In 351 c.e., Cyril of Jerusalem prepared catechumens for baptism at what he identified as the very center of the world. From Golgotha Christ once stretched his hands to embrace the ends of the earth, and Cyril's catechumens would soon receive a distinctive baptism predicated on their proximity to Golgotha first and Christ's tomb second. For this bishop location was truly everything, in his own words: “For others only hear but we both see and handle.” Cyril's Lenten Catechumenate consisted of an eight-week course of prebaptismal preparation culminating in an Easter baptism. Within this institution Cyril offered a privileged course of Christian inculcation and a singular notion of the “Christian Soldier.” Through a highly visual exegesis of the crucifixion and resurrection, Cyril transformed baptizands into witnesses to these two events, a status obligating them to defend the actuality of these moments and, in so doing, promote Cyril's particular conceptualization of Jerusalem as Holy Land.

The Council of Sens (May 25, 1141), during which the teaching of Peter Abelard († 1143) was condemned by an ecclesiastical court, has long been one of the most disputed subjects in twelfth-century scholarship. The outcome of the Council, understood as a victory for Bernard of Clairvaux († 1153) over master Abelard, bequeathed us centuries of distorted historical interpretation. For far too long, understanding of what happened was firmly based on the account given by Bernard's biographers, in the first place his secretary (and adoring admirer) Geoffrey of Auxerre, who related the confrontation between Bernard and Abelard in his contribution to the hagiographical biography of the abbot. Not unnaturally, the Vita places Bernard at the center of his time, making him the dominant figure of the twelfth century. Thus no doubt was admissible concerning Abelard's heresy and Bernard's right and justice in condemning him.

In a separatist congregation in London in 1594 a storm was brewing. The church's pastor, Francis Johnson, imprisoned for his noncon-formist activities, had recently married, and Francis's younger brother George, also incarcerated, was deeply troubled about his new sister-in-law Thomasine. George Johnson feared Francis was “blinded, bewitched, and besotted with the slie [sly] heights of the subtile proud woman,” and he considered it his duty as a good Christian and concerned brother to help “reforme” the situation. George's central grievance against Thomasine, a young widow before her marriage to Francis, was her excessive pride—she was “much noted” for it, he observed, which “became not a Pastor's wife, specially he being under persecution: in Prison: and often looking for death.” For George, as for other nonconforming Protestants who believed that one's outward behavior revealed one's inward moral state, his sister-in-law's pride was so offensive because it was so publicly and extravagantly displayed upon her body, in velvet, lace, whalebone, and gold. George wanted to “shew” Thomasine “that proud apparel and fashions of worldly dames were not decent in a Pastor[']s wife: that the creatures [material things], though lawful to be used, yet [are] not to be abused.”

In a book loaded with metaphors of assault and retaliation, Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom saved one of the best for Darwin. “Darwin's Origin of Species,” we are told, came “into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened from their old comfort and repose had swarmed forth angry and confused.” For White, the sometimes frenzied post-Darwinian controversies over providential design and divine creation were simply the latest episodes in an all-out struggle between theology and science that stretched back beyond Galileo's cheerless encounters with the Catholic Church. Though the voices may have been different, the song remained the same. Despite its continuing presence in the popular media, contemporary historians of religion and science now regard White's warfare thesis as an artifact of the constantly shifting relationships between these two cultural fields rather than a viable analysis of their engagement. The fundamental problem with the conflict model is that it is a bit like performing heart surgery with a Phillips head screwdriver: it is simply too blunt of an instrument for getting at the all-too-crucial particulars. As a result, it is likely to do more harm than good. To see why, consider what James Moore has called the “religious filiation” of Charles Darwin's evolutionary thought.

The December 1899 issue of Our Little Friend, a Seventh-day Adventist Sabbath school paper containing moral instruction, missionary stories, and the upcoming week's Bible study lessons, related the following story to its young readers: