JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY最新文献

Throughout the nineteenth century, religion and Empire became increasingly fused in the Victorian imagination through a lens of providentialism that saw Empire as an instrument for worldwide Christianisation. This article uses the case of St. Augustine's Missionary College to explore the creation of a distinctly colonial Christian culture in Canterbury. This culture was both created and curated through networks and connections made between Canterbury and colonial dioceses, the imagined world of letters fostered by the College, and the presence in Canterbury of “foreign students” whose apparently exemplary lives brought the Empire home to the “garden of England.” Reinforcing the important point that Britain was part of a mutually-constituted Empire, this article demonstrates how colonial cultures in Britain could be sustained through various means–cultural, social, and here institutional. It moreover uses the case of St. Augustine's to showcase the increasingly self-conscious links between religion and Empire within Established Anglicanism as colonisation forged the city of Canterbury into the head of a colonial and global Anglican Communion.

In 2001, Catholic pilgrims, led by Māori priest Henare Tate, travelled to France to exhume the remains of Jean-Baptiste François Pompallier (1821–1872), the first Catholic Bishop of Aotearoa New Zealand. Placed in a lead-lined coffin, the remains were taken back to New Zealand and laid to rest in Motuti, Hokianga. The interment — 131 years after Pompallier's death — marked the end of an extraordinary renovation of the Bishop as a historical figure, shaped by the tides of Māori and non-Māori Catholic life, and fulfilling, it seemed, a sentiment expressed in this memorial song which Pompallier himself had composed as a parting gift to his Katorika (Catholic) faithful: “Ano te mahara e reka/a ki nga motu o Nuitireni i/sweet is the memory I hold/for the islands of New Zealand.” This article explores the shifting remembrance of Pompallier that underpinned the repatriation and its legacy for New Zealand Catholic communities, especially Hokianga Māori. Three interrelated themes emerge: locally, Hokianga as a foundational place of Māori Catholicism, and the institutional remembrance of Pompallier as the apostolic Bishop of Auckland; and, globally, the reshaping of collective memories in the theological and social changes of the Catholic Church.

The most common form of female pilgrimage in medieval England was local pilgrimage to a saint's shrine. One English pilgrimage destination which is especially associated with women is St Frideswide's shrine in Oxford, owing to a collection of miracle stories compiled in the 1180s in which women are particularly prevalent. Drawing on a new edition and translation of the Miracula sancte Frideswide, this article revisits the cult of Frideswide in the late twelfth century and takes a fresh look at the experiences of women visiting Oxford on pilgrimage. The article reassesses previous speculations about women's attraction to the cult, brings to light some little-appreciated aspects of female pilgrimage, and finds that many of the accounts challenge assumptions made about female behaviour and expectations in the Middle Ages.

The seismic events of 2020 — a global pandemic with differing levels of trust in public health authorities, the prominence of conspiracy theories, and fresh attention to the ongoing impact of systemic and individual racism — once more made it clear the significance of the way Christians relate to issues of knowledge, expertise and authority in the public sphere.

Yet the events of 2020 did not come from nowhere. US–Australian evangelical Christian responses to shifting cultural and political landscapes, racial justice, authority of science, and decolonisation have entangled histories.

In July 2021 we hosted a hybrid symposium to explore the longer historical crises that sit behind the present picture. We examined these themes and histories from a variety of disciplines, including history, theology, sociology, philosophy, religious studies, and others. The symposium was supported via a generous grant from the Religious History Association, and assistance from the Australian Catholic University (Brisbane) and Deakin University (Geelong). While we intended to meet in-person in Brisbane, yet another wave of COVID-lockdowns across New South Wales and Victoria meant this was not possible.

Coincidentally, initial planning for the symposium marked 25 years since the publication of Mark Noll's landmark Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans, 1994) which surveyed the historical roots of what Noll saw as the lamentable state of evangelical engagement and involvement with mainstream knowledge production enterprises in the US. More recently, Molly Worthen's Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford, 2014) provided a nuanced account of the many ways in which US evangelicals since the 1960s sought to respond to the “crisis” of epistemic authority in the US. She described how many US evangelicals had developed an alternative intellectual infrastructure of their own, generating a distinctly evangelical expert whose authority was recognised and deployed in an evangelical mediascape and educational network.

The symposium did not seek to centre the Noll–Worthen analysis or merely apply it to Australia, but to widen and build on such US-focused work by including the Australian context, encompassing a scope broader than just evangelicalism. In addition to complicating narratives that centre the US religious experience, the symposium sought to examine the hypothesis that the period of the 1970s–1980s served as a specific fulcrum where there was a transition from a diversity in thought on social ethics and party-political allegiances in the 1970s to a closedness and rigidity with Christians enlisted into 1980s culture wars. Yet, the US culture wars diffracted through Australian public life in multiple and unpredictable directions.

By “infrastructures” of intellectual authority, the symposium aimed to put into historical perspective the way Christians in Australia and the US have licens