In the mid-twentieth century, a contest played out between evangelicals and mainline Protestant denominations over which organizations would have access to the radio airwaves and whose message, including whose theology, would receive the widest hearing. While networks favored the mainline denominations, a host of independent evangelical stations and the National Association of Evangelicals’ broadcast arm countered the impression that network religion represented American religion more generally. Against this backdrop, the Atlanta-based Protestant Hour radio show, which began as one station in 1945 but boasted 600 participating stations by 1963, sounded a liberal theology that promoted the liberalization of Protestantism throughout its largely southern listening area. Building on Gary Dorrien’s characterization of liberal theology, this essay shows how the theology of three preachers who frequently appeared on the show—Methodist Robert E. Goodrich, Jr., Presbyterian John A. Redhead, and Lutheran Edmund Steimle—presented this liberalism and echoed such evangelical elements as a heightened Christocentricity, repeated reference to the Bible, and personal appeal. Despite the later decline of mainline Protestantism, a type of evangelical liberalism in the 1950s and early 1960s attracted numerous radio listeners in the south contrary to the stereotype of southerners as fundamentalists who embraced a conservative theology.

This article examines how clerical reformers in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries utilized the Old Testament figure of Deborah to legitimize and encourage the active participation of elite laywomen in ecclesiastical reform. Focusing on key figures such as the countesses Matilda of Tuscany and Adelaide of Turin, the study shows how reformers crafted allegorical and historical links between biblical women and contemporary noblewomen, promoting the latter as agents of reform. Ecclesiastical reformers such as Peter Damian and Bonizo of Sutri made particular use of the Book of Judges’ Deborah to explore concepts of female secular authority defending the Latin Christian Church. The article argues that these reformers newly emphasized Deborah’s militant and authoritative role in the Old Testament rather than promoting existing late antique and early medieval readings of Deborah as a wife, widow, and mother. This shift in exegetical interpretations of Deborah directly supported the roles of elite laywomen in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries as vital co-participants in the ecclesiastical reform movement.

This article examines the series of debates concerning the status of the Roman Catholic Church in the revolutionary Philippines and in doing so demonstrates the contested legacies of the Patronato at the end of Spanish colonial rule. The government of Emilio Aguinaldo in 1898, which in 1899 was inaugurated as a republic, sought to exercise the prerogatives of ecclesiastical patronage as it had been under Spain. By formally regulating and controlling ecclesiastical appointments, the Philippine state addressed the long-standing issue of ecclesiastical secularization (the transfer of parishes from the regular clergy to the secular clergy) that pitted Spanish friars against Filipino diocesan priests, spurring the nationalist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. In effect, the Aguinaldo government assumed the functions of patronage to ensure the fulfillment of nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the status of Catholicism in the new nation-state was debated by Filipino laity and clergy even beyond the center of the revolution. Filipino clergy, for their part, almost unanimously rejected government oversight of ecclesiastical affairs despite demanding church-state union and continued government support. Ecclesiastical affairs in this period were in a constant state of flux, negotiation, and dialogue, underscoring the complex and contested legacy of patronage after Spanish rule.