I should like to acknowledge at the outset that I harbor no grandiose illusions about the import of what I will say this afternoon. As any veteran of annual meetings readily knows, presidential addresses are a time-honored ritual in the life of learned societies, a ritual comparable to the prayers spoken in the United States Congress, well meant, but stirring only mild interest. Alas, they all tend to be written as on water.

Although in recent years fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism has received much scholarly attention of increasing methodological and theoretical sophistication, conflict with demons, a primary metaphor for the ascetic life in the literature of the period, has been left relatively unexplored. One reason for this lack of attention is a shift in the intellectual paradigms through which scholars approach ascetic literature: as they have moved from psychological and theological models to social and performative ones in interpreting ascetic theory and practice, seemingly subjective or theological themes such as demonological theory have given way to more cultural topics, such as constructions of the body and formations of ascetic institutions and practices, with their accompanying politics. But the neglect of demons is a function also of the weighty influence exercised by two fourth-century demonologists, Athanasius of Alexandria and Evagrius of Pontus, and of the powerful modern explications of monastic demonology based on these important sources. Together the Life of Antony and the works of Evagrius construct, it seems, the monastic demonology, upon which later sources only elaborate.

George McTaggart's house sits across the road from the tiny clapboard Baptist church, the only landmark in the postage-stamp sized, rural town of Saint-Blaise, Québec, a town where, as inhabitants confide, “Protestants and Catholics have always had a love-hate relationship.” McTaggart will probably be mowing the long fields behind his narrow farm with his tractor, just as he was the day we met him. He speaks English with a Scots brogue and French with the characteristic Québecois broadness. He has wise eyes, wrinkles like a topographic map, and a mischievous sense of humor. Pushing eightyfive, he remembers virtually every event in his long life, every person he has ever known, but he speaks with special animation about someone he never met, a strong-minded, charismatic, independent Swiss woman named Henriette Feller.

Ruth Rouse, writing in A History of the Ecumenical Movement, made an extraordinary claim about the origins of modern ecumenism. She identified two factors in the 1890s that, in her words, “changed the course of Church history and made possible the modern ecumenical movement.” One was the Student Christian Movement, established in 1895 by the American Methodist layman, John R. Mott. The other factor was the Grindelwald (Switzerland) Reunion Conferences, an assembly mostly of English church leaders organized by a Methodist minister, Henry Lunn, between 1892 and 1895. Mott's movement is very well known to modern readers. The Grindelwald Conferences, by contrast, are utterly obscure in spite of Rouse's conclusion that they “began a new phase in the growth of the ecumenical idea.”

The past two decades have seen an efflorescence of works exploring cultural anti-Catholicism in a variety of national contexts. But so far, historians have engaged in little comparative analysis. This article is a first step, examining recent historical literature on modern British and American anti-Catholicism, in order to trace the similarities and distinctiveness of the turn-of-the-century German case. Historians are most likely to be acquainted with American nativism, the German Kulturkampf, continental anticlericalism, and the problems of Catholic Emancipation and the Irish Question in Britain. Many of the themes and functions of anti-Catholic discourse in the West transcended national and temporal boundaries. In each case, the conceptualization of a Catholic ‘other’ is a testament to the tenacity of confessionalism in an age formerly characterized as one of inexorable secularization. Contemporary observers often agreed that religious culture—like history, race, ethnicity, geography, and local custom—played a role in the self-evident distinctiveness of peoples and nations, in their political forms, economic performance, and intellectual and artistic contributions. We will see how confessionalism remained a lens through which intellectuals and ordinary citizens, whether attached or estranged from religious commitments, viewed political, economic, and cultural change.

Why have secular outlooks made so little headway in the United States in the twentieth century? Why did the Congress of the United States impeach Bill Clinton in 1998? Why have so many medical doctors in the United States been intimidated into refusing to provide abortion services to women? Might the answers to these three questions be the same?