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🔗 London 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Christianity 🔗 River Thames 🔗 Christianity/Christmas

The River Thames frost fairs were held on the tideway of the River Thames in London, England in some winters, starting at least as early as the late 7th century all the way until the early 19th century. Most were held between the early 17th and early 19th centuries during the period known as the Little Ice Age, when the river froze over most frequently. During that time the British winter was more severe than it is now, and the river was wider and slower, further impeded by the medieval Old London Bridge.

Even at its peak, in the mid-17th century, the Thames in London froze less often than modern legend sometimes suggests, never exceeding about one year in ten except for four winters between 1649 and 1666. From 1400 until the removal of the medieval London Bridge in 1835, there were 24 winters in which the Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London; if "more or less frozen over" years (in parentheses) are included, the number is 26: 1408, 1435, 1506, 1514, 1537, 1565, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635, 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1677, 1684, 1695, 1709, 1716, 1740, (1768), 1776, (1785), 1788, 1795, and 1814. Of the 24, the numbers in each century were: 15th two, 16th five, 17th ten, 18th six, 19th one. The Thames freezes over more often upstream, beyond the reach of the tide, especially above the weirs, of which Teddington Lock is the lowest. The last great freeze of the higher Thames was in 1962–63.

Frost fairs were a rare event even in the coldest parts of the Little Ice Age. Some of the recorded frost fairs were in 695, 1608, 1683-4, 1716, 1739–40, 1789, and 1814. Recreational cold weather winter events were far more common elsewhere in Europe, for example in the Netherlands. These events in other countries as well as the winter festivals and carnivals around the world in present times can also be considered frost fairs. However, very few of them have actually used that title.

During the Great Frost of 1683–84, the severest frost recorded in England, the Thames was completely frozen for two months, with the ice reaching a thickness of 11 inches (28 cm) in London. Solid ice was reported extending for miles off the coasts of the southern North Sea (England, France and the Low Countries), causing severe problems for shipping and preventing the use of many harbours.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Jesus 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy

The Immovable Ladder is a wooden ladder leaning against the right window on the second tier of the facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem. The ladder rests on a ledge and is attached to a window owned by the Armenian Apostolic Church. The ladder is a symbol of inter-confessional disputes within Christianity. Its presence in its current location signifies the adherence to an agreement among six Christian denominations, who collectively own the church, not to move, repair, or alter anything in the church without the consent of all six denominations.

🔗 Literature 🔗 Poetry 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Latter Day Saint movement 🔗 Christianity/Bible

Chiastic structure, or chiastic pattern, is a literary technique in narrative motifs and other textual passages. An example of chiastic structure would be two ideas, A and B, together with variants A' and B', being presented as A,B,B',A'. Chiastic structures that involve more components are sometimes called "ring structures", "ring compositions", or, in cases of very ambitious chiasmus, "onion-ring compositions". These may be regarded as chiasmus scaled up from words and clauses to larger segments of text.

These often symmetrical patterns are commonly found in ancient literature such as the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Classicist Bruno Gentili describes this technique as "the cyclical, circular, or 'ring' pattern (ring composition). Here the idea that introduced a compositional section is repeated at its conclusion, so that the whole passage is framed by material of identical content". Meanwhile, in classical prose, scholars often find chiastic narrative techniques in the Histories of Herodotus:

"Herodotus frequently uses ring composition or 'epic regression' as a way of supplying background information for something discussed in the narrative. First an event is mentioned briefly, then its precedents are reviewed in reverse chronological order as far back as necessary; at that point the narrative reverses itself and moves forward in chronological order until the event in the main narrative line is reached again."

Various chiastic structures are also seen in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon, and the Quran.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Gender Studies 🔗 United States/Rhode Island 🔗 Christianity/Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)

The Public Universal Friend (born Jemima Wilkinson; November 29, 1752 – July 1, 1819) was an American preacher born in Cumberland, Rhode Island, to Quaker parents. After suffering a severe illness in 1776, the Friend claimed to have died and been reanimated as a genderless evangelist named the Public Universal Friend, and afterward shunned both birth name and gendered pronouns. In androgynous clothes, the Friend preached throughout the northeastern United States, attracting many followers who became the Society of Universal Friends.

The Public Universal Friend's theology was broadly similar to that of most Quakers. The Friend stressed free will, opposed slavery, and supported sexual abstinence. The most committed members of the Society of Universal Friends were a group of unmarried women who took leading roles in their households and community. In the 1790s, members of the Society acquired land in Western New York where they formed the township of Jerusalem near Penn Yan, New York. The Society of Universal Friends ceased to exist by the 1860s. Many writers have portrayed the Friend as a woman, and either a manipulative fraudster, or a pioneer for women's rights; others have viewed the preacher as transgender or non-binary and a figure in trans history.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism

The Council of Trent (Latin: Concilium Tridentinum), held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent (or Trento), now in northern Italy, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation at the time, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.

The Council issued condemnations of what it defined to be heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism, and also issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the biblical canon, sacred tradition, original sin, justification, salvation, the sacraments, the Mass, and the veneration of saints. The Council met for twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563. Pope Paul III, who convoked the Council, oversaw the first eight sessions (1545–47), while the twelfth to sixteenth sessions (1551–52) were overseen by Pope Julius III and the seventeenth to twenty-fifth sessions (1562–63) by Pope Pius IV.

The consequences of the Council were also significant with regard to the Church's liturgy and practices. In its decrees, the Council made the Latin Vulgate the official biblical text of the Roman Church (without prejudice to the original texts in Hebrew and Greek, nor to other traditional translations of the Church, but favoring the Latin language over vernacular translations, such as the controversial English-language Tyndale Bible). In doing so, they commissioned the creation of a revised and standardized Vulgate in light of textual criticism, although this was not achieved until the 1590s. The Council also officially affirmed (for the second time at an ecumenical council) the traditional Catholic Canon of biblical books in response to the increasing Protestant exclusion of the deuterocanonical books. The former dogmatic affirmation of the Canonical books was at the Council of Florence in the 1441 bull Cantate Domino, as affirmed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus (#20). In 1565, a year after the Council finished its work, Pius IV issued the Tridentine Creed (after Tridentum, Trent's Latin name) and his successor Pius V then issued the Roman Catechism and revisions of the Breviary and Missal in, respectively, 1566, 1568 and 1570. These, in turn, led to the codification of the Tridentine Mass, which remained the Church's primary form of the Mass for the next four hundred years.

More than three hundred years passed until the next ecumenical council, the First Vatican Council, was convened in 1869.

🔗 United States 🔗 Religion 🔗 United States/Massachusetts 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Occult

The Salem witchcraft trial of 1878, also known as the Ipswich witchcraft trial and the second Salem witch trial, was an American civil case held in May 1878 in Salem, Massachusetts, in which Lucretia L. S. Brown, an adherent of the Christian Science religion, accused fellow Christian Scientist Daniel H. Spofford of attempting to harm her through his "mesmeric" mental powers. By 1918, it was considered the last witchcraft trial held in the United States. The case garnered significant attention for its startling claims and the fact that it took place in Salem, the scene of the 1692 Salem witch trials. The judge dismissed the case.

🔗 Organizations 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism

The Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX; Latin: Fraternitas Sacerdotalis Sancti Pii X 'Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X', FSSPX) is a breakaway traditionalist Catholic priestly fraternity founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Its members are commonly referred to as Lefebvrists or Lefebvrians, terms which SSPX rejects.

Lefebvre was a leading traditionalist at the Second Vatican Council with the Coetus Internationalis Patrum and Superior General of the Holy Ghost Fathers until 1968. The society was originally established as an association of the Christian faithful of the Catholic Church with the express permission of the Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg, François Charrière.

The society is named after Pope Pius X, whose anti-Modernist stance it stresses, retaining the Tridentine Mass and pre-Vatican II liturgical books in Latin for the other Holy Sacraments. The current Superior General of the Society is Davide Pagliarani. It has over 700 priestly members and a total of 1,482 members. Several religious institutes, mostly based in France, are associated with the society. Globally, there are an estimated 600,000 people who attend SSPX masses. Several organisations derive from the SSPX, such as the sedevacantist Society of Saint Pius V (SSPV) and the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Peter (FSSP), which Pope John Paul II authorized as a Society of Apostolic Life (1988).

Tensions between the Society and the Holy See climaxed in 1988 with the Écône consecrations: Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops without the Apostolic Mandate and against a personal warning by Pope John Paul II, resulting in the Vatican declaration that the bishops who consecrated or were consecrated had incurred latæ sententiæ (automatic) excommunication. However, the SSPX denied that the bishops incurred any penalty, and argued that the consecrations were permissible under canon law due to a moral and theological crisis in the Catholic Church. The declared excommunication of the surviving bishops was removed at their request, in the hope of speedily reaching "full reconciliation and complete communion" (2009).

For most of its existence, the society's canonical situation has remained disputed. Papal recognition was extended indefinitely in 2017 to confessions heard by its priests, and local ordinaries allowed to grant delegation to its priests for officially witnessing marriages. In addition, the Holy See named SSPX bishop Bernard Fellay as judge in a canonical trial against one of the society's priests. The significance of these recognitions is that, unlike other Catholic sacraments, both confession and marriage require canonical jurisdiction for their validity. While its critics claim the society's priests were not explicitly granted the requisite jurisdiction, it contends that they possessed "supplied jurisdiction" for confessions due to an "emergency crisis".

In February 2026, the Society declared their intention to consecrate new bishops on 1 July 2026 with or without a pontifical mandate from the Vatican, declining further dialogue with the Holy Office. On 13 May 2026, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández formally reiterated that this would be a schismatic act and result in automatic excommunication. On 26 May 2026, the FSPPX announced the four candidates scheduled to be consecrated bishops: Pascal Schreiber, Michael Goldade, Michel Poinsinet de Sivry, and Marc Hanappier. On 1 July, SSPX Bishop Alfonso de Galarreta proceeded with the consecration of the four bishops, with Fellay acting as co-consecrator, which is a schismatic act and thus resulted in automatic excommunication.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Law 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Bible 🔗 Islam 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Atheism 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Bahá'í Faith 🔗 Spirituality 🔗 Theology 🔗 Sikhism 🔗 Zoroastrianism

Lawsuits against God have occurred in real life and in fiction. Issues debated in the actions include the problem of evil and harmful "acts of God".

🔗 Biography 🔗 Lists 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Jesus

This is a partial list of notable people who have been claimed, either by themselves or by their followers, in some way to be the reincarnation or incarnation of Jesus, or the Second Coming of Christ.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Linguistics/Etymology

The Christian holiday Easter has several names. The names differ depending on languages, but most are derived from Greek and Latin "pascha", which is taken from the Hebrew פֶּסַח (Pesach), meaning Passover. The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre (Old English pronunciation: [ˈæːɑstre, ˈeːostre]), which itself developed prior to 899, originally referring to the name of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre.