This article considers the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel; the development of the Law Commission’s recommendations on offences against religion and public worship in 1985 (which ultimately led to the abolition of the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales in 2008); and proposals from various international bodies which now argue for similar reform.

In our religiously and politically polarized landscape, it is worth recalling that the quest for Christian unity is as old as the faith itself. Unsurprisingly, Christian unity has remained a major theme for articles in the journal Church History since its founding in 1932, even to the extent that one of the American Society of Church History’s annual prizes came to be focused on issues of unity and disunity in light of the diversity of global Christianity. The quest to bring fractured Christian movements closer together has taken many forms, ranging from the “top down” of ecumenical councils, church confessions, formal dialogues, and efforts at denominational mergers, to the “bottom up” of grassroots social movements, utopian experiments, missional collaborations, and transcultural spiritual networking. It involves both internal theological formulations that anchor ecclesial identities and external outreach for public purposes such as nation building, ethnic solidarity, or resistance to oppression. Selecting a dozen articles on the subject of Christian unity has therefore required narrowing the scope to one particular angle, namely, to the quest itself. Rather than focusing on the internal theological dimensions of Christian unity, we have selected a range of articles on the striving for unity, better understanding across difference, and the recognition of commonalities between diverse and divided communities. These articles also explore the implications of this aspiration for the public and social dimensions of the faith. The quest for Christian unity is a multi-ecclesial and enduring theme with unexpected implications for the meaning of Christianity in various times and places.

Robert Testwood (c. 1490–1543), professional singer and evangelical mischief-maker, is the subject of many colourful anecdotes in Foxe’s Acts and monuments, including a scene in which Testwood mocks the veneration of the Virgin Mary by sabotaging a performance of a polyphonic motet in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. This act of sonic iconoclasm can be dated securely to mid-May 1538. It can be placed in a rich context of surveillance, propaganda, dissent and counter-dissent among the liturgical staff of St George’s as they navigated the changes of the early Reformation.

The Oxford English dictionary’s earliest citation for the coinages Baxterianism and Baxterian to refer to the distinctive ecclesiological and theological thought of the seventeenth-century Puritan divine Richard Baxter is dated 1835, with no examples of use after 1839. This is incorrect. These, and related terms, originated in the 1650s and were in regular use during the intervening 185 years (as well as thereafter to the present day). This essay traces the changing signification and usage of these terms from the religious controversies of the seventeenth-century through the development of denominational identities and of a moderate tradition within eighteenth-century dissent that contributed to the development of Unitarianism.