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Like the church they serve, the full-time Roman Catholic professionals, including religious Sisters and Brothers as well as priests, are experiencing a period of crisis. Fewer people are entering this career, and many are leaving it. The main losses are in the specialized ministries in which the best- educated have been engaged. Meanwhile the traditional struc tures are being revised and replaced with experimental forms. The authoritarian system is giving way to collegiality at all levels, from relations with the laity to those with the hierarchy. A new focus on task-orientation has emphasized professionali zation which, in turn, has promoted self-fulfillment and relative autonomy. Seven out of ten of the church professionals in America are religious Sisters who are reorganizing their com munities around smaller task forces with much greater local self-direction than ever before. The traditional assumption that a celibate clergy is much more effective professionally than a married clergy is now being widely questioned. The religious orders, while maintaining celibacy, are re-evaluating the prac tical aspects of the vows of poverty and obedience. The in creasing "openness" of the church is reflected in the seminaries and training places of church personnel, who are now receiving a much broader and diversified professional preparation.

Contemporary church architecture in Hungary is one of the most monumental and representative architectural topics of the period after the political change; following forty years of communist dictatorship it became possible for congregations to freely raise new church buildings, asserting at the same time their social rights. It is remarkable that among the newly built churches the majority appear through the uniting of diverse functions such as congregation centres. The sacral church spaces of these architectural complexes are flexible and thus often extended with the community´s educational or other functional units used for non-sacral social gatherings, as a result the church may really become the home of a community. The article tries to encompass this phenomenon by analysing in the context of historical antecedents a typical contemporary Catholic and Protestant Hungarian church.

During the nineteenth century, religious newspapers served as an integral source of information for numerous churchgoing individuals. Articles about the finer points of theology, minutes of denominational meetings, and developments regarding domestic and foreign missions filled the pages of these organs and kept ministers and laity informed about current ecclesiastical issues. The Civil War, however, caused editors and correspondents to include matters related to war and politics in addition to typical religious fare. The Church Advocate, the Church of God's national weekly published in Lancaster, is a little-known source that reveals aspects of daily life on the Pennsylvania home front and relates the experiences of soldiers in camp and on the battlefield.

AbstractIn 1992, Jet published "James Cleveland Infected L.A. Youth with HIV, $9 Mil. Lawsuit Claims," which detailed how the Chicago-born gospel musician had not only allegedly sexually abused his foster son, Christopher B. Harris, but had also "[given] him the AIDS virus." This article takes this incident of rumor or accusation as a critical opportunity to think about the archival reality of Black queer sexuality, on one hand, and sexual violence in Black gospel music history on the other. Using the legal documents from Christopher B. Harris v. Irwin Goldring as Special Administrator of the Estate of James Cleveland and commentary from Cleveland's contemporaries, it exhumes Cleveland from dusty church closets for consideration in the history of HIV and AIDS in African American Protestant church and gospel communities and in Black queer studies, ethnomusicology, and gender and sexuality studies. Further, it theorizes "Black church rumor" as a lens for Black queer religious studies and argues that Cleveland's perceived queer sexuality distracted from Harris's allegations of sexual abuse. Thus, it situates Cleveland—the person, the preacher, and the gospel legend—in the literature on "down low" sexuality and explicates the implications of Cleveland's legacy and role in Black gospel music production.

Chapter Four: Women in the Wider WorldJohn Chrysostom, Homily 9 on I Timothy; John Chrysostom, Greet Priscilla and Aquila; John Chrysostom, Homily 7 on Matthew; Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies; Jerome, Epistle 133; Jerome, Epistle 127; Jerome, Epistle 108; Palladius, Lausiac History; Faltonia Betitia Proba, Cento; Jerome, Epistle 128; Jerome, Epistle 107; Tertullian, On Baptism; John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood; John Chrysostom, Saints Bernice and Prosdoce; Canons of Nicaea and Chalcedon; Apostolic Constitutions; Jerome, Epistle 77; Socrates Scholasticus, Church History.

In this new book on the rise of commercial black 'mega churches,' Mary Hinton examines the rich legacy of the historic black church from the dual perspectives of theology and religious education. She explores the new religious models emerging from the tradition of the historic black church and questions whether they are continuing to operate and practice according to the wisdom of this unique form of American religion. Two mega church ministries, those of T. D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar, are examined in detail with regards to how they align with black church religious history. Hinton concludes by proposing that the fastest growing religious phenomenon within and outside of the black community in the United States-the mega church-should no longer be analyzed based on size alone. Instead, Hinton urges readers to consider the ecclesial structures of churches in making appropriate assessments in determining should and should not be classified as a commercial church

In honour of Mary-Anne Elizabeth Plaatjies-Van Huffel, this article is dedicated to her last endeavour, "to reflect on the road travelled" of the Uniting Reformed Church in Southern Africa (URCSA). Plaatjies-Van Huffel became outspoken against the lack of internal unity in URCSA, especially after the retraction of her nomination as Actuarius at the URCSA Cape Synod elections in 2018. In this regard, the article focuses particularly on reconciliation in URCSA with a focus on the role of the church media as a medium for reconciliation. The paper will focus on the media reporting of the DRMC church newspaper, Die Ligdraer, between 1990 and 1994 on church unification between the DRCA and the DRMC as a case study to reflect on what role church media can play in the internal unification processes in URCSA. The author conducts a rhetorical analysis of the DRMC's newspaper, Die Ligdraer, and its role in the facilitation of unification between two churches (DRMC and DRCA), with different ethnic and cultural traditions that became reconciled and united in the context of political transition within the broader South African context.

The debate over whether the early church basilica was "imperial" is bound up with many other questions, including the origins of the building type, and whether building types have fixed or only contingent associations. Krautheimer, for example, maintained that the imperial quality of the early Christian basilica was generally transmitted, as the church basilica was a descendant of the public basilica which it formally resembles, and which itself was in the imperial domain. Deichmann, by contrast, held that no architectural form has inherent meaning, rather buildings are constituted as Christian or imperial through use or posterior interpretation. Recent advances in semiotic theory offer a way around this impasse, by suggesting that the "basilica" is a discursive rather than a formal category, determined neither purely by form nor purely by use, but by a cultural and linguistic understanding; and that the properties of architectural space contribute to this understanding by thematizing culturally meaningful categories. Contrasting the Lateran Basilica to two earlier public basilicas, the Basilica Aemilia and the Basilica Ulpia, demonstrates a fundamental lack of resemblance without denying a possible genetic connection. Semiotic analysis of the Lateran's interior suggests that it thematized many qualities that were also imperial but not exclusively so, including opulence, visibility, and power. It also thematized privacy – not an imperial attribute – and did not refer to the imperial themes par excellence, victory and military prowess.