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In his final accomplishment of a distinguished career, the author considers the musical practices of the early Church in this examination of the history of Christian chant from the years ad 200 to 800. The result is a book that is certain to have an impact on musicology, religious studies, and history.

Recent work on the notoriously passionate Christian conflicts of the later Roman Empire has elucidated their wide-ranging political and social implications. However, the fifth-century conquest of the Roman West by “barbarian” rulers brings this train of inquiry to a juddering halt, as scholars of early Christianity turn eastward for new doctrinal developments, and early medieval historians focus on political continuity and ethnic identity in the new kingdoms. This book argues that Christian controversy retained its sophistication and its sociopolitical consequences in the post-imperial West. It examines church conflict under the Vandals, who ruled the former Roman province of Africa (the modern-day Maghreb) from 439 to 533 CE. Exploiting neglected Christian texts, this book exposes a sophisticated culture of disputation between Nicene (“Catholic”) and Homoian (“Arian”) Christians, and it explores their rival claims to represent the true church, which consciously evoked earlier ecclesiastical controversies. It argues that this Christian conflict cannot be firewalled from other developments in post-imperial Africa, revealing its implications for issues of social identity and political formation. Through careful comparison with the evidence for Homoian Christianity in the other barbarian successor kingdoms, it seeks to set out a new framework for understanding Christian identity across the post-imperial West.

Although the reception of the Eastern father Gregory of Nyssa has varied over the centuries, the past few decades have witnessed a profound awakening of interest in his thought, particularly in relation to the contentious issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. The Body and Desire sets out to retrieve the full range of Gregory’s thinking on the challenges of the ascetic life through a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre. Exploring his understanding of the importance of bodily and spiritual maturation in the practices of contemplation and virtue, Raphael Cadenhead recovers the vital relevance of this vision of transformation for contemporary ethical discourse.

To the Victorians, the Chinese were invariably “inscrutable”. The meaning and provenance of this impression—and, most importantly, its workings in nineteenth-century Protestant missionary encounters with Chinese religion—are at the center of this book, which looks at how missionaries' religious identity, experience, and physical foreignness produced certain representations of China between 1807 and 1937. The book first introduces the imaginative world of Victorian missionaries and outlines their application of mind-body dualism to the dualism of self and other. It then explores Western views of the Chinese language, especially ritual language, and Chinese ritual, particularly the kowtow. This work offers surprising and valuable insight into the visceral nature of the Victorian response to the Chinese—and, more generally, into the nineteenth-century Western representation of China.

How, a mere generation after Vatican Council II initiated the biggest reform since the Reformation, can the Catholic Church be in such deep trouble? The question resonates throughout this book. A timely and much-needed review of forty years of Church history, the book offers a genuinely new interpretation of the complex and radical shift in American Catholic attitudes since the second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Drawing on a wealth of data collected over the last thirty years, the book points to a rift between the higher and lower orders in the Church that began in the wake of Vatican Council II—when bishops, euphoric in their (temporary) freedom from the obstructions of the Roman Curia, introduced modest changes that nonetheless proved too much for still-rigid structures of Catholicism: the “new wine” burst the “old wineskins.” As the Church leadership tried to re-impose the old order, clergy and the laity, newly persuaded that “unchangeable” Catholicism could in fact change, began to make their own reforms, sweeping away the old “rules” that no longer made sense. The revolution that this book describes brought about changes that continue to reverberate—in a chasm between leadership and laity, and in a whole generation of Catholics who have become Catholic on their own terms. Coming at a time of crisis and doubt for the Catholic Church, this analysis brings light and clarity to the years of turmoil that have shaken the foundations, if not the faith, of American Catholics.

In a work that challenges notions that have dominated New Testament scholarship for more than a hundred years, this book gives startling evidence for a messianic precursor to Jesus who is described as the “Suffering Servant” in recently published fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book clarifies many formerly incomprehensible aspects of Jesus' life and confirms the story in the New Testament about his messianic awareness. The book shows that, around the time of Jesus' birth, there came into being a conception of “catastrophic” messianism in which the suffering, humiliation, and death of the messiah were regarded as an integral part of the redemptive process. Scholars have long argued that Jesus could not have foreseen his suffering, death, and resurrection because the concept of a slain savior who rises from the dead was alien to the Judaism of his time. But, on the basis of hymns found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the book argues that, one generation before Jesus, a messianic leader arose in the Qumran sect who was regarded by his followers as ushering in an era of redemption and forgiveness. This messianic leader was killed by Roman soldiers in the course of a revolt that broke out in Jerusalem in 4 bce. The Romans forbade his body to be buried and after the third day his disciples believed that he was resurrected and rose to heaven. The book argues that this formed the basis for Jesus' messianic consciousness; it was because of this model that Jesus anticipated he would suffer, die, and be resurrected after three days.

This book analyzes the hagiographic traditions of six missionary saints in the Syriac tradition: Thomas, Addai, Mari, Simeon of Beth Arsham, Jacob Baradaeus, and Ahoudemmeh. Through studying these saints’ lives, we gain an understanding of the development of the East and West Syriac ecclesiastical bodies: the Syrian Orthodox Church and the Church of the East. The lives of the missionaries encapsulate the concerns of the communities that wrote them.

This revisionist work brings fresh theoretical perspectives to the study of the “propagandistic” art and architecture of the Jesuit order as exemplified by its late Baroque Roman church interiors. The first extensive analysis of the aims, mechanisms, and effects of Jesuit art and architecture, this study also evaluates how the term “propaganda” functions in art history, distinguishes it from rhetoric, and proposes a precise use of the term for the visual arts for the first time. The book begins by looking at Nazi architecture as a gateway to the emotional and ethical issues raised by the term “propaganda.” Jesuit art once stirred similar passions, as the book shows in a discussion of the controversial nineteenth-century rubric the “Jesuit Style.” It then considers three central aspects of Jesuit art as essential components of propaganda: authorship, message, and diffusion. The book tests its theoretical formulations against a broad range of documents and works of art, including the Chapel of St. Ignatius and other major works in Rome by Andrea Pozzo as well as chapels in Central Europe and Poland. Innovative in bringing a broad range of social and critical theory to bear on Baroque art and architecture in Europe and beyond, this volume highlights the subject-forming capacity of early modern Catholic art and architecture while establishing “propaganda” as a productive term for art history.

The most striking feature of Wutong, the preeminent God of Wealth in late imperial China, was the deity's diabolical character. Wutong was perceived not as a heroic figure or paragon of noble qualities but rather as an embodiment of humanity's basest vices, greed and lust, a maleficent demon who preyed on the weak and vulnerable. This book examines the emergence and evolution of the Wutong cult within the larger framework of the historical development of Chinese popular or vernacular religion—as opposed to institutional religions such as Buddhism or Daoism. This study, spanning three millennia, gives due recognition to the morally ambivalent and demonic aspects of divine power within the common Chinese religious culture.

This book weaves the story of Freemasonry into the narrative of American religious history. Coming to colonial America freighted with the mythical legacies of stonemasons’ guilds and the Newtonian revolution, English Freemasonry brought with it a vast array of cultural baggage that was drawn upon in different ways, added to, and transformed during the fraternity’s sojourn in American culture. This study argues that from the 1730s through the early twentieth century, the changing beliefs and initiatory practices of this all-male society were broadly appropriated by the religious worlds of an evolving social order. For much of American history, Freemasonry provided a counter and complement to Protestant churches and a site for collective action among African Americans, Native Americans, Jews, and Catholics outside the European American Protestant mainstream. Moreover, to differing degrees and at different times, the cultural template of Freemasonry gave shape and content to the American “public sphere.” By expanding and complicating the terrain of American religious history to include a group not usually seen to be a carrier of religious beliefs and rituals, the intention of this book is to show how Freemasonry’s American history contributes to a broader understanding of the multiple influences that have shaped religion in American culture.

This book provides an original and rewarding context for understanding the prolific fourth-century Christian theologian John Chrysostom and the religious and social world in which he lived. The book analyzes two highly rhetorical treatises by this early church father attacking the phenomenon of “spiritual marriage”. Spiritual marriage was an ascetic practice with a long history in which a man and a woman lived together in an intimate relationship without sex. What begins as an analysis of Chrysostom's attack on spiritual marriage becomes a broad investigation into Chrysostom's life and work, the practice of spiritual marriage itself, the role of the theater in late antique city life, and the early history of Christianity. Though thoroughly grounded in the texts themselves and in the cultural history of late antiquity, this study breaks new ground with its focus on issues of rhetoric, sexuality, and power. The book argues that Chrysostom used images and tropes drawn from the theater to persuade religious men and women that spiritual marriage was wrong. In addition to this analysis of the significance of the rhetorical strategies used by Chrysostom, the book gives a thorough discussion of the role of the theater in late antiquity, particularly in Antioch, one of the gems among late antique cities. It also discusses gender in the context of late antique religion, shedding new light on early Christian attitudes toward sexuality.