JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY最新文献

This article discusses the deposit since the 1950s of the Church of England's local and national records, with particular reference to the eighteenth century, in Lambeth Palace Library and elsewhere, especially local authority archive offices. These records illustrate the established Church's engagement during the “long-eighteenth century,” nationally, regionally and locally, with all levels of English society. The cataloguing and accessibility of these archives significantly contributed to the post-1960s burgeoning of English social and economic history, particularly research about poverty, literacy and education. Frequently such research has neglected the religious-faith base of the creators of these archives. However, parallel research about religion in the lives of laypeople and of English society generally in the “long-eighteenth century” has led to questioning the long-standing hypothesis of English society's secularisation following the seventeenth century Civil Wars. The article therefore provides a case study illustrating parochial and diocesan archives' evidence of religion permeating people's lives. Large numbers of better-off laypeople lived out their religious faith by establishing and sustaining voluntary elementary education for poor children in the 3Rs and the practice of Christian faith and subsequently securing apprenticeships or service for them. Evidence also suggests large numbers of poor parents took up these opportunities.

Lambeth Palace Library's primary function is to preserve the records of the Church of England, but there are ample opportunities for researchers to use these archives to better understand Britain's histories of citizenship, race relations, and migration in the twentieth century. Lambeth Palace Library (LPL) houses documents on projects on race relations undertaken by the British Council of Churches and the Church of England's Board of Social Responsibility's Race and Community Relations Committee, as well as Archbishop Michael Ramsey's correspondence from his tenure as Chair of the National Committee of Commonwealth Immigrants. These papers attest to the Church of England's significant role in urgent national debates on migrant rights and race equality, and the work of organisations representing the interests of Commonwealth migrants as they actively sought the support of church leaders in their campaigns. LPL collections reveal the important place British churches had in building networks, providing funding and supplying resources to support anti-racist organisations, and the ways ideas of Britishness were contested in the 1960s and 1970s around the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Acts and Race Relations Acts. Papers in LPL collections can also be used to critically examine post-imperial formations of Whiteness, xenophobia and the racialisation of British citizenship.

The 1882 religious schism in the mission village of Metlakatla, British Columbia, and the subsequent battle over land rights between the Tsimshian First Nations and settler governments, are some of the most extensively analysed events in the history of missions in nineteenth-century Canada. Yet historians have overlooked the role played by the Church Missionary Society in perpetuating these events. Most importantly, historians have failed to ask why a society that was in financial difficulties and that regularly abandoned mission stations all over the world was so determined to hold on to this one station. The Society's official story was that it needed to protect its converts from persecution, but this article argues that two economic factors also contributed to the value of Metlakatla for the Society. First, competition with Methodist missionaries in the region made Metlakatla a valuable asset for attracting government grants and private donations. Second, the religious schism in Metlakatla undermined the Society's branding as a bastion of doctrinal purity, rendering it necessary to protect the Society's marketing strategy. Attending to these economic factors complicates simplistic narratives of imperial missionary work as only about Christianisation and civilisation, and contributes to ongoing efforts to understand missionary societies as corporations.

This is a study of Don Ignazio Saverio Mifsud's sermons in Maltese, which he delivered between 1739 and 1754. It is divided into three parts. The first discusses Mifsud's sources. The second concentrates on the structure of the sermons and on their themes, emphasising the development of the sermon from the homily through the thematic sermon through the epideictic. Mifsud had the ability to move from one genre to another, inculcating in his listeners love of virtue and hatred of vice. Lastly, the article examines the rhetorical techniques Mifsud used in addressing the people.

This article focuses on a digital platform which invited forced migrants to document their experiences during the Covid pandemic, resulting in an archive of digital materials, much of it relating to religion and spirituality: around 1000 contributions by around 800 asylum-seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants. Using smartphones, they shared audio and video recordings, photos, texts, artworks, etc. The Covid Chronicles project, funded by the Open University, ran from March 2020 to June 2023. It was initiated by a group of academic researchers and forced migrants connected through volunteering with support organisations in UK cities and the Netherlands. Via personal networks and social media, the project extended its reach, snowball-fashion. The bulk of contributions are from the UK and mainland Europe but eventually the project connected forced migrant individuals and groups worldwide. The content is hugely varied, but many contributors refer to religious and spiritual practices, frequently bearing witness to the solidarities created by care-giving community actions and invoking ethical principles rooted in faith traditions. Many hoped that a better future might emerge from the crisis: this archive is as much about imagining viable futures as it is about documenting history.