Guardians of the Sacred: The Nuns of Soissons and the Slipper of the Virgin Mary
by Anne Clark

During an outbreak of ergotism in 1128, the nuns of Notre-Dame de Soissons in northern France inaugurated a healing ritual using their prized relic, the slipper of the Virgin Mary.  Miraculous cures said to take place at their abbey church were described in a substantial text by Hugh Farsit, a local regular canon, and other contemporary authors also more briefly discussed the events.  This article examines the depiction of the nuns in these texts, comparing the evidence for their innovative activity in light of the contemporary developments that circumscribed the ritual roles of women and social role of nuns.  Despite these pressures that tended to offer less scope for religious activity, the nuns of Notre-Dame, with no script from tradition, created a ritual that responded to the needs of the laity of the region and also enabled them to build a new church based on increased donations.  But due to the commitments of the various authors writing about the plague miracles, the nuns’ activities are sometimes submerged, whether due to uneasiness about the nuns’ behavior, or competition between the ecclesiastical communities.  The article also analyzes the role of the slipper of the Virgin in the broader context of medieval relic veneration.

Let the Children Come: The Religion of the Protestant Child in Early America
by Brooks Holifield

When children in the decades between 1770 and 1861 described their religious feelings, beliefs, and practices, they wrote primarily about death and virtue. Reflections on heaven and hell alternated with earnest desires for good lives, which could mean obedience to conventional rules but also could reflect a passion about social justice. A reading of forty-four diaries and sets of letters from Protestant children, especially girls between the ages of nine and sixteen, reveals a religious culture in which pious children absorbed copious amounts of complex religious teaching, chiefly through their attentiveness to sermons though also from catechisms, Sunday schools, religious reading, and relationships with peers and parents.  What they absorbed from the whole range of Protestant practices was, above all, a sense of religion as a comfort in the face of death and a guide to a virtuous life.  Changing social, political, and intellectual trends could alter their religious preoccupations, but the continuity during these ninety-one years was fully as striking as the changes.  While numerous studies have explored the attitudes of adults toward children’s religious development, this account focuses on what children thought and felt while they were still children.

Defining the Boundaries of Orthodoxy: Eunomius in the Anti-Jewish Polemic of his Cappadocian Opponent
by Christine Shephards

Scholars have long recognized that the theological arguments of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa against their opponent Eunomius helped to shape the development of Christian orthodoxy, and thus Christian self-definition, in the late fourth-century Roman Empire.  The cultural and theological significance of the strong anti-Judaizing rhetoric contained within these Cappadocian authors’ anti-Eunomian treatises, however, remains largely unexamined.  The anti-Judaizing rhetoric of these anti-Eunomian texts attests to the advantages that these leaders gained by rhetorically associating their Christian opponents with Jews.  By claiming that Eunomius and his followers were too Jewish in their beliefs to be Christian, and too Christian in their behaviors to be Jewish, Basil, Gregory, and Gregory deployed anti-Judaizing rhetoric to argue that Eunomians were significantly inferior to both true Christians and Jews.  The Cappadocians’ strategic comparisons with Jews and Judaism rhetorically distanced their Eunomian opponents from Christianity, and thus strengthened the Cappadocians’ own claims to represent Christian orthodoxy.  Locating the rhetoric of these authors within the context of vacillating political support and long-standing intra-Christian controversy highlights the significant role that this anti-Judaizing rhetoric played in shaping the political, theological, and cultural boundaries of eastern Christianity in the late fourth century.

Urbanization and the End of Black Churches in the Modern World
by Curtis Evans

Social scientific debates about African American religion in the 1940s reflected and shaped broader discussions about the place of blacks in American society.  As black and white social scientists sought to come to a consensus about the specific issues that needed to be addressed to deal with America’s race problem, they realized that a haunted past, filled with claims of black natural religion and primitivism, and heated contentions about blacks prospects in the modern world were more difficult to confront than they had anticipated.  The “Negro Church” came to signify more than just black religion, but it also connoted the nature of black life and the meaning of African Americans’ experiences in a racist society.  Although this specific discussion about black religion has been narrowly treated as a debate between anthropologist Melville Herskovits and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, I argue that it was much broader than an academic or personal debate and that even talk about religion was often about something else, which made it difficult to agree on the terms of the discussion.  Attention to the social and political context of interpretations of African American religion highlights the dilemmas faced by African American social scientists who sought various ways to provide blacks, including themselves, with an escape from a shameful past.

Mormons Study “Abroad”: Brigham Young’s Romance with American Higher Education, 1867-1877
by Thomas W. Simpson

In the 1860s American Mormons began knocking at the doors of American universities.  Reversing the course of their westward-bound pioneer ancestors, these early educational migrants sought to retrieve what their forerunners had left behind, by force or by choice: their access to higher education.  In the earliest cases, Brigham Young and other high-ranking church leaders sent the students as special missionaries, but not to proselytize.  Rather, they tapped these women and men for specialized training in professions ranging from law, medicine, and engineering to education.  Mormons saw education in “Gentile” universities as a means to realize a corporate hope: a kingdom of God in the Mountain West.  The goal was, in the words of Young, to gather the world’s knowledge to Zion, to help build the perfect society in the “latter days” before God’s millennial reign.
This study documents the origins of the long Mormon romance with American higher education.  I argue that this romance—characterized by intense and abiding passion, devotion, insecurity, and envy—has been the natural outgrowth of competing Mormon desires for purity and progress.  Emerging from the shadow of persecution and deprivation, Mormons condemned “the world” and yet craved its praise.