The bestselling book, If Christ Came to Chicago, was published in 1894. It was a work of sensationalist, exposé journalism, documenting with titillating details the city’s rampant vice, dire social problems such as unemployment and homelessness, and corrupt officials and politicians. The book was, among other things, a contribution to the Social Gospel movement. It even inspired Charles M. Sheldon’s bestselling novel, In His Steps (1896), with its refrain, “What would Jesus do?” The author of If Christ Came to Chicago, W. T. Stead (1849–1912), however, was an Englishman. Stead’s earlier efforts at the New Journalism had been focused upon London, including his “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” articles and ghostwriting In Darkest England and the Way Out (1890) for the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth. When he turned to the Windy City, however, Stead was attacked for being an interloper, a foreigner who should not have presumed to pronounce a harsh judgment upon an American city. One of his responses to this charge was to try to recast himself as an insider through evoking the category of “our common English-speaking race.” This article explores transatlantic crossings, collaborations, and condemnations. Stead himself died in one of the greatest failed transatlantic crossings of the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic.

This article comparatively examines commentaries by sixteenth-century European reformers on the apostle Paul’s “allegory” in Galatians 4:21–31. Older scholarship on the reformers’ relationship to allegorical exegesis tended to view the reformers as strict literalists, leading to charges that Protestantism created an anti-figurative culture. More recent work, however, has frequently argued that the reformers in fact continued to subtly interpret the Bible allegorically, even to the point that some regularly contradicted their theoretical opposition to allegory in their actual exegetical practice. I argue that a close reading of the reformers’ commentaries on Galatians 4:21–31 challenges both of these interpretations. Rather than seeing the reformers as solely concerned with whether scripture should be read allegorically, this article points to a more nuanced set of questions that the reformers debated concerning the nature, status, and purposes of allegorical exegesis. Understanding these sixteenth-century questions supports seeing a high degree of consistency between various reformers’ hermeneutical theory and their exegetical practice, while also offering a much richer set of considerations for what it means to speak of the reformers’ spectrum of approaches to allegory than has typically been given. The reformers offered no unified approach to allegory but instead gave a rich variety of approaches to this perennial literary and exegetical conundrum.

Excommunication – being summarily cut off from the sacraments of the Catholic Church – was the logical, if extreme, expression of Ultramontanism, and of the paternal metaphor enshrined at its heart. It was the ultimate weapon in the Church’s battle with critics who sought to undercut or challenge its chosen role as privileged mediator between the state apparatus and the people, whether this came in the form of open rebellion against said state, or in the demand for individual intellectual freedom, or both. Studying the infamous cases of nineteenth-century excommunicates, Joseph Guibord and Louis Riel (together with their predecessors, the ill–fated Patriotes) yields important insights into the nature of excommunication, both when it “worked” (from the perspective of those who imposed it) and, just as crucially, when it did not.

The desegregation of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) offers a critical case study for scholars of American religious history, illuminating how white evangelical institutions responded to the racial transformations of the post-civil rights era. Unlike southern evangelical colleges that defended segregation on overt theological grounds, DTS never explicitly framed its exclusion of Black students within a scriptural mandate. Instead, the seminary’s shift from racial exclusion to intentional Black student recruitment in the 1970s reflects what Martin Luther King Jr. once described as a “more cautious than courageous” approach. Anchored in biblical literalism, DTS president John Walvoord’s reluctance to use scripture to justify segregation played a key role in the school’s transformation. This article fills a gap in the historiography by examining how institutional culture, theological commitments, and broader cultural pressures converged to produce a quiet and incremental model of desegregation—neither overtly racist nor actively prophetic—offering a more complex portrait of evangelicalism and race in the second half of the twentieth century.