This volume is the first comparative study of the political tools employed by the Popes and the perception of the Papacy in different regions, so combining the perspectives of the Roman center and that of the churches on the periphery. The Roman view of the means by which it exerted its influence over the Church is set against the reaction of the various regions to them. In this way the discrepancy between Roman prototypes and actual interpretations from the mid-11th to the end of the 12th century is further enhanced by the differences revealed by contrasting regional sketches.

The debate over women's roles in the Southern Baptist Convention's conservative ascendance is often seen as secondary to theological and biblical concerns. Elizabeth Flowers argues, however, that for both moderate and conservative Baptist women - all of whom had much at stake - disagreements that touched on their familial roles and ecclesial authority have always been primary. And, in the turbulent postwar era, debate over their roles caused fierce internal controversy. While the legacy of race and civil rights lingered well into the 1990s, views on women's submission to male authority provided the most salient test by which moderates were identified and expelled in a process that led to significant splits in the Church. In Flowers's expansive history of Southern Baptist women, the "woman question" is integral to almost every area of Southern Baptist concern: hermeneutics, ecclesial polity, missionary work, church-state relations, and denominational history. Flowers's analysis, part of the expanding survey of America's religious and cultural landscape after World War II, points to the South's changing identity and connects religious and regional issues to the complicated relationship between race and gender during and after the civil rights movement. She also shows how feminism and shifting women's roles, behaviors, and practices played a significant part in debates that simmer among Baptists and evangelicals throughout the nation today.

This volume attempts to put the clergy in the context of the issues and debates of the nineteenth century, treating the social history of the clergy, the repeated attempts to reform it, and the impact of these reforms on the structure and outlook of rank-and file parish clergy.

Originally published in 1983.

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