The study of Eastern Christianity has recently become a methodological laboratory for a family of approaches known collectively as “connected history”. This term has been taken up, especially by scholars interested in understanding how processes of religious change defied geographical and linguistic boundaries in the Christian East. Counterintuitively, a field rooted in ecclesiastical history and philology is now a site for some of the most exciting and fashionable innovations in religious history. And yet for many years, when faced with the plurality and diversity of Eastern Christianity, specialists have often found themselves practicing “connected history” avant la lettre. This lecture explores why this should be the case: Why is connected history so well suited to making sense of the beliefs and practices of Middle Eastern Christianity? Answering this question, John-Paul Ghobrial focuses on current approaches to Catholic conversion in the Ottoman Empire as well as the place of Eastern Christianity in wider narratives of confessional change in the early modern world.