There is surprisingly little evidence to suggest that bishops played a major role in initiating and overseeing missionary endeavors between the second and fourth centuries CE. John Chrysostom (d. 407), who directed a number of missionary enterprises as the bishop of Constantinople, represents one well-established exception. This article argues that Chrysostom cultivated his distinctive approach to mission during his formative years in Antioch by tracing the key features of Chrysostom's mission strategy back to the activities of his episcopal mentors in Antioch, especially their efforts to promote the Christianization of the surrounding rural areas and their assertion of jurisdictional claims over regions beyond the Roman Empire. In conjunction with these activities, Chrysostom developed his own scriptural justification for mission during this period in which he advocated for emulation of the apostle Paul, who was, in his estimation, Christianity's missionary exemplar.

This article surveys the emergence and usage of the redefinition of man not as animal rationale (rational animal) but as animal religiosum (religious animal) by numerous English theologians between 1650 and 1700. Across the continuum of English Protestant thought, human nature was being redescribed as unique due to its religious, not primarily its rational, capabilities. This article charts said appearance as a contribution to debates over man's relationship with God; then its subsequent incorporation into the discussion over the theological consequences of arguments in favor of animal rationality, as well as its uses in anti-atheist apologetics; and then the sudden disappearance of the definition of man as animal religiosum at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In doing so, the article hopes to make a useful contribution to our understanding of changing early modern understandings of human nature by reasserting the significance of theological writing in the dispute over the relationship between humans and beasts. As a consequence, it offers a more wide-ranging account of man as animal religiosum than the current focus on “Cambridge Platonism” and “Latitudinarianism” allows.

This essay examines the colonial relationship between the Anglican Church and the British Empire's Welsh subjects across the nineteenth century. Focusing on the small output of a group of exiled Welsh clergymen (known as The Association of Welsh Clergy in the West Riding of the County of York), I consider Welsh Anglican responses to the church's neglect of Wales (exemplified by no Welsh-speaking bishop being assigned to a Welsh diocese between 1727 and 1870, despite the majority of the population not speaking English). The association believed that preaching in a foreign language such as English constituted a perversion from proper church practice and that this both reflected hegemonic attitudes toward indigenous and non-English speaking populations and pushed the Welsh population toward dissent. In response, the association sought to combine church reform with Welsh nationalism by elevating Welsh speakers as the spiritual inheritors of the true and primitive British church. They promulgated their visions in annual reports published between 1852 and 1856 into which they channeled other contemporary voices speaking against tyrannical and “Romish” Anglican Church practices. Through an analysis of post-Reformation Welsh church histories and the reports’ usages of such terminology as “alienation,” “Catholicism,” and “patriotism,” I reveal how the Welsh national identity the association fashioned at once operated within and aspired to correct the Anglican Church.

By examining Booker T. Washington's (little studied) relationship with Mormon elites, this article introduces the category of “usefulness” to scholars who investigate how racially and religiously marginalized Americans have sought acceptance in the “white American republic.” Washington's 1913 visit to Utah was the high point in a decade-long public campaign of mutual admiration. Washington and the Mormons’ high regard for each other—an aberration in much of black-Mormon relations—was based on similar histories of discrimination at the hands of white Protestant Americans. It was also based on similar beliefs that to overcome their status as “problem” people, Washington-led blacks and Mormons had to prove their “usefulness”—a form of respectability politics—to themselves and to the American republic. To do so, they pointed to the fruits of their own and each other's usefulness: economic productivity, educational advancement, and middle-class mores. While these fruits were similar, the roots were different, and racialized. For the Mormons, usefulness arose from a post-polygamy Mormon religion through which they asserted their whiteness. For Washington, usefulness arose not from the “Negro” church—the only independent black institution in American history—but from educational institutions like Tuskegee, which promoted black advancement under the control of white supremacy.

On the first Sunday of Advent in 2017, a new university church was consecrated at Leipzig University in Germany. This celebration brought to an end the five-decade-long absence of a church within the old university. The inauguration of the Paulinum—as the combined church and assembly hall was named—visibly reconnected the university with a church history involving the active participation of personalities such as Martin Luther, Johann Tetzel, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johann Sebastian Bach. Under scrutiny in this article is the 1968 destruction of the University Church of Saint Paul, originally a medieval monastery, by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) as a kind of socialist iconoclasm. Through the destruction of the University Church of Saint Paul, I argue, the church became something of an architectonic and cultural martyr. Although the Paulinum is not viewed as a direct continuation of the university church, its completion and refurbishing with art treasures from the old church has, however, come to be viewed as a counterpart to SED barbarism and as an undoing of some aspects of the destruction. Moreover, some episodes from the university church and its destruction have been passed on and attached to the Paulinum as a mnemonic layer, much valued by the university, city, and region.