It is difficult to imagine Jonathan Edwards countenancing the “Confus'd, but very Affecting Noise” that erupted in Suffield, Massachusetts, on July 6, 1741. Yet there he stood, his loud voice rising in prayer above the din that emanated from an assembly of more than two hundred boisterous men and women who had gathered to listen to his exhortations in the “two large Rooms” of a private house. On the previous day, the visiting Northampton, Massachusetts, revivalist had administered the sacrament to nearly five hundred Suffield communicants, ninety-seven of whom had joined the church that very day. It was an extraordinary event—quite possibly the largest oneday church admission ritual ever observed in colonial New England.

In a letter to the people of Florence in the early part of 1067, the ardent reformer, Peter Damian, denounced a group of monks as locustae. These unnamed monks—whom it has long been accepted were the Vallombrosans—had been waging a campaign against their bishop, Peter Mezzabarba of Florence, whom they accused of obtaining his office by simony. Although Damian, who had been cardinalbishop of Ostia as well as prior of the eremitical community at Fonte Avellana, readily acknowledged that Mezzabarba might have a case to answer at Pope Alexander II's forthcoming council in Rome, he condemned their intrusion into matters of ecclesiastical politics that were none of their business. Yet it was clearly more than a matter of inappropriate activities. For he went on to dismiss in the bitterest of terms the dangerous pretensions of these monks to a superior holiness. Referring to their sanctity as odiosa, Damian concluded by saying that if monks like the Vallombrosans wanted to be holy they should not flaunt a spiritual arrogance in the face of weaker brethren. For Damian, the duty of monks was strictly defined by function: their calling was to weep for sins, not to announce them.

Medieval pilgrims making the dangerous journey from the Norman-Breton coast to the island monastery of Mont-Saint-Michel would have passed a tall stone cross rising out of the sands about halfway between the mainland and the north shore of the Mont. In the unlikely event that the visitors had not already heard the story of this monument, the so-called “croix des grèves,” they were sure to hear it—and perhaps even see it reenacted—once they arrived at their destination, since the miracle it commemorated was one of the most famous in the shrine's vast store of legend. Popularly known as the “Peril,” the miracle told of a pregnant woman who had come on pilgrimage to the shrine in the time of Abbot Hildebert I(1009–17). As she was making her way across the sands toward the abbey at low tide, a sudden storm blew in from the sea, carrying the tide in its wake. In her frantic efforts to reach the shore before the pilgrims' path was submerged, the woman went into labor and was unable to escape the quickly rising waters. According to the version of this story recounted to generations of pilgrims to Mont-Saint-Michel, the abbey's patron Saint Michael took pity on the unfortunate woman and made a dry space for her to wait out the storm in the midst of the sea, preserving her from harm while she was safely delivered of a healthy son. The boy was christened “Peril” in commemoration of his dangerous birth, and in gratitude to the archangel his mother designated him for the priesthood.

In December 2004 the George W. Bush administration filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of two Kentucky counties barred by the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals from posting framed copies of the Ten Commandments in their courthouses, alongside a proclamation from President Ronald Reagan marking 1983 as the Year of the Bible. To those who would object that even a minimalist interpretation of the separation of church and state might preclude the prominent display of a religious text in just that place—the courthouse—where the principle of separation is normatively enforced, the White House offered assurance that “Official acknowledgement and recogntion of the Ten Commandments' influence on American legal history comport with the Establishment Clause [of the First Amendment].”