Law · empire · resistance · public life
Christianity, Empire & Political Power
These profiles connect theology with law, empire, state churches, persecution, colonization, nationalism, reform, and resistance. They avoid treating either establishment or dissent as one unchanging Christian position and keep victims, beneficiaries, compromised institutions, and internal critics in the same historical frame.
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Nero and the Christians of Rome
Nero and the Christians of Rome opens a focused path through Christian history: Tacitus’s report of Christians punished after the Great Fire, set beside Roman legal practice, spectacle, scapegoating, Peter and Paul martyr traditions, and the limits of calling an isolated imperial action a universal persecution policy
Domitian and the Persecution Debate
Domitian and the Persecution Debate opens a focused path through Christian history: later claims of persecution under Domitian compared with executions of elites, Jewish taxation, Revelation’s imperial setting, Christian memory, and the lack of evidence for one empire-wide anti-Christian edict
Pliny, Trajan, and Roman Policy toward Christians
Pliny, Trajan, and Roman Policy toward Christians opens a focused path through Christian history: the correspondence that records interrogation, execution, apostasy tests, anonymous accusations, and imperial restraint, showing both local danger and the absence of a proactive empire-wide search policy
The Decian Persecution
The Decian Persecution opens a focused path through Christian history: the imperial sacrifice requirement under Decius, surviving libelli, imprisoned and executed Christians, confessors, those who complied, rival restoration policies, and how one state loyalty ritual produced long ecclesial division
The Great Persecution
The Great Persecution opens a focused path through Christian history: the tetrarchic edicts against churches, Scriptures, clergy, and Christian officeholders, their uneven regional enforcement, martyr testimony, apostasy, Donatist memory, Galerius’s toleration, and Constantine’s later settlement
Constantinian Christian Patronage
Constantinian Christian Patronage opens a focused path through Christian history: imperial gifts, basilicas, bishops, councils, Sunday law, legal privilege, warfare, court ritual, and Constantine’s baptism, examined without reducing conversion either to pure faith or cynical political calculation
The Milan Settlement and Christian Legalization
The Milan Settlement and Christian Legalization opens a focused path through Christian history: the agreement associated with Constantine and Licinius restoring religious liberty and confiscated Christian property, distinguished from making Christianity the official religion and set within broader late Roman toleration policy
Theodosian Christian Establishment
Theodosian Christian Establishment opens a focused path through Christian history: Theodosius I’s Nicene legislation, councils, restrictions on sacrifices, conflicts over temples and heresy, episcopal influence, and the gradual, uneven transformation of Christianity into an imperially favored norm
Ambrose, Theodosius, and Episcopal Moral Authority
Ambrose, Theodosius, and Episcopal Moral Authority opens a focused path through Christian history: the conflicts over a destroyed synagogue and the massacre at Thessalonica, later remembered as the church humbling the state but better read through imperial patronage, episcopal access, penance, and selective advocacy
Justinian’s Christian Empire
Justinian’s Christian Empire opens a focused path through Christian history: imperial law, church building, doctrinal intervention, episcopal administration, suppression of dissent, war, plague, and the ideal of a unified Christian commonwealth under Justinian and Theodora
Byzantine Symphonia
Byzantine Symphonia opens a focused path through Christian history: the ideal of harmony between priesthood and empire, derived especially from Justinianic language and later reception, whose neat theory repeatedly met conflict among emperors, patriarchs, monks, bishops, and publics
Byzantine Iconoclasm and Imperial Power
Byzantine Iconoclasm and Imperial Power opens a focused path through Christian history: imperial measures against images, episcopal and monastic responses, military and regional settings, councils, material destruction, women rulers, and later narratives that sometimes exaggerate either total persecution or purely political causation
The Carolingian Christian Empire
The Carolingian Christian Empire opens a focused path through Christian history: royal anointing, papal alliance, conquest, forced baptism, liturgical and educational reform, monasteries, capitularies, and the coronation of Charlemagne within competing claims to Roman and Christian order
Papal Monarchy
Papal Monarchy opens a focused path through Christian history: the medieval expansion of papal legal, judicial, fiscal, diplomatic, and appointment authority, especially from Gregory VII through Innocent III, alongside local resistance, councils, canon law, and practical limits
The Investiture Contest
The Investiture Contest opens a focused path through Christian history: the conflict among popes, emperors, bishops, nobles, and cities over appointments, symbols, property, clerical reform, excommunication, and political legitimacy, conventionally framed by Gregory VII and Henry IV
Crusading and Papal Power
Crusading and Papal Power opens a focused path through Christian history: armed pilgrimage, papal authorization, penance, vows, taxation, military orders, conquest, anti-Jewish violence, Eastern Christian experiences, and the expansion and limits of papal mobilizing power
Medieval Inquisitions and Political Power
Medieval Inquisitions and Political Power opens a focused path through Christian history: multiple episcopal and papal mechanisms for investigating heresy, their legal procedures, reliance on secular enforcement, regional difference, coercion, archives, and the error of imagining one timeless centralized Inquisition
Church, Crown, and Magna Carta
Church, Crown, and Magna Carta opens a focused path through Christian history: the English church’s role in baronial conflict and the charter’s claim that the church should be free, involving Archbishop Stephen Langton, King John, papal overlordship, annulment, reissue, and later religious-liberty memory
The Western Schism and Rival Papal Obediences
The Western Schism and Rival Papal Obediences opens a focused path through Christian history: rival popes, cardinals, courts, universities, taxation, diplomacy, saints, and councils dividing Latin Christendom, exposing how papal legitimacy depended on political allegiance as well as canonical argument
The Hussite Revolution
The Hussite Revolution opens a focused path through Christian history: religious reform, national and social conflict, communion in both kinds, crusades against Hussites, radical and moderate coalitions, negotiated settlement, and the political afterlife of Jan Hus’s execution
The Doctrine of Discovery
The Doctrine of Discovery opens a focused path through Christian history: a modern legal and moral category drawing together papal bulls, conquest, land seizure, non-Christian sovereignty, colonial law, later court doctrine, indigenous critique, church repudiations, and disputes about continuity
The Spanish Inquisition and Monarchy
The Spanish Inquisition and Monarchy opens a focused path through Christian history: a tribunal authorized by the papacy but controlled by the crown, focused on converted Jews and Muslims, heresy, books, social discipline, archives, torture, confiscation, and state-building
Iberian Patronato and Royal Church Power
Iberian Patronato and Royal Church Power opens a focused path through Christian history: papal grants and crown control over mission, appointments, tithes, boundaries, conversion policy, slavery, indigenous communities, and colonial administration across Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds
Reformation Territorial Churches
Reformation Territorial Churches opens a focused path through Christian history: princes and city councils reorganizing worship, property, clergy, education, discipline, and confession, showing how Protestant reform depended on political authority while also generating resistance and new limits
English Royal Supremacy
English Royal Supremacy opens a focused path through Christian history: the break with papal jurisdiction and the crown’s claim to supreme governance of the English church, developed through Parliament, oaths, dissolution, reform, resistance, succession crises, and later constitutional settlement
Confessionalization and State Formation
Confessionalization and State Formation opens a focused path through Christian history: the historical model linking Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed discipline with schooling, bureaucracy, identity, and state consolidation, along with critiques that it overstates elite control and parallel development
Peace of Augsburg
Peace of Augsburg opens a focused path through Christian history: the legal settlement recognizing Lutheran and Catholic estates, often summarized as whose realm, their religion, while omitting cities, individual migration rights, excluded confessions, territorial complexity, and the settlement’s fragility
French Wars of Religion
French Wars of Religion opens a focused path through Christian history: interlocking confessional, dynastic, noble, urban, international, and popular violence involving Catholics and Huguenots, massacres, leagues, royal authority, toleration experiments, and the Edict of Nantes
Christianity and the Thirty Years’ War
Christianity and the Thirty Years’ War opens a focused path through Christian history: confessional division joined to dynastic rivalry, imperial law, foreign intervention, military devastation, chaplaincy, propaganda, diplomacy, and a peace that did not simply invent modern secular sovereignty
English Toleration Settlement
English Toleration Settlement opens a focused path through Christian history: limited legal worship for many Protestant dissenters after the Glorious Revolution, while tests, establishment, tithes, and exclusions of Catholics, non-Trinitarians, Jews, and non-Christians remained
Russian Imperial Orthodoxy and Autocracy
Russian Imperial Orthodoxy and Autocracy opens a focused path through Christian history: Peter the Great’s replacement of the patriarchate with the Holy Synod, state administration of church life, mission, schooling, nationalism, dissent, monastic renewal, and the contested formula Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality
Christianity and Modern Religious-Freedom Law
Christianity and Modern Religious-Freedom Law opens a focused path through Christian history: Christian arguments for and against liberty of conscience, disestablishment, minority protections, conversion, worship, education, conscientious objection, human-rights instruments, and disputes over equality and institutional autonomy
Religious Disestablishment in the United States
Religious Disestablishment in the United States opens a focused path through Christian history: the uneven dismantling of colonial church establishments through state constitutions, the First Amendment, dissenting activism, continued Protestant cultural power, slavery, indigenous dispossession, and later incorporation doctrine
The French Revolution and the Churches
The French Revolution and the Churches opens a focused path through Christian history: nationalization of church property, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, divided oaths, dechristianization, violence, constitutional cults, resistance, the Concordat, and long disputes over citizenship and church authority
Christianity and the Haitian Revolution
Christianity and the Haitian Revolution opens a focused path through Christian history: enslaved and free Christians, Catholic rites, African religious traditions, clergy, revolutionary leadership, colonial racism, emancipation, state formation, and the political theology of the first Black republic
Modern Christian Nationalisms
Modern Christian Nationalisms opens a focused path through Christian history: the varied projects joining Christian symbols, narratives, institutions, ethnicity, nation, sovereignty, and political exclusion, distinguished from ordinary patriotism and studied without assuming one ideology across every country
Kulturkampf
Kulturkampf opens a focused path through Christian history: Bismarck-era laws restricting Catholic institutions, education, clergy, and appointments, Catholic political mobilization, papal conflict, partial retreat, and wider European struggles between nation-states and transnational churches
Churches amid the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides
Churches amid the Armenian and Assyrian Genocides opens a focused path through Christian history: mass killing, deportation, destroyed dioceses and monasteries, clergy and lay victims, rescue and survival, international Christian advocacy, contested state memory, and the remaking of Armenian, Assyrian, Syriac, and related diasporas
Mexican Church–State Conflict and the Cristero War
Mexican Church–State Conflict and the Cristero War opens a focused path through Christian history: anticlerical constitutional provisions, enforcement under Calles, Catholic resistance, armed rebellion, martyr memory, negotiated settlement, lay activism, violence on multiple sides, and later church-state accommodation
Soviet Anti-Religious Repression
Soviet Anti-Religious Repression opens a focused path through Christian history: confiscation, propaganda, executions, prison, church closures, surveillance, controlled institutions, wartime accommodation, underground worship, collaboration disputes, and the different experiences of Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, and other communities
The German Church Struggle under Nazism
The German Church Struggle under Nazism opens a focused path through Christian history: German Christians, the Confessing Church, Catholic negotiations and resistance, state coordination, antisemitism, baptized Jews, military chaplaincy, courageous dissenters, institutional compromise, and postwar reckoning
Apartheid and South African Churches
Apartheid and South African Churches opens a focused path through Christian history: Reformed theological legitimation, ecumenical and Black Christian resistance, mission legacies, state repression, Kairos theology, conscientious objection, global solidarity, church division, and incomplete post-apartheid repair
Christianity and the People’s Republic of China
Christianity and the People’s Republic of China opens a focused path through Christian history: expulsion of foreign missions, state-recognized church bodies, house churches, patriotic theology, Cultural Revolution suppression, post-Mao revival, registration, surveillance, Vatican relations, and disputed statistics
Black Churches and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement
Black Churches and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement opens a focused path through Christian history: congregations, pastors, women organizers, students, songs, mass meetings, legal strategy, nonviolence, armed self-defense debates, federal power, white Christian opposition, and the movement beyond a few famous leaders
Liberation Theology and State Violence
Liberation Theology and State Violence opens a focused path through Christian history: base communities, bishops, priests, religious, Protestant partners, peasants, workers, military regimes, U.S. policy, martyrdom, Vatican scrutiny, armed-struggle debates, and church complicity as well as resistance
Churches and People Power in the Philippines
Churches and People Power in the Philippines opens a focused path through Christian history: Catholic leaders, Radio Veritas, religious communities, Protestant partners, lay crowds, election fraud, nonviolent resistance, Marian devotion, political transition, and later disputes over church influence
Churches and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda
Churches and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda opens a focused path through Christian history: the participation, failure, resistance, rescue, martyrdom, institutional responsibility, post-genocide trials, apology, reconciliation, and memory of predominantly Christian communities during mass violence