Histories of Protestant missions use the “modern missionary movement” to describe the voluntary societies, networks, and structures that emerged around William Carey in the late eighteenth century. Using a conceptual-historical framework, this article distinguishes organizational modernization—the voluntary societies and transnational infrastructures that sustained overseas expansion—from methodological modernization—the redefinition of missionary aims, instruments, and criteria of success. Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn’s indigenous-church model treated conversion and the formation of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches as the measures of achievement. From the 1860s onward, however, initiatives associated with Hamlin and Bliss in Istanbul and Beirut challenged the subordinate status of schooling within this hierarchy, extending debates evident in Alexander Duff’s earlier program in India. Education, medicine, and philanthropy became constitutive expressions of Christian purpose rather than merely auxiliary instruments of evangelization. Social Gospel thought supplied a theological vocabulary for this widening field of action, while Howard S. Bliss’s “modern missionary” retrospectively articulated its implications. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East, the article proposes a layered periodization: organizational modernization enabled transnational expansion, whereas methodological modernization embedded evangelistic purpose within durable institutions of knowledge, professional formation, and social transformation without abandoning conversion or religious identity.
After the expulsions of 1420/21 in the persecution known as the ‘Vienna Gezerah’, Pressburg in the Kingdom of Hungary (today Bratislava in Slovakia) became a place of refuge for a number of Jews from the Duchy of Austria. They found shelter there under the protection of King Sigismund of Hungary until his death in 1437, when Duke Albrecht V of Austria—the very ruler who had initiated the Gezerah—was elected the new King of Hungary. Although the Gezerah had been characterized by forced baptisms ordered by the duke, Albrecht’s religious motives for the persecution have recently been called into question. This article examines two individual cases from Pressburg, which are documented in letters from 1438, with regard to Albrecht’s attitude towards Jewish conversion after his coronation and explores the extent to which the Pressburg sources allow conclusions to be drawn about his motives during the Gezerah.
This article reads Dante’s Commedia as a mythic-religious macro-narrative of spiritual transformation. Building on the interpretation of the journey as an itinerarium mentis in Deum, it examines the Thomistic degrees of charity—incipientes, proficientes, and perfecti—and their respective studia principalia as a framework for interpreting the pilgrim’s changing formative priorities. The contribution lies in connecting moral discernment, relational practices, and contemplative adherence within a single account of growth in charity. Close readings of Francesca and Ulysses examine the difficulty of judging apparently compelling forms of love and aspiration; purgatorial intercession shows how progress in the good becomes mutual assistance; and Piccarda’s explanation and the examination on charity in Paradiso XXVI illuminate the integration of love of God with love of others. Aquinas’s formulation is considered alongside its Augustinian source, Bonaventure’s contemplative itinerary, and scholarship that distinguishes Dante’s penitential ethics from Thomistic moral systematization. Finally, the article explores how the poem’s symbolic participation invites readers to examine the orientation of their own desires and relationships, bringing spiritual transformation into dialogue with religious self-interpretation and identity formation.
In this article, I outline a model of “messianic psychoanalysis”—a psychoanalysis “slightly adjusted” to incorporate the future-oriented dimension of hope characteristic of the Jewish messianic idea—through a close reading of one of Sigmund Freud’s most significant essays on literature, namely his analysis of Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva. I argue that the possibility of a messianic reading of both Jensen’s novella and Freud’s interpretation depends on the relation between first love and new love, which mirrors the dialectic of past and future found in philosophical models of messianic temporality developed by Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch. Drawing on the work of these thinkers, I demonstrate that Gradiva, at the level of its deep structure, is a psychoanalytic story about the possibility that love—and with it, singular life—can indeed have a future, provided it parts ways with the past while remaining faithful to it in a different manner. The “triumph of love” presented in the novella rests on a fundamentally messianic conception of happiness, understood as a new response to the original enigma of the Other: an enigma transformed from the site of catastrophic trauma into the source of previously unimaginable bliss.
Church music is commonly discussed as a liturgical, theological, aesthetic, or cultural practice, while its character as a professional field has received less systematic attention. This article conceptualises church music as a liturgical profession by bringing Christopher Small’s concept of musicking into dialogue with Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions. Musicking makes it possible to understand musical activity in worship as situated, relational, and participatory, while Abbott’s theory highlights the application of specialised knowledge and professional judgement to concrete cases. The article argues that professionalism in church music does not consist in exclusive control over musical activity or in technical and artistic competence alone. Rather, it concerns the situated application of specialised musical knowledge to the shaping of ritual practice. Pastoral services—particularly baptisms, weddings, and funerals—serve as a test case because musical decisions frequently intersect with biography, pastoral relationships, participation, and competing professional responsibilities. Drawing additionally on Rudolf Stichweh and Isolde Karle, the article conceptualises professional jurisdiction as specialised judgement concerning the musical shaping of ritual practice and develops interprofessional translation as a way of relating distinct professional rationalities. This article argues that church music can be understood as a liturgical profession whose identity is sustained by the relationship between specialised musical expertise, differentiated responsibility, and interprofessional cooperation.
