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This chapter affirms Pope John Paul II's description of ecumenical dialogue as involving ‘an exchange of gifts’ in order to identify a number of characteristic ecclesial endowments present in Methodism which Catholics might fruitfully receive in the process of Receptive Ecumenism. Methodism claims no special gifts, beyond those ordinarily bestowed on the church by the Holy Spirit for the sake of its mission, but has been raised up by God to spread scriptural holiness. Arising out of its historic mission and fruitfulness, Methodism has various ecclesial endowments to offer Catholics in any mutual exchange of gifts. These are considered here under six headings: Corporate Christianity (the nature of Christian community); Watching Over One Another in Love (discipline); Connexionalism and Christian Conference; The Contribution of Laypeople; The Call to Holiness; and The Means of Grace.

While it is generally assumed that the Second Vatican Council did not leave much room for public devotion outside the reformed and newly endorsed patterns of the Catholic liturgy, laid out in the Constitution on the sacred liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium), the present essay shows a remarkable case of the survival and transformation of a preconciliar devotional practice. The 3,000 crosses that still decorate the landscape in the Canadian province of Quebec are being maintained and taken care of by Catholic laypeople. In a complex process of selective (re)interpretation and (re)negotiation of what they see as key concepts of the Council–such as lay participation, openness to the world, and a positive attitude toward non-Catholics and non-Christians–these Quebeckers succeed in making the crosses into a new, revitalized expression of their postconciliar religiosity and their own distinct Catholic identity, with little interference from the Church authorities.

This chapter takes up the experiences of laypeople as they sifted through Sunday school lessons about the book of Genesis and sermons on a so-called new theology, where turn-of-the-century liberal piety refused to make forced choices between fixed positions, one right and the other wrong. Many Congregational laypeople found themselves in this liminal space as the nineteenth century drew to a close and the twentieth century began to unfold. They understood that the past, with all its traditions, was important, but they knew at the same time that it was not absolute. They were relativists but also believers, skeptical of old pieties but unable or unwilling to leave them behind.

This essay views the reception of the Council against the background of the transformation of the American Catholic landscape in the late 1950s and 1960s, when upward mobility and suburbanization contributed to the final collapse of the American Catholic subculture. Largely unrelated to the Council, these developments intersected with responses to the Council in interesting ways. In debates over the use of birth control, divorce and remarriage, and liturgical innovation, laypeople often took things into their own hands. In the city of Detroit, Catholic laity, in their interaction with Archbishop John Francis Dearden (1958-1980), occasionally used the authority of the Council in defending their own views, in particular with regard to the archbishop’s controversial actions in dealing with race related problems in the city in the 1960s.

This chapter focuses on “practical divinity,” or how Puritan ministers and laypeople understood the workings of redemption and developed a dense system of “means.” Summing up the essence of theology, the early seventeenth-century English theologian William Ames described it as “living to God,” or in such a way that the divine–human connection became visible. Well before Ames was emphasizing the interplay of piety and practice, the sixteenth-century humanist Desiderus Erasmus had advised clergy to avoid “intricate syllogisms” and focus on the “gospel life.” The makers of the practical divinity wanted to convert Catholics into Protestants and to stabilize the contours of orthodoxy, but a more telling goal was to raise the bar for all those who contented themselves with the vernacular wisdom summed up in the saying, “the God that made me, save me.” Nothing this simple would do. To these goals, the makers of the practical divinity added another, its value as an instrument of social and moral reformation.

This chapter discusses regroupings of laypeople living around the Mergen Monastery. Their concerns have influenced monastic arrangements. It shows that external people who care for what an institution stands for will intervene and insist, and will place a stake to make sure that their concern is symbolically and physically evident.

This chapter argues that in the highly laicized environment which was Virginia's Anglican Church, laypeople not only adapted English forms of church governance to the new Virginia environment. In the absence of a strong clergy—and thus in a religious environment where clerically dominated forms of religion such as preaching and the Eucharist could not occupy a central place in everyday piety—laypeople engaged in vital religious practices in the household. To venture a description of religion in early Virginia is to wade into a historical literature that is well established. In 1982 the terms of scholarly discussion of Anglicanism in colonial Virginia were set by Rhys Isaac. Gentry women had a greater opportunity for active participation in religious ritual than women had in communities where religious ritual unfolded principally in church buildings, and where religious subjectivity was more strictly ordered around preaching and the celebration of sacraments.

Focusing specifically on the tenor of the social relations to be observed among monks and novices in the monastery described in Chapter Two, this chapter describes the fairly attenuated degree of attachment that characterizes relations among the monastery’s residents: among themselves and with their lay supporters. Buddhist injunctions to minimize one’s attachments in this world complement a gender ideology that idealizes masculine autonomy. As a result, fluid, polite, but low-intensity relationships are the rule among the monastery’s residents, particularly as they grow older.

This chapter reviews how the Church of England fared at the local, diocesan, and parochial levels in England during the long eighteenth century from 1662, when the Church was re-established as an episcopal and liturgically ordered Church, to 1828, when, with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (and Roman Catholic emancipation in 1829), members of other Churches gained full citizen rights. The chapter examines the response of clergy and laypeople at the local level to contemporary intellectual and socio-economic changes and organizational reforms and renewal in the Church, noting regional variations. It considers the pastoral and disciplinary roles of bishops and clergy, and explores the focal role of the Church in communal life in towns and villages and the active engagement of laypeople, including women, with the Church. The relationship with Dissenters from the Established Church is also discussed, as well as the evidence for anti-clericalism.

This chapter presents deathbed testimonies containing evidence of faith. Ministers and laypeople tried to capture the essence of divine revelation in the moment before death, especially those of women, of divine transition from death to life, from the visible to the invisible world, from the dark glass of limited perception to unfiltered revelation—and the promise of redemption that it held for the “meanest and lowest earthen vessels.” During this time, Richard Saunders's View of the Soul and Thomas Willis's Two Discourses concerning the Soul unearth the observational capacities needed to watch the actions of the spirit recorded in the dying person's optic nerve.

This chapter examines how the relationships formed in Pentecostal churches—both vertical ties to church leaders and horizontal ties among laypeople—are worked out through ritual. Over the course of a Sunday morning worship service, believers move toward increasingly hierarchical practices like preaching, demonstrating the primacy of ties to church leaders in the Pentecostal relational world. However, egalitarian practices like prayer nevertheless persist throughout the ritual, reminding everyone that charismatic authority is by definition unstable. At any moment, the authority of the pastor may be challenged, and his position as a spiritual leader given to someone else. This potential for charismatic hierarchy to be upended serves as an important safeguard against what one believer called “corruption.”

This chapter argues that the patronage of the educated elite was also critically important to the success of the Chan school and its individual lineages. In the Song, support from members of the literati was crucial to the personal ambitions of a Chan master, and to the fate of particular Chan lineages, because of the elite's economic power and its power to influence appointments to the abbacies of public monasteries. Only as an abbot at a public monastery could a Chan master give transmission to his students, and Chan masters were very aware that they required the support of officials and local literati if they wished to obtain abbacies and continue their lineages. Appealing to the interests of the educated elite thus became an important subtext in the Chan school, and the influence of elite laypeople ultimately contributed in significant ways to the shaping of Chan ideology and factional—or sectarian—consciousness.

This chapter examines how physicians developed the concept of place to reconcile the complexities of race and sex when defining bodies and their health and sicknesses. In the increasingly contested political arena of the antebellum years, southern physicians knew that their work would most likely be received favorably if it reinforced the region's distinctiveness. Awareness that some places were inherently unhealthy and that some people were more likely to get sick in them was part of the anecdotal medical lore that informed physicians' thinking about bodies as placed. Doctors were well aware that southerners fell victim to different diseases and had to be treated differently from people elsewhere in the nation. Thus, doctors argued that a specifically southern medical theory and practice was necessary. This chapter explores how nineteenth-century physicians seeking to understand the consequences of placed bodies invoked the South's climate and the concept of acclimation to explain disease. It shows that laypeople shared physicians' convictions that medicine was specific to place and that bodies were shaped by their environment.

This chapter examines how laypeople viewed the ways commonsense defined the interactions between mind and body in the cause, course, and treatment of various diseases. During the antebellum period, commonsense notions about the mind–body connection influenced ideas not only about race, sex, and class, but also about many other aspects of life such as opportunity, destiny, sexuality, marriage, and personality. Laypeople of both races preferred to define health and sickness for themselves, although slaves also had to deal with their owners' interference. Slaveholders were concerned about shamming, the deliberate invocation of illness on the part of healthy slaves to gain respite from hard labor. Slaves had very different explanations for the origins and meaning of disease than whites did, while women, especially white women, struggled to maintain the attitudes they believed would protect them and their babies from harm during pregnancy and childbirth. This chapter compares the views of white southerners and slaves when it came to mind, body, the emotions, and the external causes of illness.

This chapter shows that laypeople's views about bodies were important to physicians because they defined the parameters of what was possible within the daily practice of medicine. Members of both races and sexes sought ways to be healthy and to find meaning in the suffering of their bodies. For whites, the meaning of their bodies was expressed as commonsense truisms that linked body and mind in a web of responsibility for health and sickness. Slaves believed that they were less personally responsible for the state of their health and instead recognized the importance of the physical conditions imposed upon them by their owners. This chapter examines how physicians tried to reconcile sex and race as they sought to understand their patients' bodies and minds, in part by obtaining consent from them. It also considers how physicians claimed for themselves the responsibility of defining the mind–body connection as well as health and disease for everyone in the South.