As a revivalist who appeared to have initiated a world-wide awakening of Christianity and was also an early leader of the fundamentalist movement, Reuben A. Torrey is generally regarded as a major figure in the early twentieth-century history of evangelicalism. By tracing its origins and results, this article attributes Torrey's rise to prominence in the global evangelical movement to the evangelistic campaign he conducted in Australia in 1902. Setting this episode in the context of the history of international revivalism, it identifies Torrey as the first global revivalist in influence as well as geographical range. In place of the traditional providential interpretation, the analysis proposes the alignment of the revivalist theology, methods, and achievement exhibited in the Australian campaign with the hopes and expectations of the preexisting conservative evangelical subculture as a “functionalist” explanation of Torrey's impact. As the reason for Torrey's transformed standing in the evangelical movement in America and the wider world, the 1902 Australian campaign also emerges as a revealing case study of the dynamics of global evangelicalism and the function of international revivalism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Swami Vivekananda was the most influential pioneer of a Yogi Christ, illustrating well over a century ago how the life and teachings of Jesus might be incorporated within a larger Hindu worldview—and then presented back to Western audiences. Appropriation of Jesus, one of the central symbols of the West, might be viewed as the ultimate act of counter-Orientalism. This article begins by providing a brief biography of Vivekananda and the modern Hinduism that nurtured him and that he propagated. He articulated an inclusivist vision of Advaita Vedanta as the most compelling vision of universal religion. Next, the article turns to Vivekananda's views of Christianity, for which he had little affection, and the Bible, which he knew extraordinarily well. The article then systematically explores Vivekananda's engagement with the New Testament, revealing a clear hermeneutical preference for the Gospels, particularly John. Following the lead of biblical scholars, Vivekananda made a distinction between the Christ of the Gospels and the Jesus of history, offering sometimes contradictory conclusions about the historicity of elements associated with Jesus's life. Finally, the article provides a detailed articulation of Vivekananda's Jesus—a figure at once familiar to Christians but, in significant ways, uniquely accommodated to Hindu metaphysics. Vivekananda demonstrated a robust understanding and discriminating use of the Christian Bible that has not been properly recognized. He deployed this knowledge to launch an important and long-lived pattern: an attractive, fleshed out depiction of Jesus of Nazareth, transformed from the Christian savior into a Yogi model of self-realization. Through his efforts, Jesus became an indisputably Indian religious figure, no longer just a Christian one. The Yogi Christ remains a prominent global religious figure familiar to Hindus, Christians, and those of other faiths alike.

The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy was a defining moment for New York in the 1920s and one of the most significant theological battles in the city's history, as key doctrines of the Christian tradition such as the Virgin Birth, the Atonement, and the bodily resurrection of Christ were debated in the mainstream as well as the religious press. The principal figures in the controversy were John Roach Straton and Harry Emerson Fosdick, two prominent clerics whose intellectual and oratorical confrontation showed just how deep this nationwide religious divide had become. Straton and Fosdick used their New York pulpits as public platforms to articulate their opposing theological visions and to justify them as the correct expression of historic Christianity in the present. In doing so, they made the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy very much a New York story, remapping the city's Protestant evangelical culture and reorienting one of the most important episodes in American religious history. The aftermath of the conflict, however, reveals that the lines between “fundamentalist” and “modernist” as distinct categories of religious experience became blurred as each embraced elements of the other. By 1935, both fundamentalists and modernists in New York City had been transformed, just as they had transformed the city.

The founding editors of Christianity Today spent more than a year planning the launch of their magazine. Carl F. H. Henry, L. Nelson Bell, and J. Marcellus Kik believed Christianity Today could “plant the flag” for evangelicalism. To do that, though, the editors had to decide what evangelicalism was. They had to decide where the lines were, who was in and who was out, which issues mattered and which did not. One key criterion, they decided, was whether or not someone liked evangelist Billy Graham. Historian George Marsden later offered this as a tongue-in-cheek definition of evangelicalism. More seriously, religious historians have used David Bebbington's quadrilateral definition, which says the basis of evangelicalism is conversionism, biblicism, activism, and crucicentrism. This article argues that Bebbington's definition is ahistorical, vague, and deeply unhelpful. Marsden's joking definition, on the other hand, is quite useful, as it directs historians to attend to actual relationships, historical affinities, and real-world conversations. Based on new archival research, this article tells the story of the launch of evangelicalism's “flagship” magazine, shows how evangelicalism's lines were drawn in 1956, and makes the case that evangelicalism is best understood as a discourse community which is structured by its communication networks.

Jon Butler's God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan is not a book, Butler would be the first to tell us, that anyone should have expected to read (or write). The equation of Manhattan with modernity and modernity with secularization has long been hardwired into the scholarly and popular imagination. Butler wants to disrupt these circuits. It is not that Manhattan was not secular but rather that religion flourished there beyond all expectations between the late nineteenth century and 1960.

God in Gotham issues a challenge: if religion can survive, nay thrive, in Sodom by the Sea, then maybe we need to revise our theory of secularization of the modern world. The book's subtitle articulates its subversive claims: “The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan.” Its alliterative argument suggests a measure of wonder, one of those features of pre-modern life supposedly banished by secularization and the disenchantment of the world.

After reading Jon Butler's richly documented history of religion in Manhattan, I thought again of one of my favorite images: a 1939 watercolor by Ben Shahn called Self-Portrait among the Churchgoers, in which a photographer stands near a church on Sunday but points his camera toward the street and seems to ignore the gathering worshippers. Some U.S. historians might be relieved they do not need to learn more about those pious pedestrians, or what happens inside, but specialists in religious history might think the photographer has missed all the action. Has he? Well, in one sense, sure. Historians of religion must attend to churches and adherents, as Butler does, but, like Shahn's photographer, Butler also looks out to the wider cityscape. And that approach pays off as he asks how religion confronted “the challenge of modernity” in Manhattan, “the capital of American secularism.” More specifically, he hopes to explain why religion “didn't collapse in modernity's grasp,” as religion theorists like Max Weber and William James predicted.

Jon Butler's God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan affirms what historians of religion have long known and some urban historians have begun to discover—that few things in American history have survived so well as religion. Political moments and social movements have come and gone. Fashions have fallen out of favor; fads have faded. But that thing that we call “religion”—however defined, theologically, experientially, or institutionally—has survived, even thrived, particularly in American cities and perhaps most particularly in America's largest city, New York.