The December issue of Anglican and Episcopal History (AEH) reaches across a broad range of geography and time to offer studies of interest related to church-state relations, liturgy, and theology.

Studies addressing church-state relations consider events in France, England, Germany, and the U.S.

Justus Doenecke considers ways two different theologies can lead to similar conclusions. He closely examines archived issues of the Anglo-Catholic weekly The Living Church to determine ways it responded to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s policies surrounding World War I. This study shows ways The Living Church editor Frederic Cook Morehouse (1868-1932) and the Presbyterian US president both came to equate Christianity with patriotism. Doenecke cautions that “…statecraft took on the trappings of a crusade” while both men assumed a universalism that was “doomed to failure be it in 1914-19 or a century thereafter.”

The study is titled “The Living Church and Wilsonianism, 1914-1920: An Ambiguous Legacy.” Doenecke is emeritus professor of history at New College of Florida.

Two studies address events in Europe.

Mary, as Our Lady of Lourdes, is well-known. Shawn Martin, head of scholarly communication at Dartmouth College, introduces readers to a lesser-known apparition of Mary that occurred in La Salette, France, in 1846.

Martin notes ways that the appearance before two children, Maximin Giraud and Mélanie Calvat, was widely reported in European newspapers at the time. It was also interpreted politically by some as a way to support centralized government and the restoration of the French monarchy.

In “Marian Apparitions in Anglican-Roman Catholic Dialogue: La Salette and the Politics of Mariology in Nineteenth-Century England,” Martin argues that the different ways in which the apparition in La Sallette was interpreted politically provides lessons for the Anglican Communion and Roman Catholic Church not to let politics get in the way of what Mary was about.

Other studies with connections to church-state dynamic include:

• “George Bell, the British Churches, and Émigré Artists from Nazi Europe, 1933-c.1957” by Peter Webster. Webster is head of digital scholarship and innovation at the Hartley Library, University of Southampton

• “Indigenous African Women as Missionaries, Preachers, Evangelists, and Receivers of Christianity in the Interactions of Niger Missions in the Middle Belt States of Nigeria, 1841-1930” by Kefas Lamak, a doctoral student at the University of Iowa. Lamak uses a “history from below” framework to recover indigenous women’s perspectives from their triple marginalization by African men, colonial missionary men, and women from outside the region.

Studies related to liturgy and theology include:

• “Revising the 1929 Book of Common Prayer Psalter: A Difficult and Delicate Process” by Steven Bishop. This study uses extensive archival evidence and a focused study of Psalm 84 to examine the methodology used for revising the psalter. Bishop’s examination provides lessons for future revisions of the 1979 Psalter. He writes that “Revising is as taxing as translating… The peculiar constraints of a translation embedded in a religious tradition and emotionally charged attachment to that tradition make the work particularly hazardous.” Bishop is associate professor of the Old Testament at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas.
• “Explanations of the Real Presence and Richard Allestree’s Heresy of Impanation in Early Modern England, 1534-1681: Finding God in Bread” by Tanner Moore. This essay proposes that Richard Allestree’s (1619/21?-1681) theology on the Eucharist used the heresy of impanation to reconcile Church of England theology of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist with its Roman Catholic heritage. Moore is visiting professor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College.