Models of Charitable Care analyses the practice of Catholic nuns in Amsterdam in the 19th and 20th century. Attention is paid to the ambiguous ascetic spiritual discourse that underpinned their work: it encouraged charity as solidarity with strangers, but caused intense emotional distance too. Historiography is mainly manufactured by religious and lay academics who shared the congregational perspective and presented fairly positive evaluations. Criticism from within, however, is voiced by care leavers who grew up in homes ran by religious. Some are grateful, others bitter. The sisters were living models who combined an anti-worldly outlook with a practical concern for vulnerable creatures. Relating various theoretical interpretations, a typology of three models is developed with ‘agency’ as the differentiating criterion.
This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, ‘1968’, generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women’s movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church’s movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.
Nineteenth-century female congregation founders could achieve levels of autonomy, power and prestige that were beyond reach for most women of their time. With a subject hidden for a long time behind a curtain of modesty and mystery, this book recounts the fascinating but ambiguous life stories of four Belgian religious women. A close reading of their personal writings unveils their conflicted existence: ambitious, engaged, and bold on the one hand, suffering and isolated on the other, they were both victims and promotors of a nineteenth-century ideal of female submission. As religious and social entrepreneurs these women played an influential role in the revival of the church and the development of education, health care and social provisions in modern Belgium. But, equally well, they were bound to rigid gender patterns and adherents of an ultramontane church ideology that fundamentally distrusted modern society.
How churches in Northern Europe reinvented their role as providers of social relief Charity is a word that fits well in the history of religion and churches, whereas the concept of social reform seems to belong more to the vocabulary of the modern welfare states. Christian charity found itself, during the long nineteenth century, within the maelstrom of social turmoil. In this context of social unrest, although charity managed to confirm its relevance, it was also subjected to fierce criticism, as well as to substitute state-run forms of social care and insurance. The history of the welfare states remained all too blind to religion. This fourth volume in the series ‘Dynamics of Religious Reform’ unravels how the churches in Britain and Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium shaped and adjusted their understanding of poverty. It reveals how they struggled with the ‘social question’ and often also with the modern nation states to which they belonged. Either in the periphery of public assistance or in a dynamic interplay with the state, political parties and society at large, the churches reinvented their tradition as providers of social relief. Contributors Andreas Holzem (Universität Tübingen), Dáire Keogh (St Patrick’s College, Dublin City University), Frances Knight (The University of Nottingham), Nina Koefoed (Aarhus Universitet), Katharina Kunter (Germany), Bernhard Schneider (Universität Trier), Aud V. Tønnessen (Universitetet Oslo), Annelies van Heijst (Tilburg University), H.D. van Leeuwen and M.H.D. van Leeuwen (Universiteit Utrecht), Leen Van Molle (KU Leuven).
This book explores the experience and understanding of Roman Catholic sisters of their vocation to the apostolic form of religious life as they age.Based on interviews with twelve religious women, it draws on the practice of Lectio Divina to explore how these women describe their call to service and activity at a time in life when these might be curtailed by physical diminishment and increasingly reduced social interaction and influence.As the very institutions of religious life are themselves under threat, the book identifies new emerging forms of ministry through presence, to each other and to their carers.
Drawing on archive materials collected worldwide, the present study aims at revising the contemporary reading of the preparation period of Vatican II, in particular concerning the catholic debate on revelation theology and the development of biblical exegesis.
Jacob M. Kohlhaas's Beyond Biology is a breakthrough in the theology of parenthood, integrating Catholic social thought and social scientific studies of child well-being in order to offer a more diverse and inclusive interpretation.
For a long time it was thought that there were no Middle Dutch sermons dating from the thirteenth century. It was only after J.P. Gumbert had redated the manuscript from The Hague containing the Limburg Sermons that its contents could be assigned to that century. Most of the Limburg Sermons appear to be translations of the Middle High German St. Georgen sermons. But sixteen of these texts are known only in Middle Dutch, and among these is to be found material drawn from the works of Hadewijch and Beatrijs van Nazareth. Thus the Limburg Sermons emerge to take their place in the famous tradition of Brabantine mysticism.
In Sacrifice in Modernity: Community, Ritual, Identity it is demonstrated how sacrificial themes remain an essential element in our post-modern society.
Church discipline and the Reformed consistory, whether in Hungary, the Swiss world, France, The Netherlands or the British Isles, have become the subject of intense scholarly discussion. The fifteen essays gathered in this volume examine the process of censure and excommunication across Europe from the mid-sixteenth through the late eighteenth centuries. They reevaluate the relationship of women to ecclesiastical authority and explore the complex ways in which exclusion from the Lord’s Supper operated. Several contributors trace the decrease in excommunication over time; others underscore national differences in its nature and the surprising infrequency of application. Together, they offer a fresh, unanticipated and illuminating portrait of the reform of morals associated with John Calvin and his followers. Les disciplines ecclésiastiques et les consistoire réformés aussi bien en Hongrie, que dans le monde Suisse, la France, les Pays-Bas ou les Îles britanniques, ont fait l'objet d'intenses débats universitaires. Les quinze textes réunis dans ce volume examinent les processus de censure et d'excommunication pratiqués dans toute l'Europe depuis le milieu du XVIe siècle jusqu'à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. Ils réexaminent les positions des femmes face à l'autorité ecclésiastique et explorent les différentes manières de concevoir et d'appliquer l'exclusion de la Cène. Plusieurs contributeurs décrivent la diminution de la pratique de l'excommunication au fil du temps, d'autres soulignent les différences nationales dans sa nature et les surprenantes variations de son application. Tous offrent un nouveau portrait, inattendu et éclairant, de la réforme de la morale associée à Jean Calvin et ses successeurs. Contributors are Edwin Bezzina, Serge Brunet, Philippe Chareyre, Christian Grosse, Robert M. Kingdon, Suzannah Lipscomb, Michelle Magdelaine, Françoise Moreil, Graeme Murdock, Judith Pollmann, Didier Poton, Salomon Rizzo, Andrew Spicer, Karen Spierling, Nicole Staremberg Goy, and Margo Todd.
