Videos

David d'Avray, Church, State, and Hierarchy

https://www.youtube.com/embed/AF_svv8xF9Y?si=WJv1JiS4k75GyaVz

A generation ago, Walter Ullmann in a series of syntheses argued that a descending order of sovereignty with the pope at the apex asserted itself successfully in the Middle Ages until the rediscovery of Aristotle and feudal facts on the ground replaced it with an ascending order in which power stemmed from the people. Ullmann aside, many scholars take it from granted that the two main alternatives so far as church and state are concerned are (1) that ultimate sovereignty ought to be vested in one or the other or (2) that they each should have separate domains, sacred and secular respectively, with a fairly clear border between them. The idea of hierarchy developed by the anthropologist Louis Dumont gives a third alternative that can elucidate papal relations with states from late Antiquity on.

 

Bethany Moreton, Theocracy Now!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Psx3sKBtyFY?si=gVo4_9c8EWk770M0

When Christian nationalists tell us what they want, we should take them at their word. From the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War through MAGA’s unapologetic fascism, U.S. theocrats have forged international alliances to enforce sexual conformity, racial purity, and gender rigidity. In the twenty-first century, their ranks have been joined by unlikely recruits: Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarians are the latest entrepreneurs of American religious revival with global ambitions. Dismissed for decades as mere distractions from the weighty matters of law and economics, theocrats aspire to a sacred market order—and their stock is rising.

 

Ann Hughes, Church and State in Early Modern England: Views from the Parish

https://www.youtube.com/embed/0mUiDGtt9Io?si=MB3-PQqjQpMFayRY

In the towns and villages of England, the seventeenth century was a period of widening confessional divide. From Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers to Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists, this lecture explores how Protestant dissenters nevertheless remained active in local governance during and after the Civil Wars through continued participation in parish life and officeholding. Taxation, military mobilisation, oath-taking, and petitioning intensified political engagement at the local level and deepened the reach of the state into ordinary life. Parish structures nonetheless continued to shape welfare, administration, and communal identity, while practices such as occasional conformity reveal the complex negotiations between religious conviction, civic obligation, and political power.

 

 

György Geréby, One Sword or Two? On the Byzantine Theology of Power

https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZMXKUyH0uGw?si=QNpDZJJTAyCZu1i5

Who governed society in medieval Christendom: emperors, priests, or both together? Eastern and western political thinkers had very different understandings of the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority. While western writers increasingly asserted distinct, but unequal spheres of responsibility, Byzantine traditions emphasised the interdependence of empire and priesthood in sustaining Christian order, even at moments of relative political weakness. Thus, while in the West there were two swords to be wielded, in the East, imperial and priestly authority were ideally united within a single sacred Christian order.