In his presidential address to the American Society of Church History in 1920, Robert Hastings Nichols observed that he had discovered, in his reading of previous addresses, “no mention of the reading of a paper dealing with what is the occupation of almost half of our members, the teaching of Church History,” or, as he preferred to call it, the teaching of “Christianity in History.” He decided, therefore, to talk about pedagogy. He devoted most of his address to answering the question why history should be taught in the theological seminary, arguing that it trained students to weigh evidence, calculate motives, trace causes, and estimate the power of social movements. It nurtured a certain kind of intellectual and moral capacity.

Episcopal election in Western Christianity evolved considerably over the course of the fifth to the twelfth centuries. In the early part of this period, an open electorate consisting of the clergy and the people (clerus et populus), as well as the diocesan clergy and the metropolitan archbishop, all took part in the election and consecration of a new bishop. Over the course of several centuries, the local prince came increasingly to dominate the process due both to Germanic and Roman traditions of the role of the prince and to the growth in power of the local rulers over the course of the Middle Ages. Efforts to harmonize the discordant views of a “democratic” versus an elite (either princely or clerical) electorate with the ideals of canon law, which forbade lay participation in episcopal election, led to assertions that the clergy were to elect the bishop with the people and the prince giving their assent to the bishop-elect. However, with the Gregorian reforms of the twelfth century, the right of the clergy in episcopal elections became preeminent as the reformers sought to enforce the canon laws and exclude the laity from episcopal election, especially in light of past princely abuse. Despite the apparent victory of the reformers in the Investiture Controversy, the local ruler continued to play a preeminent role in episcopal appointments (or elections) into modern times, though the principle of election “by the clergy and the people” fell into disuse.

The Cathedral of St. Étienne at Bourges, which Ribault justly styles “un chef d'oeuvre gothique” (a Gothic masterpiece), did not escape the Huguenot depredations of 1562. Especially vulnerable to the pikes and pry-bars of the Reformers were the choir screen in front of the main altar, the north and south doorways commemorating respectively Mary in Majesty and Christ in Majesty, and several areas of the West facade: the jamb statues (whose subjects are currently unknown), the spandrel sculptures under the dado that celebrated events of the Christian scriptures and of the book of Genesis, and the five extensively carved tympana dedicated from right to left as one faces them:

For the American Puritan minister Increase Mather, the battle of Armageddon would be “the most terrible day of battel that ever was.” “Asia is like to be in a flame of war between Israelites and Turks,” he wrote in The Mystery of Israel's Salvation, “[and] Europe between the followers of the Lamb and the followers of the beast.” In the Asian and European spheres of action, or so Mather anticipated, God's Israelite and Protestant armies would “overthrow great Kingdoms, and make Nations desolate, and bring defenced Cities into ruinous heaps.” The inevitable victory would reshape the course of history, for the destruction of Roman Catholic and Ottoman power would be accompanied by the conversion of the Jews and the lost tribes of Israel to Christianity and by their restoration to their ancestral homeland in Palestine. Then would come the birth of the millennium in Jerusalem and the subsequent spread of the kingdom of Jesus Christ throughout Europe, the Middle East, and the rest of the world.

A hundred years ago Virginia drafted a new state constitution designed to disfranchise African American voters. That objective was transparent from the outset of the convention. As John Goode, the presiding officer, assumed his seat, he called black suffrage “a great crime against civilization and Christianity.” At the age of seventy-two, Goode was the grand old man of the convention. A graduate of the University of Virginia and life-long Democrat, he had served in the state legislature, the Secession Convention of 1861, the Confederate legislature, and the U.S. House of Representatives before his appointment as Solicitor General of the United States in 1885. Goode reflected the mentality of the vast majority of convention delegates when he stated that African Americans were incapable of education or citizenship. “The omniscient Ruler of the Universe … made [them] inferior,” he proclaimed, and sometime in the future, when the North knew better, the Fifteenth Amendment would be repealed.

American pacifists first heard of Mohandas Gandhi and his struggles in South Africa and India after World War I. Although they admired his opposition to violence, they were ambivalent about non-violent resistance as a method of social change. As heirs to the Social Gospel, they feared that boycotts and civil disobedience lacked the spirit of love and goodwill that made social redemption possible. Moreover, American pacifists viewed Gandhi through their own cultural lens, a view that was often distorted by Orientalist ideas about Asia and Asians. It was only in the 1930s, when Reinhold Niebuhr and other Christian realists charged that pacifism was impotent in the face of social injustice, that they began to reassess Gandhian nonviolence. By the 1940s, they were using nonviolent direct action to protest racial discrimination and segregation, violations of civil liberties, and the nuclear arms race.