Christianity

Dura Europos

Findings at a desert site in eastern Syria shed light on pagan, Jewish and early Christian religions.

The Huguenots: A Study of a Minority, Part II

J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.

Lamennais: A Liberal Catholic

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

The Mormons in America: The Story of a Frontier

When Mark Twain said of the Mormons, 'Their religion is singular but their wives are plural' he expressed the sum of what is generally known about them. Yet the Mormon story deserves to be better known. It illuminates one side of the development of a pioneer society, and forms a commentary upon many of the main themes of American history.

Early Massachusetts

A Puritan Commonwealth on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean was the ideal that Governor Winthrop and his seventeenth-century colleagues had in mind, writes Richard C. Simmons.

The Oxford Movement

At Oxford, in 1833, writes K. Theodore Hoppen, a group of earnest reformers set out to infuse new spiritual life into the Established Church.

Gerald Wellesley: A Victorian Dean

Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.

The Real Bethlehem

The ‘little town’ celebrated by western Christians as the location of the Nativity is much more than a stylised depiction evoked in Christmas cards each December, says Jacob Norris.