People have been denied citizenship in America for many reasons. Would it surprise you to learn that four of those people were denied because they were conscientious objectors to war? The government believed that because they were not willing to bear arms in defense of the country, they were not attached to the principles of the Constitution, as required by naturalization law. Ironically, none of these people were eligible for military service because of their age, and two of them were women. Furthermore, when both women were denied citizenship it was during a period when women could not...

Composed in 1809 in order to organize and direct a loosely assembled network of Scots-Irish Presbyterians on the Western Pennsylvania frontier, the Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington never quite achieved the immediate objectives that compelled its composition. Yet the document's lofty vision of a unified Christian Church, restored to the peace and purity that the New Testament had preached and promised, has for generations fueled the imagination and fired the commitment of millions of Christians worldwide--with, often, quite contradictory results. Emerging from...

Douglas Geyer's illuminating analysis of Mark 4:35-6:56 explains why the Gospel ends as it does in the earliest manuscripts-abruptly, at 16:8, with the words, "for they were afraid." This ending, with women fleeing the empty tomb in "trembling and astonishment," has long been considered "problematic," and, in the several attempts to rewrite it, Mark 16 has become a source of unending mischief. Geyer's work draws on a vast literature of fear, anomaly, terror, and dread in the ancient world to demonstrate that this ending is a consistent, overriding theme of Mark's Gospel. In Mark we see and...