Hilary of Poitiers and Basil of Ancyra were unlikely companions. The former was a Latin bishop from a backwater part of Gaul who had only recently become immersed in the Trinitarian controversy. The latter was a leading figure in the East, schooled in classical Greek theology and a veteran in the ongoing struggle over the nature of God. It is also true that their political fortunes diverged significantly. Though both Hilary and Basil's parties “lost” at the Synod of Constantinople in 360, Basil thereafter slipped into obscurity while Hilary's pro-Nicenes would eventually secure political and theological victory in 381. This pairing is so unlikely, in fact, that scholars have long been reluctant to acknowledge the depth of Hilary's relationship with Basil. Among other issues, such a relationship creates a number of historiographical problems by challenging the traditional mapping of the various theological and political alignments of the mid-fourth century. In the traditional version, Hilary is commonly portrayed as the “Athanasius of the West,” who, in the late 350s, emerged as the leading supporter of the pro-Nicenes in the West. Basil, on the other hand, is regarded as a “semi-Arian,” who rejected the Nicene doctrine that the Son was homoousios to the Father, preferring instead to call the Son “like according to substance” (homoios kat’ ousian).

Muscovy's active period of eastward expansion began with the conquest of the Khanate of Kazan’ in 1552. By the seventeenth century, one observer claimed that the conquest of Kazan’ was the event that made Ivan IV a tsar and Muscovy an empire. With this victory, the tsar claimed new lands, adding to his subjects the diverse animistic and Muslim population of Turkic Tatars and Chuvashes, and Finno-Ugric Maris, Mordvins, and Udmurts. The conquest of Kazan’ provided both the Metropolitan of Moscow and Ivan IV (the Terrible) an opportunity to transform the image of Muscovy into that of a victorious Orthodox power and to justify the title of its Grand Prince as a new caesar (tsar). Since the conquest was the first Orthodox victory against Islam since the fall of Constantinople, commemorations of it were immediate, including the construction of the Church of the Intercession by the Moat (St. Basil's) on Red Square.

The incorporation of the lands and peoples of Kazan’ has served traditionally to date the establishment of the Russian Empire. Accounts of the conquest have emphasized the victory of Orthodoxy against Islam, with the Russian Orthodox Church and its Metropolitan as the motive force behind this expansion. The conversion of the Muslims and animists of the region is portrayed frequently as automatic, facing little resistance. More recently, scholars have criticized this simplistic account of the conquest by discussing the conversion mission as a rhetorical construct and have placed increasing emphasis on the local non-Russian and non-Orthodox resistance to the interests of the Church and state.

Four thousand miles of ocean divided the plantation colonies of the first British Empire from the English metropole, a great physical distance that was augmented by the cultural divergence that divided those slave societies from England. Colonists in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina thus made the re-creation of English ritual ways central to their ordering of the colonial experience. In particular, the preservation of the English liturgical year and its ritual enactment offered opportunities to connect colonial experience to metropolitan ideal. Confronted with seasons and crops that did not square meteorologically with English experience, colonists sought the comfort of maintaining English calendrical norms as much as possible. Within parish boundaries, colonists built churches in which the parish community could gather for the carefully scheduled, well-ordered worship of the English national church. The English Sabbath was central to the passage of time in weekly units, a day set apart for the church's liturgy, rest from labor, and social gatherings. The great and minor festivals of the Christian year and the daily office offered similar opportunities for Christian teaching and social fellowship, just as the celebration of state holidays connected these distant outposts of the empire to the Protestant national narrative that held an increasingly British people together. These ways of ordering time lent meaning to days that otherwise slipped by amid the routines of agricultural, commercial, and domestic life.

In the winter of 1771, the colonial assembly of Pennsylvania received a petition from voters in Lancaster County asking for the construction of a turnpike from the Susquehanna River to Philadelphia. Supporters of the project believed that the new road would spur economic development, and in support of this claim they cited developments in England. England's turnpikes, they argued, had made long-distance travel efficient and safe, had contributed to an expansion of commerce and manufacturing, and had increased the value of agricultural land. Shortly after these claims were published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, John Woolman, a Quaker reformer in Mount Holly, New Jersey, began hearing troubling stories about the English roads. Woolman was best known as an opponent of slavery, but in his writings and travels he had voiced concerns on an array of other economic issues, including exploitative labor relations generally, and the overwork and abuse of animals. In 1772, Woolman was planning to travel in England, and thus he had reason to pay attention to reports about the English roads.

One of the innovations of England's turnpike era was the “flying coach.” This was a carriage pulled by a team of six horses, and it achieved efficiency not so much by running fast as by starting early in the morning and going for long hours continuously. Woolman heard that flying coaches could cover one hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and that they “often run over foot people in the dark.”

This article looks at the connection between a political movement and the evolution of Christian consciousness. It seeks to answer a series of questions not often asked, in hopes of demonstrating that these questions deserve more attention than they have generated in the past. Historians and mission scholars rightly expend a good deal of effort studying the transition in mission-established churches from European to indigenous control. Missions did more than establish churches, however. They established local Christian cultures. Yet while there is some understanding of what indigenous peoples sought to do when they assumed direction of churches founded by missionaries, there is very little idea of what indigenous peoples have sought to do when they take over local Christian cultures. But, if it is the case that, as Lamin Sanneh has argued, Christianity “stimulated the vernacular,” then the local Christian cultures built upon the vernacular, perhaps more so than the churches missions founded, are the true legacy of the missionary enterprise.