Pietas Austriaca is a path-breaking study of the relationship between religious beliefs and practices and Habsburg political culture from the end of the medieval period to the early twentieth century. In this seminal work, Anna Coreth examines the ways that Catholic beliefs in the power of the Eucharist, the cross, the Virgin Mary, and saints were crucial for the Habsburg ruling dynasties in Austria and Spain.

For pious converts to Christianity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New England, all reality was shaped by religious devotion and biblical text. It is therefore not surprising that earnest believers who found themselves marginalized by their race or sex relied on their faith to reconcile the tension between the spiritual experience of rebirth and the social ordeal of exclusion and injustice. In Piety and Dissent, Eileen Razzari Elrod examines the religious autobiographies of six early Americans who represented various sorts of marginality: John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, and Jarena Lee, all of African or African American heritage; Samson Occom (Mohegan) and William Apess (Pequot); and Abigail Abbott Bailey, a white woman who was subjected to extreme domestic violence. Through close readings of these personal narratives, Elrod uncovers the complex rhetorical strategies employed by pious outsiders to challenge the particular kinds of oppression each experienced. She identifies recurrent ideals and images drawn from Scripture and Protestant tradition—parables of liberation, rage, justice, and opposition to authority—that allowed them to see resistance as a religious act and, more than that, imbued them with a sense of agency. What the life stories of these six individuals reveal, according to Elrod, is that conventional Christianity in early America was not the hegemonic force that church leaders at the time imagined, and that many people since have believed it to be. Nor was there a clear distinction between personal piety and religious, social, and political resistance. To understand fully the role of religion in the early period of American letters, we must rethink some of our most fundamental assumptions about the function of Christian faith in the context of individual lives.

This is the first narrative history of the Archdiocese of St. Paul, from 1840 to 1962. Historian Marvin R. O'Connell brings to life the extraordinary labors and accomplishments of the French priests who came to the upper midwest territory during the first half of the nineteenth century. Over the next fifty years a flood of settlers, primarily Irish and German Catholics, filled up the land. In 1850 Rome created a new diocese centered in the village of St. Paul, and in 1851 French priest Joseph Cretin was named its first bishop. O'Connell's lively account stresses the social, economic, and political context in which the Catholic Church in Minnesota grew and evolved. He vividly illuminates the personalities of the bishops who followed Cretin, Thomas Grace (1859–84) and John Ireland (1884–1918). Ireland inherited a sophisticated system of churches, schools, orphanages, and hospitals, staffed by orders of religious men and women. Ireland built upon this legacy, founding colleges for men and women, a major seminary, and cathedrals in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. Ireland's successors, Austin Dowling (1919–30) and John Gregory Murray (1931–56) were not as colorful as Ireland, although Murray was immensely popular. William Brady is the final archbishop covered in this book, serving from 1956 to 1961 when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack. O’Connell ends his narrative In 1962, soon after the death of Archbishop Brady and a few months before the first session of Vatican II.

Is it possible that early Christian anti-Judaism was directed toward people other than Jews?

Michele Murray proposes that significant strands of early Christian anti-Judaism were directed against Gentile Christians. More specifically, it was directed toward Gentile Christian judaizers. These were Christians who combined a commitment to Christianity with adherence in varying degrees to Jewish practices, without viewing such behaviour as contradictory. Several Christian leaders thought that these community members dangerously blurred the boundaries between Christianity and Judaism. As such, Gentile Christian judaizers became the target of much anti-Jewish rhetoric in various early Christian writings.

Evidence of Gentile Christian judaizers can be found in canonical sources, such as Pauls Letter to the Galatians and the Book of Revelation, as well as non-canonical sources, such as the Epistle of Barnabas, the Didache, and Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho. In order to compare the phenomenon of judaizing and the reaction to it of ecclesiastical authorities, Murray organizes the evidence by probable geographical location, using Asia Minor and Syria as the two main loci.

The phenomenon of Gentile Christian judaizing is examined within the broader context of Jewish-Christian relations in the early centuries, and is the first attempt to draw all possible references to Gentile Christian judaizers together into one study to consider them as a whole. This discussion invites readers to reflect on the existence of Gentile Christian judaizers as another point on the continuum of Jewish-Christian relations in the Greco-Roman world — an area, Murray concludes, that needs to be more carefully defined.

The third volume in the Studies in Rhetoric & Religion, Preaching Politics traces the surprising and lasting influence of one of American history's most fascinating and enigmatic figures, George Whitefield. Jerome Mahaffey explores George Whitefield's role in creating a"rhetoric of community "that successfully established a common worldview among the many colonial cultures. Using a rigorous method of rhetorical analysis, Mahaffey cogently argues that George Whitefield directed the evolution of an American collective religious identity that lay underneath the emerging political ideology that fueled the American Revolution.

Quaker History is a peer reviewed journal consisting of illuminating articles on Quaker (Religious Society of Friends) contributions to issues such as social justice, education, and literature. The journal also includes book and article reviews and is published by the Friends Historical Association.

“Prohibition Is Here to Stay” focuses on the Reverend Edward S. Shumaker, a Methodist minister who for nearly twenty-five years led Indiana's influential chapter of the Anti Saloon League. Shumaker was one of the most powerful men in Indiana in the fight against demon rum, and his influence extended well beyond the boundaries of the state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jason Lantzer uses Shumaker's life and work to shed new light on the rise and fall of Prohibition and to better understand and appreciate the interplay of religion and politics in American culture. Drawing on Shumaker's personal papers as well as archival work, Lantzer argues that understanding the role of religious faith and in particular evangelical Protestantism is essential to understanding Prohibition. Shumaker's religious faith inspired his crusade against alcohol and his efforts to make the Indiana Anti Saloon League one of the strongest political pressure groups in the country. Lantzer argues that Edward Shumaker's life and the cause to which he devoted most of it were not aberrations but exemplars of central currents in American culture of the time. Lantzer also connects Shumaker and the prohibition movement in Indiana to larger issues of America's transition from a predominantly rural society to an urban culture, with the attendant fears of change, loss of values, the impact of industrialization, and foreign immigration.

For nearly four decades, E. P. Sanders has been the foremost scholar in shaping and refocusing scholarly debates in three different but related disciplines in New Testament studies: Second Temple Judaism, Jesus and the Gospels, and Pauline studies. This collection of essays by an impressive array of colleagues and former students presents original scholarship that extends—or departs from—the research of Sanders himself. Both apologists and dissenters find their place in this volume, as the authors actively debate Sanders’s innovative positions on central issues in all three disciplines. The introductory group of essays includes a substantive intellectual autobiography by E. P. Sanders himself. The next three parts examine in turn the three areas in which Sanders made his important contributions. The essays in part 2 engage Sanders's notion of “common Judaism.” Those in part 3 deal with issues that Sanders raised respecting the historical Jesus and the Gospels. And the essays in part 4 debate, among other issues, Sanders’s contention that participation in Christ, rather than justification by faith, is the central theme of Paul’s soteriology. The volume concludes with a bibliography of Sanders's works.

In 1539, Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, Bishop of Carpentras, addressed a letter to the magistrates and citizens of Geneva, asking them to return to the Roman Catholic faith. John Calvin replied to Sadoleto, defending the adoption of the Protestant reforms. Sadoleto's letter and Calvin's reply constitute one of the most interesting exchanges of Roman Catholic/Protestant views during the Reformationand an excellent introduction to the great religious controversy of the sixteenth century. These statements are not in vacuo of a Roman Catholic and Protestant position. They were drafted in the midst of the religious conflict that was then dividing Europe. And they reflect too the temperaments and personal histories of the men who wrote them. Sadoleto's letter has an irenic approach, an emphasis on the unity and peace of the Church, highly characteristic of the Christian Humanism he represented. Calvin's reply is in part a personal defense, an apologia pro vita sua, that records his own religious experience. And its taut, comprehensive argument is characteristic of the disciplined and logical mind of the author of The Institutes of the Christian Religion.