John Wyclif

Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age examines the changes in religious life for women religious in Britain from 1945 to 1990 identifying how community and individual lives were altered. This work is grounded in three core premises: women religious were influenced by and participated in the wider social movements of the long 1960s; women’s religious institutes were transnational entities and part of a larger global happening; and the struggles of renewal were linked to competing and contradictory ideas of collective, institutional identities. The work pivots on the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), but considers pre and post Vatican II social, cultural and religious events and social movements of the 1960s as influencers in these changes. It interrogates ‘lived experience’ by examining the day-to-day lives of women religious. Though rooted in the experiences of women religious in Britain, the book probes the relationships and interconnectivities between women religious within and across national divides as they move from institutions embedded in uniformity to the acceptance of cultural plurality. It also engages with the histories of the social movements of the long 1960s. For too long, religion has been relegated to its own silo, unlinked to the ‘radical sixties’ and depicted as ultimately obstructionist to its social movements. To contest this, female religious life is examined as a microcosm of change in the Catholic Church pointing to the ‘new thinking and freer lifestyles’ that allowed for the questioning of institutional cultures.

The previously unexplored legacy of religious anarchism in traditional Jewish theology is examined for the first time in this book. Probing the life and thought of figures whose writings have gone largely unread since they were first published, Hayyim Rothman makes, in the first place, a case for the existence of this heritage. He shows that there existed, from the late nineteenth though the mid-twentieth century, a loosely connected group of rabbis and traditionalist thinkers who explicitly appealed to anarchist ideas in articulating the meaning of the Torah, of traditional practice, of Jewish life, and the mission of modern Jewry. Supported by close readings of the Yiddish and Hebrew writings of Yaakov Meir Zalkind, Yitshak Nahman Steinberg, Yehuda Leyb Don-Yahiya, Avraham Yehudah Hen, Natah Hofshi, Shmuel Alexandrov, and Yehudah Ashlag this book traces a complicated story about the intersection, not only of religion and anarchism, but also of pacifism and Zionism, prophetic anti-authoritarianism, and mystical antinomianism. Bringing to light, not merely fresh source material, but uncovering a train of modern Jewish political thought that has scarcely been imagined, much less studied, No masters but God is a groundbreaking contribution.

This volume explores how changes that we tend to associate with the Enlightenment were intertwined with practices and rationales within Lutheran confessional culture in the two Nordic states during the long eighteenth century. It does so by examining several well-rehearsed topics of Enlightenment studies. Scientific novelties, realized policies, and reading as well as printing practices are all themes that return in this book; here they are understood in relation to the various modes and rationales of confessional culture. More precisely, all the contributions to the present volume deal with ideas related to three ‘R’s: reason, rationalism and reform. The eighteenth century encountered in this volume is not only a story of clashes and conflicts. Reason is not necessarily seen as replacing religious belief, nor is rationalism viewed as opposed to reasonings occurring within religious policies or institutions. Evidence of reform may in some cases be interpreted as expressions of Enlightenment; but there is a recurring echo of previous religious transformations and measures promoting renewal, not least in relation to the historical experience of the Lutheran Reformation. Therefore, the writers have chosen to place the notion of ‘religious Enlightenment’ at the core of this book. All the various chapters proceed from this fundamental conception in their explorations of ideas and practices that were embedded in a landscape shaped by both reason and orthodoxy.