In 1641, the Congregational minister Thomas Goodwin delivered a series of sermons to his independent church in London, expounding the letter to the Ephesians in characteristically meticulous detail. Goodwin had recently returned to England after a brief but formative period of religious exile in the Netherlands, and as the Sundays passed, his auditors were surely moved by the oratory of a speaker so “blessed with a rich invention and a solid and exact judgment.” The minister's breadth was equally impressive. The sermons opened up a cornucopia of Christian themes, flowing from one topic to the next as Goodwin's capacious mind found stimulus in the scriptural text. Seemingly eager to follow every possible digression, application, and excursus, Goodwin's unhurried pace required thirty-six sermons simply to exhaust the epistle's first chapter. And yet, amid this abundance of subject matter, one issue in particular arrested Goodwin's attention. While delivering his thirty-fifth discourse on Ephesians, Goodwin paused to consider what he described as “the Great question of these times” and, alternatively, “the great Controversy of the times.” By the middle of 1641, Goodwin's world was experiencing an unprecedented upheaval—England had been invaded by Scottish covenanters, the archbishop of Canterbury had been arrested and imprisoned, and the king had been forced to call a parliament he would be unable to dissolve. Yet Goodwin's “great Controversy” turned not upon political or cultural convulsion but rather upon a seemingly obscure point of ecclesiastical polity, a question not often considered by modern historians and even less often fully appreciated: “the great Question of these times,” said Goodwin, was “whether yea or no . . . many congregations, many Churches united in one may not be called one particular Church.” What did this strangely worded question mean to Goodwin and his hearers, and why did the future president of Magdalen College and religious adviser to the Lord Protector deem this rather specific query the very hinge upon which the nation's future turned? To answer these questions, we must consider how the early modern English mind understood the idea of a “national church”—for though he does not explicitly invoke the term, it was, as we will see, a concept embedded at the very center of Goodwin's “great Controversy.”

Quakers began arriving in the Caribbean and North America when their religious society was still new and struggling to define its core beliefs and institutional structure. There were tensions within the Society of Friends stemming from the Quakers’ validation of individual inspiration and their communal commitment to the Christian message as contained in the Bible. A bitter debate over scriptural authority wracked Quaker meetings for the remainder of the seventeenth century, and the controversy included arguments over the Quakers’ relations with Native Americans, Africans, and others outside of Europe beyond the reach of formal Christian teaching. On both sides of the Atlantic opponents of Quaker discipline challenged long-standing assumptions about the source and content of the Christian message and the social hierarchies that resulted when some groups claimed privileged access to truth. The ensuing argument influenced the Quakers’ plans for their colonies in North America, and their debate over slavery.

In standard postcolonial political polemics in Uganda, colonial Anglican and Catholic churches have been castigated for fomenting and exacerbating Uganda's political divisions. These polemics overlook the growing ecumenical ties between Catholic and Anglican leaders that began in the 1950s and continued well into the 1980s. In particular, the shared experience of political oppression forged solidarity between erstwhile Catholic and Anglican rivals, especially during the Idi Amin dictatorship of 1971–1979 and the brutal civil war of 1979–1986. Drawing on an array of archival, oral, and secondary sources, this article offers a synthesis of Ugandan Christian leaders’ political engagement during the quarter-century following independence in 1962. I argue that church leaders in the 1960s embraced a politically quiescent, “social development” approach best embodied in the ecumenical Uganda Joint Christian Council. In the early 1970s, Anglican and Catholic leaders slowly withdrew from active collaboration with Amin's regime, embracing an approach I term “prudent recalcitrance,” entailing shifting stances of official silence, private lobbying, and carefully crafted written critiques. Finally, during the political unrest and civil war of the early 1980s, church leaders adopted a posture of “prophetic presence,” standing for and with the people in opposition to Milton Obote's increasingly violent state.

Modernism: What was it? When was it? Does Modernism name “a break with the past,” proclaim the present as “qualitatively distinct and new”—or is Modernism's self-representation as an “ideology of rupture, opposition, and anti-institutionality” over-hyped? And when was the “when” of Modernism? Do Modernism's origins trace back to the era of Romanticism? Or to the 1880s and Baudelaire? Or to 1913 and Stravinsky's “Rite of Spring”? Or to 1922: the publication of Ulysses, “The Waste Land,” and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?

Recent studies of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch have helpfully located seventeenth-century Ignatian scholarship in its ecclesial and political context. Of particular importance, these new works have demonstrated that seventeenth-century British analysis of the genuineness of Ignatius's letters coincided with debates about British ecclesial government and the English Civil War. This essay contributes to such studies by expanding the discussion in three ways. The first two ways extend the study of Ignatian reception backward from the seventeenth century. First, the article observes that the study of the middle recension (the earliest form of Ignatius's letters) can be found in late medieval English theological writings and manuscripts. Second, it addresses how, simultaneously, four Ignatian letters which record a correspondence between Ignatius, John the Elder, and the Virgin Mary were read in Britain. These letters highlight Ignatius's piety and apostolic links. Finally, this essay widens the scholarly narrative of seventeenth-century Ignatian studies by observing that seventeenth-century interpreters drew on late medieval citations of Ignatius and that they were concerned with Ignatius's piety as well as the interpretive puzzles in his letters.

The Compactata, one of the most significant documents related to the Council of Basel, have not been analyzed and understood properly in the historiography, both in relation to their content and impact. This article aims to provide a better understanding of the Basel Compactata by discussing the controversial nature of these documents as demonstrated in international diplomacy and polemical writings of the fifteenth century. The diplomatic missions of J. Carvajal, N. Cusanus, J. Capistrano, and E. S. Piccolomini prove that the Compactata could easily have become a crucial bone of contention between Catholics and Bohemian Utraquists even on the international level. Rather surprisingly, the Catholic diplomats’ negative approach toward the Compactata does not appear to have been influenced by their origins in the controversial Council of Basel, for other phenomena such as craving for perfect unity and alleged transgressions of the treaties played a more prominent role. A thorough examination of polemical writings shows that there existed major differences between the standard Catholic and Utraquist interpretation of the key provision of the Compactata, which was possible due to their compromise wording. Such differences could affect considerably the situation in the Czech Lands. For instance, the emergence of a semi-independent Utraquist Church after 1436 was not explicitly stated in the Compactata and was enabled by the manner in which the Utraquists interpreted their text. Although the Compactata did contribute to the stabilization of the political situation in the Czech Lands, unproductive disputes over their meaning actually disturbed the idea of peaceful coexistence between the Catholics and Utraquists.

This article contextualizes the origins and development of Joseph Smith's secretive Council of Fifty, a clandestine assembly whose minutes were sequestered from public access since their creation in 1844 and were only made available in September 2016. Organized by Smith, the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, only months before his death at the hands of a mob in June 1844, the council was destined to introduce a new form of world governance. Colloquially named the “Council of Fifty,” it blended democratic principles with theocratic rule. More than a significant moment in the development of America's largest home-grown religion, however, Joseph Smith's controversial organization and the ideals it represented hint at broader anxieties over the nation's cultural disunity and democratic excesses in the wake of disestablishment. While many embraced the democratization of religious authority, the Mormons and some of their contemporaries countered that it only introduced cultural and political chaos. Examining how groups such as the Mormons grappled with these implications—through orchestrated electoral participation, appeals to higher laws, and revisions to democratized authoritative structures—sheds light on this dynamic challenge of political self-rule during America's antebellum period.

On July 11, 1666, the new cathedral in the French colonial capital at Quebec was finally consecrated by the vicar apostolic of New France, Msgr. François de Laval. Catherine de Saint-Augustin, a nursing sister who belonged to the Hôtel-Dieu de Québec, described the elaborate ceremony in her journal. The celebrants in their regalia made three trips around the church sprinkling holy water and chanting prayers before they came to the main door. After striking the door three times with a cross, “to signify the power of Jesus Christ, sovereign bishop of the Church,” they entered, and majestically processed toward the high altar. Upon the altar sat four candles, which signified “that Catholics (have) spread to the four corners of the world.” In the middle of these was a single cross, “that of Our Lord,” which symbolically linked the entire Church throughout the world to its (European) center—“au milieu du monde.” Following a number of minor rites including lessons and responses, the bishop circled the altar seven times sprinkling its base with holy water. The relics of saints were interred within it, and the church was dedicated to the holy trinity—the new seat of a new bishop in a “New” World.

Historians have long known that antebellum American Protestants were fascinated by death, but they have overlooked Protestant relationships with the dead. Long before the advent of séance Spiritualism in 1848, many mourners began to believe—contrary to mainstream Protestant theology—that the souls of the dead turned into angels, that the dead could return to earth as guardian angels, and that in graveyards one could experience communion with the spirits of the departed. The version of Protestantism these mourners developed was therefore, to use Robert Orsi's term, a religion of “presence,” a religion in which suprahuman beings—in addition to God—played an important role. Based on diaries and popular sentimental literature written mostly by women, this article brings to light an unexplored facet of antebellum Protestant lived religion: that the dead were “present with us tho’ invisible,” as one young woman wrote about her deceased sister.

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.