Curated playlist
Christian terminology
- PentecostalismPentecostalism begins with a specific moment: a watch night service in Topeka, Kansas, on the 1st of January, 1901, when students at a small Bible school started speaking in tongues and believed they had received the baptism of the Holy…
- EucharistThe Eucharist sits at the center of Christian worship, a rite performed in churches from Ethiopian highlands to Scandinavian cities, each time involving bread and a cup. Its name comes from the Greek word eucharistia, meaning simply…
- Western SchismThe Western Schism began on the 20th of September 1378, with a single, startling act: a group of French cardinals gathered at Fondi and elected a second pope. There was already a pope. He was sitting in Rome. For the next thirty-nine…
- BaptistsBaptists are a Protestant tradition distinguished by one radical conviction: that faith must come before water. No infant can choose to believe, so no infant should be baptized. That single idea, first articulated by English exiles…
- Pauline epistlesThe Pauline epistles are the thirteen books of the New Testament attributed to Paul the Apostle. They rank among the very earliest Christian writings that still exist. They open a window onto the beliefs and disputes of early Christianity.…
- SacramentA sacrament, at its most stripped-back, is a Christian rite that has been judged to be particularly important and significant. Yet that tidy definition conceals a dispute running across nearly two thousand years of Christian life. How many…
- MethodismMethodism began on the 24th of May 1738, when John Wesley stood in a Moravian service in Aldersgate and felt his heart, in his own words, "strangely warmed." He recorded in his journal: "I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for…
- Confession (religion)Confession, in many of the world's religions, is the act of acknowledging sinful thoughts and actions. It can be spoken directly to a deity, shared with a fellow believer, or formally received by an ordained minister. What unites all these…
- BaptismBaptism sits at the threshold of Christian life. A candidate steps toward water - or water comes to them - and something is said to change forever. Across thousands of Christian denominations, a remarkable number agree on this single act…
- EvangelicalismEvangelicalism is a worldwide, interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity, and the word at its heart comes from a single Greek term. That word is euangelion, meaning good news, a reference to the message of salvation…
- UnitarianismUnitarianism is a nontrinitarian movement of Christianity built on a single, radical conviction: that God is one being, and one person alone. On the 22nd of January, 1556, a Polish student named Piotr of Goniądz stood up at a general synod…
- Investiture ControversyThe Investiture Controversy began with a letter. In the winter of 1076, King Henry IV of Germany wrote to Pope Gregory VII using a salutation that was not exactly diplomatic. He addressed the pope as "Hildebrand, at present not pope but…
- PresbyterianismPresbyterianism takes its name not from a creed or a charismatic founder, but from a word for an elder. Presbyter. The idea is almost startlingly democratic: that the congregation, not a bishop or a king, should govern itself through…
- Grace in ChristianityGrace in Christianity is described in one definition as God's favor, a "share in the divine life of God", and a gift that is "generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved". It is the kind of thing, theologians insist, that cannot…
- Cenobitic monasticismThe word cenobite emerged from the Greek terms koinos and bios, meaning common life. Ancient writers applied this label to followers of Pythagoras in Crotone, Italy. These early groups formed communes dedicated to philosophical study and…
- NontrinitarianismNontrinitarianism is the name given to a broad family of Christian belief that refuses one of mainstream Christianity's most defining claims: that God is three co-equal, co-eternal persons united in a single essence. The question at the…
- Church FathersThe Church Fathers wrote letters, sermons, and philosophical treatises that would shape the beliefs of billions of people across two millennia. Some were bishops. Some were monks. One was a court secretary who gave up politics for a…
- PurgatoryPurgatory sits at the intersection of mercy and justice, promising neither heaven nor hell but something in between. The word itself traces back through Anglo-Norman and Old French to the Latin purgatorium, meaning simply a place of…
- ProtestantismProtestantism began with a protest. Six princes of the Holy Roman Empire, joined by rulers of fourteen Imperial Free Cities, issued a formal dissent against the edict of the Diet of Speyer in 1529. They were the first people ever to be…
- PaganismPaganism is a word that carries the weight of centuries of argument, misuse, and reinvention. Before the 20th century, no one actually called themselves a pagan to describe their own religion. The label was invented by the early Christian…
- LutheranismLutheranism began with an insult. In July 1519, during the Leipzig Debate, German Scholastic theologian Johann Maier von Eck reached for the oldest weapon in the heresy-hunter's arsenal: name the movement after the man you want to…
- English DissentersEnglish Dissenters were Protestants who broke from the Church of England across three centuries, from the 1500s through the 1800s. Their central complaint was simple: the established church had not gone far enough in purging itself of…
- BishopThe word bishop comes from a Greek term meaning "overseer" or "supervisor," and for roughly two thousand years that single idea has rippled through governments, wars, and religious institutions on every continent. What began as a Greek…
- New TestamentThe New Testament is a collection of 27 texts written in Koine Greek that forms the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It sits alongside the Old Testament, which draws primarily on the Hebrew Bible, and together they are…
- Christian martyrChristian martyrdom begins with a single Greek word: mártys. It means witness. Not hero, not saint, not sacrifice. Just witness. That gap between the word's origin and what it eventually came to mean tells the whole story of how a religion…
- Mass (liturgy)Mass ends with two Latin words: Ite, missa est. The phrase means roughly go, the dismissal is made, and it may be the source of the very name Mass. The Catholic Church calls this liturgy "the source and summit of the Christian life," the…
- Edict of MilanThe Edict of Milan did not make Christianity the official religion of Rome. That is the first misconception worth clearing up. What happened on the 13th of February 313 AD was something more nuanced and, in its way, more remarkable. Two…
- Threefold officeThe threefold office of Jesus Christ rests on a single Latin phrase: munus triplex. Three roles. Three functions. One person. Prophet, priest, and king. The idea reaches back to ancient Israel, where oil poured over a person's head marked…
- Diocletianic PersecutionOn the 23rd of February 303, the Diocletianic Persecution began not with soldiers in the street but with a building coming down. Diocletian ordered the newly built Christian church at Nicomedia to be razed, its scriptures burned, and its…
- Sacramental breadSacramental bread sits at the center of one of the oldest rituals in Christianity. Known by many names, the host, the Lamb, Communion bread, Communion wafer, or Sacred host, it is the bread consecrated during the Eucharist and understood,…
- Christian mysticismChristian mysticism sits at the heart of a tradition stretching back to the second century AD, and it begins with a surprisingly practical question: how does a human being actually encounter the living God? Not through argument or doctrine…
- ChristiansChristians are the largest single religious community on the planet, numbering approximately 2.4 billion people as of 2020 - roughly a third of the entire human race. That figure has grown from around 600 million in 1910, a more than…
- Counter-ReformationThe Counter-Reformation was a sweeping Catholic resurgence that grew in response to, and in parallel with, the Protestant Reformation. At its center stood the Council of Trent, which met sporadically from the 13th of December 1545 to the…
- Greek East and Latin WestGreek East and Latin West began as a geographic shorthand for the two halves of a single civilization, yet the divide they named would prove durable enough to split Christianity itself. Picture the Roman world at its height: one empire,…
- Nicene ChristianityNicene Christianity is the doctrinal tradition that binds together the vast majority of Christian churches on earth today. Its foundation is a single text: the Nicene Creed, hammered out at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and then…
- Holy Roman EmpireThe Holy Roman Empire was, in the words of the philosopher Voltaire, "in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire." That sardonic line has clung to it for centuries. Yet this sprawling polity held together much of Central and Western Europe…
- Judeo-ChristianJudeo-Christian is a term that carries enormous political and cultural weight, yet it began its life with a surprisingly narrow meaning. In a letter dated the 17th of October, 1821, Alexander McCaul used the phrase "Judæo Christian" simply…
- Sacramental winePaul the Apostle wrote in 1 Corinthians 10:16 about wine being used in the earliest celebrations of the Lord's Supper. In the Early Church, both clergy and laity received the consecrated wine by drinking from the chalice after receiving a…
- IconAn icon, according to a story recorded by the sixth-century writer Theodorus Lector, once cost a painter the use of his own hands. A pagan artist had been commissioned to paint an image of Jesus but used the wrong model, giving him the…
- Thirty-nine ArticlesThe Thirty-nine Articles of Religion were finalised in 1571. But one of their most contested clauses had spent eight years deliberately omitted. Article 29 declares that the wicked do not eat the Body of Christ. Elizabeth I had removed it…
- ChristendomChristendom is a word coined in the 9th century by a single scribe, somewhere in southern England, possibly at the court of King Alfred the Great of Wessex. That scribe was translating a Roman historian's work from roughly the year 416 and…
- Christian ChurchThe Christian Church is not one thing. It never has been. From its earliest days in Roman Judea in the first century AD, it has been a subject of argument, definition, and redefinition. Who belongs? What makes a church real? Which…
- Christian nameThe phrase Christian name appears in Elizabethan England as a term for any given name, not strictly tied to baptism. William Camden observed that these names distinguished individuals while surnames separated families. In modern usage, the…
- Northern CrusadesThe Northern Crusades were military campaigns by several Catholic kingdoms and military orders aimed at Christianizing the pagan peoples of the Baltic Sea's southern and eastern shores. What makes them remarkable is not just their scale,…