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Nothing stirs up English nationalism like football (in the English sense of the word). So the timing of progressive Church of England clerics couldn't have been worse when they proposed removing St. George from his role as England's patron saint just in time for World Cup fever.

Popular reaction was immensely negative—so the idea has gone nowhere. But they did have their reasons:

St. George first became popular with Brits during the Crusades when Christian armies captured Antioch from Muslim control in 1098. During the battle of Antioch, reports the Daily Mail, it was said that an apparition of George appeared to the Crusader army. The legend about his slaying a dragon cannot be traced any earlier than the late 1100s.

George was a Roman general and a martyr, possibly under Diocletian. But that is about all we know for sure.

His association with the Crusades and his military imagery would be off-putting to contemporary people and particularly to Great Britain's many Muslims.

Who was proposed to take George's place as patron saint?

St. Alban, the first English martyr. He was put to death about 305, also during Diocletian's reign. Alban was converted and baptized by a fugitive priest. When soldiers came looking for the priest, Alban disguised himself in the priest's cloak. Alban was killed, but he failed to save the priest, who was stoned to death a few days later.

The history of early California is intimately bound up with church history. The 21 Catholic missions (beginning with Mission San Diego de Alacalá in 1769) were cultural, economic, and transportation hubs that also transformed the lives of the native population.

But until now, scholars who wanted to study the religious history of early California have been stymied by the difficulty of working with key primary sources: the meticulously kept sacramental registers of California's Spanish missions. The original handwritten records of 101,000 baptisms, 28,000 marriages, and 71,000 burials are fragile, and many scholars could only access them through blurry microfilms that have also deteriorated.

Now, after eight years of deciphering 18th-century handwriting and an enormous effort at data entry, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, has launched a comprehensive database that integrates the existing records from all 21 missions. This represents the key moments in the lives of 110,000 early California residents—many of them Native Americans who settled near the missions and were Christianized by the padres.

Oregon State University historian Steve Hackel, the project's general editor, hopes that with the advent of the comprehensive new database, historians will produce many more studies that will help balance our reading of early American history. The Early California Population Project can be found at http://www.huntington.org/Information/ECPPmain.htm.

A monastery built around the site of Jacob's well, where Jesus met the Samaritan woman, will finally open its doors after 100 years of struggle. On the volatile West Bank of Palestine, in Nablus, stands the almost-completed Greek Orthodox monastery that has contended with Bolsheviks, Zionist extremists, and Israeli and Palestinian governments.

Its story goes back to the early centuries of Christianity. From at least the 4th century onward, Jacob's well has been a popular destination for Christian pilgrims. Emperor Constantine was the first to build a church around the well, but by the time Crusaders arrived in the Holy Land in 1099, they found only ruins. So they built a new church, which lasted only until the region fell into the hands of the Muslim warrior Saladin in 1187.

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