Christianity as a Vocation: The Rostrevor Benedictines and the Renewal of Faith in Ireland

This chapter explores how the Benedictine monks at Holy Cross Monastery in Rostrevor, Northern Ireland, have re-introduced the idea of vocation into the minds of a range of Christians on the island of Ireland. A picture of this new vision of the church in Ireland is painted through sections devoted to 'living ecumenism' and 'creating safe spaces'. The work of the Rostrevor Benedictines may seem limited because of the small scale of the changes among individuals. But Holy Cross is just one of multiple 'extra-institutional' spaces in Ireland's changing religious landscape. From their strategic positions on the margins, extra-institutional expressions of religion may prompt more significant changes in religious practice than initially seem possible.

Jubilee and the Limits of African American Freedom after Emancipation

Scholarship generated in the post-civil rights US underpins a growing consensus that any honest confrontation with the American past requires an acknowledgment both of the nation’s foundations in racially-based slave labour and of the critical role that the enslaved played in ending that system. But scholars equally need to examine why the end of slavery did not deliver freedom, but instead – after a short-lived ‘jubilee’ during which freedpeople savoured their ‘brief moment in the sun’ – opened up a period of extreme repression and violence. This article traces the political trajectory of one prominent ex-slave and Republican party organiser, Elias Hill, to assess the constraints in which black grassroots activists operated. Though mainly concerned with the dashed hopes of African Americans, their experience of a steep reversal is in many ways the shared and profoundly significant legacy of ex-slaves across the former plantation societies of the Atlantic world.

W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Agency and the Slaves' Civil War

This article reviews the historical literature on slave self-activity during the US Civil War, taking account of recent developments in historiography. Attempting to move beyond the debate between those who argue for 'slave self-emancipation' and others who emphasize the role of high politics, this article suggests that while slaves played a central role in re-directing the war into an assault on slavery, there were severe constraints on their activity as well. Northern military advances played a critical role in opening up the Confederate South to slave self-assertion.