Religions

As early as the Middle Ages, Christian worship employed a wide range of visual, auditory, and performative strategies to render the sacred experience more vivid and immediate, translating the principal mysteries of Christianity into tangible forms that could be apprehended by the senses and remembered by the faithful. On the most important feast days of the liturgical calendar, churches hosted celebrations rich in sensory and spectacular elements designed to make the invisible perceptible to the congregation’s imagination. Medieval religious spectacle developed an elaborate repertoire of multisensory devices intended to capture the audience’s attention and instruct them in the truths of the Christian faith. These ceremonies orchestrated multisensory experiences shaped by devotional, doctrinal, and communal aims. From the heights of the church—symbolically associated with the celestial realm and paradise—acolytes, bell ringers, sacristans, and altar boys performed various actions intended to produce a powerful visual and auditory impact on worshippers, engaging their senses in ways that deepened their understanding of the sacred. Various contraptions and objects could be lowered or launched from church roofs or attics to heighten the spectacular effect. The Iberian theatrical tradition of the Late Middle Ages was later transmitted to the Americas through the missionaries who accompanied the colonial enterprise, and significant traces of these practices can still be found today on both sides of the Atlantic. Overall, this article aims at reading early medieval stage machinery and spectacular special effects as sensorial configurations of the mysteries of Christianity.

Histories of Protestant missions use the “modern missionary movement” to describe the voluntary societies, networks, and structures that emerged around William Carey in the late eighteenth century. Using a conceptual-historical framework, this article distinguishes organizational modernization—the voluntary societies and transnational infrastructures that sustained overseas expansion—from methodological modernization—the redefinition of missionary aims, instruments, and criteria of success. Rufus Anderson and Henry Venn’s indigenous-church model treated conversion and the formation of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating churches as the measures of achievement. From the 1860s onward, however, initiatives associated with Hamlin and Bliss in Istanbul and Beirut challenged the subordinate status of schooling within this hierarchy, extending debates evident in Alexander Duff’s earlier program in India. Education, medicine, and philanthropy became constitutive expressions of Christian purpose rather than merely auxiliary instruments of evangelization. Social Gospel thought supplied a theological vocabulary for this widening field of action, while Howard S. Bliss’s “modern missionary” retrospectively articulated its implications. Focusing on the Ottoman Middle East, the article proposes a layered periodization: organizational modernization enabled transnational expansion, whereas methodological modernization embedded evangelistic purpose within durable institutions of knowledge, professional formation, and social transformation without abandoning conversion or religious identity.

Church music is commonly discussed as a liturgical, theological, aesthetic, or cultural practice, while its character as a professional field has received less systematic attention. This article conceptualises church music as a liturgical profession by bringing Christopher Small’s concept of musicking into dialogue with Andrew Abbott’s sociology of professions. Musicking makes it possible to understand musical activity in worship as situated, relational, and participatory, while Abbott’s theory highlights the application of specialised knowledge and professional judgement to concrete cases. The article argues that professionalism in church music does not consist in exclusive control over musical activity or in technical and artistic competence alone. Rather, it concerns the situated application of specialised musical knowledge to the shaping of ritual practice. Pastoral services—particularly baptisms, weddings, and funerals—serve as a test case because musical decisions frequently intersect with biography, pastoral relationships, participation, and competing professional responsibilities. Drawing additionally on Rudolf Stichweh and Isolde Karle, the article conceptualises professional jurisdiction as specialised judgement concerning the musical shaping of ritual practice and develops interprofessional translation as a way of relating distinct professional rationalities. This article argues that church music can be understood as a liturgical profession whose identity is sustained by the relationship between specialised musical expertise, differentiated responsibility, and interprofessional cooperation.