In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation""and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West.

Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation s protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science as the source of all truth necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge.

"The Unintended Reformation" asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

Thousands of men and women were executed for incompatible religious views in sixteenth-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively for the first time, providing a compelling argument for the importance of martyrdom as both a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

Brad Gregory explores Protestant, Catholic, and Anabaptist martyrs in a sustained fashion, addressing the similarities and differences in their self-understanding. He traces the processes and impact of their memorialization by co-believers, and he reconstructs the arguments of the ecclesiastical and civil authorities responsible for their deaths. In addition, he assesses the controversy over the meaning of executions for competing views of Christian truth and the intractable dispute over the distinction between true and false martyrs. He employs a wide range of sources, including pamphlets, martyrologies, theological and devotional treatises, sermons, songs, woodcuts and engravings, correspondence, and legal records. Reconstructing religious motivation, conviction, and behavior in early modern Europe, Gregory shows us the shifting perspectives of authorities willing to kill, martyrs willing to die, martyrologists eager to memorialize, and controversialists keen to dispute.

In a work that is as much about the present as the past, Brad Gregory identifies the unintended consequences of the Protestant Reformation and traces the way it shaped the modern condition over the course of the following five centuries. A hyperpluralism of religious and secular beliefs, an absence of any substantive common good, the triumph of capitalism and its driver, consumerism-all these, Gregory argues, were long-term effects of a movement that marked the end of more than a millennium during which Christianity provided a framework for shared intellectual, social, and moral life in the West. Before the Protestant Reformation, Western Christianity was an institutionalized worldview laden with expectations of security for earthly societies and hopes of eternal salvation for individuals. The Reformation's protagonists sought to advance the realization of this vision, not disrupt it. But a complex web of rejections, retentions, and transformations of medieval Christianity gradually replaced the religious fabric that bound societies together in the West. Today, what we are left with are fragments: intellectual disagreements that splinter into ever finer fractals of specialized discourse; a notion that modern science-as the source of all truth-necessarily undermines religious belief; a pervasive resort to a therapeutic vision of religion; a set of smuggled moral values with which we try to fertilize a sterile liberalism; and the institutionalized assumption that only secular universities can pursue knowledge. The Unintended Reformation asks what propelled the West into this trajectory of pluralism and polarization, and finds answers deep in our medieval Christian past.

A historical investigation of the phenomena of religious conversion from ancient to modern times. This volume explores the subject of religious conversion over broad expanses of time and space, considering cases from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries and from settings across the world. Leading scholars from a variety of historical sub-fields address the theme at a moment when the utility of the concept of conversion is vigorously debated. The historical settings treated here stretch from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century southern India and Andean Peru, from Bohemia to China during the age of the Reformations, from the fifteenth-century Low Countries to seventeenth-century New France and from the nineteenth-century Minnesota borderlands to late colonial Zimbabwe and modern India. The book's broad mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge about particular places and times, and spark new thinking about religious change, cultural appropriations, and interactive emergence across discipline and fields. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, is also published by the University of Rochester Press.

On the 500th anniversary of the Reformation comes this compelling, illuminating, and expansive religious history that examines the complicated and unintended legacies of Martin Luther and the epochal movement that continues to shape the world today.For five centuries, Martin Luther has been lionized as an outspoken and fearless icon of change who ended the Middle Ages and heralded the beginning of the modern world. In Rebel in the Ranks, Brad Gregory, renowned professor of European history at Notre Dame, recasts this long-accepted portrait. Luther did not intend to start a revolution that would divide the Catholic Church and forever change Western civilization. Yet his actions would profoundly shape our world in ways he could never have imagined.Gregory analyzes Luther's inadvertent role in starting the Reformation and the epochal changes that followed. He reveals how Luther's insistence on the Bible as the sole authority for Christian truth led to conflicting interpretations of its meaning--and to the rise of competing churches, political conflicts, and social upheavals. Ultimately, he contends, some of the major historical and cultural developments that arose in its wake--including the Enlightenment, individual self-determination and moral relativism, and a religious freedom that protects one's right to worship or even to reject religion--would have appalled Luther: a reluctant revolutionary, a rebel in the ranks, whose goal was to make society more Christian, yet instead set the world on fire.

Research indicates that on average, Americans change their religious affiliation at least once during their lives. Today, a number of evangelical Christians are converting to Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism. Longtime Evangelicals often fail to understand the attraction of these non-Evangelical Christian traditions. Journeys of Faith examines the movement between these traditions from various angles. Four prominent converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Evangelicalism and Anglicanism describe their new faith traditions and their spiritual journeys into them. Response chapters offer respectful critiques. Contributors include Wilbur Ellsworth (Eastern Orthodoxy), with a response by Craig Blaising; Francis J. Beckwith (Roman Catholicism), with Gregg Allison responding; Chris Castaldo (Evangelicalism) and Brad Gregory s Catholic response; and Lyle Dorsett (Anglicanism), with a response by Robert Peterson. This book will provide readers with first-hand accounts of thoughtful Christians changing religious affiliation or remaining true to the traditions they have always known. Pastors, counselors and students of theology will gain a wealth of insight into current faith migration within the church today."

While religious history and intellectual history are both active, dynamic fields of contemporary historical inquiry, historians of ideas and historians of religion have too often paid little attention to one another's work. The intellectual historian Quentin Skinner urged scholars to attend to the contexts as well as the texts of authors, in order to 'see things their way.' Where religion is concerned, however, historians have often failed to heed this good advice; this book helps to remedy that failure. The editors and contributors urge intellectual historians to explore the religious dimensions of ideas and at the same time commend the methods of intellectual history to historians of religion.

The introduction is followed by an essay by Brad Gregory reflecting on issues related to the study of the history of religious ideas. Subsequent essays by John Coffey, Anna Sapir Abulafia, Howard Hotson, Richard A. Muller, and Willem J. van Asselt explore the importance of religion in the intellectual history of Great Britain and Europe in the medieval and early modern periods. James Bradley shifts forward with his essay on religious ideas in Enlightenment England. Mark Noll and Alister Chapman deal respectively with British influence on the writing of religious history in America and with the relationship between intellectual history and religion in modern Britain. David Bebbington provides a concluding reflection on the challenges inherent in restoring the centrality of religion to intellectual history.

"This terrific collection of essays will give all intellectual historians a lot to think about. With learning, courtesy, and precision, the authors make clear that historians of early modern and modern thought, in Britain, Europe, and America, need to pay far more attention than they have to religious ideas and categories. At the same time, though, they show that historians of ideas can provide historians of theology with important methodological lessons." --Anthony Grafton, Princeton University

""Seeing Things Their Way "is a unique and important volume that explores and applies in the field of religious thought the methodology of intellectual history pioneered by Quentin Skinner. This rich interdisciplinary collection not only addresses for the first time at book length the strengths, weaknesses, and implications of this approach within the context of the history of religious ideas, but also offers some exemplary exercises in the good practice of that art. It will appeal to historians of political thought and specialists in intellectual history as well as to scholars interested in the place and treatment of religious ideas in social history." --Richard Rex, Queens' College, University of Cambridge

"There is no greater service that the historian can provide to our own understanding of ourselves in time and place than to reconstruct "how" past societies understood themselves in time and place. When historians fail to include a clear analysis of how the most articulate of our forebears struggled to locate God and his immanence into their studies of themselves and the societies they sought to build, those same historians impoverish our understanding of how our pasts inform our present and how and at what cost (if any) we exclude God from our sense of what makes a just society. This book teaches us that, and much more." --John Morrill, University of Cambridge