Howard Thurman, the great 20th-century African American thinker and pastor, has often been characterized as holding an antagonistic view of the Apostle Paul, based primarily on several passages in his most important work, Jesus and the Disinherited (1949). One of those passages describes the anti-Pauline position of his grandmother, a former slave, Nancy Ambrose. In this article we argue that Thurman was, in contrast to his grandmother, oftentimes an admirer of Paul. Our thorough consideration of Thurman’s published and unpublished work, as well as the work of his various intellectual and religious mentors, uncovers that he had a much more nuanced position on Paul than is normally described. He saw Paul as a profoundly radical and original thinker, who was nonetheless compromised by his Roman citizenship, distancing himself from his fellow Jews. For Thurman, a mentor to many in the civil rights movement, the question of citizenship was crucial, and he used Paul to help explore the complex intellectual, religious, and social situations of African Americans, caught between two worlds, ambivalent about trying to fit into a world that was ambivalent about them. In this way, for Thurman, Paul was a model of personal struggle and religious complexity.

The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.

During the Cold War, various political forces sought to shape the mindset of the Chinese diaspora. One understudied cultural influence that played an important role in reaching overseas Chinese was Chinese Christian literature. Focusing on Dengta (Lighthouse, 1956–1967), the first Chinese Christian magazine aimed at non-Christian communities in the diaspora, this study examines how the magazine developed an evangelical discourse that engaged with the cultural and spiritual identities of the Chinese diaspora amid political and ideological conflicts. Published in Hong Kong, which emerged as a hub for Chinese Christian literature in the post-war period, the magazine reflects a pivotal shift in Chinese Christian publishing: the start of a global movement aimed at evangelizing overseas Chinese. To appeal to the diaspora, Dengta adopted an ethnic and cultural rhetoric of Chineseness and presented Christian ideals in a context that resonated with the experiences of the Chinese diaspora. I argue that the Chineseness promoted by Dengta helped construct a transregional and transnational sense of belonging for overseas Chinese by framing a blend of traditional Chinese culture and modern knowledge within a Christian cosmic worldview. This study foregrounds the evangelical efforts of Christian literary workers to shape the diasporic experience amid the political tensions of the Cold War.

According to an influential narrative, the Cold War era Federal Bureau of Investigation led in the construction of a countersubversive machinery that was designed to punish progressive dissent and to uphold a conservative Christian capitalist public order. This narrative has been constructed with very little research done into the FBI’s actual views of and relations with the Cold War era political and religious Right, the ideology of which it was supposedly enforcing. Recent availability of FBI files makes such a study now possible – and yields results that destabilize the long-dominant narrative. These files show that the Bureau was in fact just as engaged in surveilling and repressing right-of-center organizations, and those of that era’s Christian Right in particular. Materials in the files suggests that far from being an empowering agent for the emerging Christian Right, the Cold War era FBI was in fact policing and enforcing a notably liberal containment consensus and that its views on “genuinely” American religiosity were very far from being far-right.