods from a variety of other disciplines. These disciplines, however, have varied over time. Latenineteenth-century German historiography looked to the rigorous procedures of the natural sciences to reconstruct the past “as it actually happened“; mid-twentieth-century historians turned to the social sciences, especially to anthropology and sociology, for their models and methods. More recently, historians' appropriation of (and experimentation with) concepts derived from literary and critical theory has occasioned much heated discussion within the field.

Our knowledge of Melanchthon's thought on the role of godly magistrates in the church is surprisingly incomplete, despite the generally acknowledged importance of that thought. Most Reformation scholars are familiar with Melanchthon's argument that the Christian magistrate is, as custodian of both tables of the Law and as foremost member of the church, the incumbent of an office established for the sake of the church and thus burdened with responsibility for the establishment and maintenance of true religion. Most know too that this argument became the standard Lutheran justification for what is called the cura religionis of the magistrate. Few, however, are aware that it took Melanchthon a good decade to arrive at that doctrine, that he spent a further decade or so refining and developing it, and that during all that time there was an intimate connection between the content of his thought and the course of public events. The reason for this gap in our knowledge is that the history of the development of Melanchthon's thought on the religious duties of secular rulers has not yet been written.

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon (1648–1717) has been best known for her role in the Quietist controversy of late-seventeenthcentury France, leading to the public debate that pitted her defender, Fenelon, against Bossuet. Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV, also became an opponent, adding her influence to that of Bossuet, so that Madame Guyon was imprisoned in the Bastille from 1698 to 1703.

Ernst Troeltsch is known to church historians largely for his classic threefold distinction of church, sect, and mysticism. In The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch describes the church as an institution enmeshed with society and making accommodations to the world's imperfections; the sects, driven by a quest for purity, refuse to make accommodations or compromises, while the mystics stand aside from this conflict and concern themselves with “a purely personal and inward experience” in which “the isolated individual, and psychological abstraction and analysis become everything.” Troeltsch sees mysticism not as a phenomenon naturally at home within the church but rather as one that leads away from the establishment, and it is perhaps this perception in particular that gives his work lasting relevance. The assumption that mysticism veers naturally in an antiecclesial direction, and that its more orthodox manifestations are anomalies requiring explanation, remains very much alive in the literature. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural materialism, it is the political, antiecclesial, subversive bite of mysticism that is its most interesting feature. On this point liberal Protestantism and postmodernism have come together, theology and cultural studies have embraced. Troeltsch's schema thus retains relevance well beyond the sphere of historiography.

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?

It may appear absurd to link a thinker of Christian antiquity with the peoples of early modern North America. The Bishop of Hippo (354–430) was not particularly interested in evangelization beyond the Mediterranean world. While he encouraged the proselytization of the tribes of North Africa, Augustine rejected the possibility of “New Worlds” as “on no grounds credible” for lack of scriptural warrant. His achievement, some thousand years before Columbus, was to provide the authoritative account of religious conversion as well as the intellectual foundations for Christian spirituality. This legacy was not well suited, however, to deal with problems raised by contact with “new” peoples of the Americas. It had little to say about the “nature” of these “savage” peoples as well as the prospects for their conversion. Augustinian theology emphasizes relations between God and self, in contrast to the approach identified with Thomas Aquinas, which asserts the possibility of finding God in the world and propels inquiry in that direction. Augustine's sense of the corruption of fallen humankind and the powerlessness of nature without God would appear to discourage any but the most morbid interest in New World peoples.

In a 1959 survey of 2,706 ministers of the Churches of Christ, an American denomination that grew out of the nineteenth-century reform movement of Alexander Campbell, the rhetorician James Swinney discovered 215 preachers who said that they had conducted public oral debates as a way of attracting converts and defending their tradition. During the previous half-century, they had held around 4,400 debates, each lasting from one to fourteen days, mainly in the rural areas and small towns of the South and lower Midwest. Another student of Campbell's movement has compiled a list of more than 9,000 such debates, around 500 in the nineteenth century and more than 8,500 in the twentieth. The forensic superstars included regional celebrities like J. D. Tant of Texas, who held more than 350 such contests between 1885 and 1941 and who argued that four people would attend a debate for every one who attended a worship service. His assertion calls for qualification, but it reminds us of a practice that once attracted widespread attention and that has continued to flourish in parts of American Protestantism.

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.

In March 1835 Charles Finney told a gathering in New York City: “If the church will do all her duty, the millennium may come in this country in three years.” This statement has often served as an epigram for the era, the motto of that movement for revivalism and social reform that, having already swept the churches, was to so infuse the culture with its moral imperatives as to make a Civil War against slavery inevitable and the hegemony of evangelical Protestantism secure. On this reading Finney's declaration marks the midpoint in a story of triumph—triumph for revival religion, and triumph for a nation that aspired to righteousness.

Most American scholars are reasonably well aware of the contributions of Thomas Jefferson (and his younger colleague, James Madison) to the establishment of the legal framework for religious freedom in the United States. Perhaps many are less aware of Jefferson's “second life” in the Supreme Court's several encounters with Jefferson and with the religion clauses of the First Amendment. This article will, first, review briefly Jefferson's lifelong commitment to religious liberty, which he regarded as the foundation of all liberties. Second, attention will be given to Supreme Court decisions in this troubled arena, with some comment on Jefferson's continued relevance—to use a tame and tired word—within the contemporary American scene.

On New Year's Day 1971 Pasadena, California, basked in its standard smog-tinged sunshine as well over a million people lined the route for the annual Tournament of Roses Parade. That year's grand marshal was America's “Protestant Pope,” evangelist Billy Graham. Consistently voted among America's most admired men and a highly visible spiritual counselor and friend of Richard Nixon, Graham may well have been at the zenith of his national influence. But, as he entered into the gala festivities surrounding the Tournament of Roses, Graham claimed that he was of two minds. Despite the “fanfare, the flag-waving,” Graham wrote later that year, “I have seldom had such mixed emotions as I had that day in Pasadena.” For he claimed he knew “that decadence had settled in. As I savored the grandeur of this great nation I also sensed its sickness.” As the elements of the parade headed down the boulevard, Graham and his wife Ruth waved to the smiling crowds while he, as he said, “watch[ed] the horizon for a cloud of impending revival to restore [America's] spiritual greatness.”

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.

The first decade of the twentieth century was a time of great theological ferment in the Catholic church in France. In order to reconcile Catholic teaching with the latest findings of historical criticism, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) and other “modernists” proposed sweeping reforms in the Church. From the perspective of Rome, however, these reforms seemed to threaten the very heart of the faith. In Roman eyes, Loisy and his theological allies had adopted the scientific methods of the anticlerical university. Like their secular colleagues but less openly, they then used these methods to subvert the Catholic tradition and the institutional structure of the church. The Vatican defended its embattled faith with a series of measures designed to crush this movement.

Thirty years ago Alan Heimert published his monumental study of religion's relationship to the American Revolution. Religion and the American Mind: From the Great Awakening to the Revolution contradicted the conventional wisdom rooted in Vernon Parrington's 1927 Main Currents of American Thought and implicitly challenged the more recent interpretation put forward by Heimert's own mentor, Perry Miller. Critics responded vigorously, but their reproofs did not foretell the future of Heimert's argument. Indeed, in the past twenty years a cadreof young scholars assumed either his thesis or method and moved the debate toward the personalities and movements Heimert underscored. Some of today's leading scholars who study connections between the revivals and the Revolution pay homage to Heimert's thought in footnotes if not in the texts themselves. Two social/intellectual movements seemingly at cross-purposes, namely Protestant evangelicalism and the new cultural history, rescued Heimert's work from scathing yet well-placed criticisms to establish its assertions as a leading model for understanding religion's role in the American Revolution.

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.

Before I begin to offer my analysis of what the Encyclopedia of the Reformation tells us about Reformation studies, I should first explain my role in its production. I have been one of six senior editors, responsible for what was loosely termed “social history and popular religion.” Four of the other editors have been in charge of specific geographic areas, and David Steinmetz has been in charge of theology, so I have generally thought of my role as the editor for “other.” That meant “my” articles began with “alchemy” and ended with “women,” including in between entries on such topics as capitalism, death, divorce, drama, Jews, miracles, music, polygamy, printing, science, sexuality, and time. I was in charge of fewer entries than most of my coeditors–102 out of 1200–but more words, as I ended up with nearly all the longest articles. That alone, I think, indicates the clear acceptance of one “new approach,” an approach picked up by the marketing department at Oxford, whose banner head describes the Encyclopedia as “the definitive reference on society in early modern Europe.” It was also noted at a very early editors' meeting, where one of the consulting editors commented—not exactly with dismay, but not exactly with triumph either—“do you realize we've given witchcraft more words than Luther?”

“Growth is as essential in human personality as it is in a stalk of corn,” wrote the pastor of First Community Church, Columbus, Ohio, in 1935. His remark typified the changes underway in mainline American Protestantism as it digested empiricist theology, Christian realism, psychoanalysis, and world events from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. In those years the terms of discourse about what it takes to make a strong democracy gradually shifted from “character”—the traits, attitudes, or behaviors of an individual that publicly express private conviction—to “personality”—the inner, psychodynamic organization of an individual that expresses itself socially in relation to God and other people. Prominent religious educators debated it; pastoral counselors put it into practice. Popularization of psychotherapy in the denominational presses brought the language of “personality” and the psychological dimension of human existence into the lexicon of the mainline churches by the end of World War II. Earlier in the century in the face of mass immigration America's churches had extolled the merits of “character” and “character education” as the chief way for mediating private conviction and public action that would preserve democracy, but in the late 1930s they sounded this theme in the new key of personality: promoting the inner growth and freedom of each individual would safeguard America from moral decay and totalitarian regimes.

Hours before dark on a lazy summer afternoon in the mid-1990s, cars arrived in a long unbroken line that connected a rural two-lane highway to an unpaved parking lot. Seasonal thunderstorms and churning steel-belted radials combined to turn the meadow for overflow parking into a muddied mess. Still, some six thousand emerged from those vehicles and made their way toward a rustic fairgrounds stage. After displaying a ticket, they chose a spot, set up a few lawn chairs, and settled in for a long evening of entertainment and worship—making little to no distinction between the two. Each fan paid twelve dollars apiece to attend this gospel music event held just outside Boone, North Carolina, a small tourist community in the remote mountainous region of the state. All in all, few could complain about the price; the evening program featured five major groups, four with songs in Southern Gospel Music's Top 80 Hits monthly chart.