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institutions and practices that purportedly united the Atlantic World. According to this view, the United States had much to teach European countries, most of which had strayed far from democracy in the interwar years and needed to be brought back into the fold. The second vision – advanced by the Holy See, a handful of European Christian Democratic leaders, and certain key American Catholic opinion-makers – did not have democracy as its endgame. Rather, it proposed to build a peaceful post-war order through the reconstitution of the ‘Christian West’, which was defined as an
One of the key aims of this book is to offer a synthesis of the main findings of current research on age. It is intended as an outline survey and consequently the scope of the book is deliberately broad: it covers two centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. The book focuses solely on the Christian West, including consideration on the extent to which social rank influenced life expectancy, the methods and goals of upbringing, marriage patterns and funerary memorialisation. The book also demonstrates how extensive that range can be. Examples are drawn from manorial accounts, tax assessments, spiritual writings, didactic literature, romances, elegies, art and architecture. The main thrust is that age formed an essential part of a person's identity in late medieval Europe. During adolescence, men and women progressively took on their adult roles. Three chapters are devoted to educating girls. The book discusses young people's period of transition between childhood and adulthood. It draws attention to pious young women who fought against marriage and wanted a chaste life. Divergences between northern and southern Europe in terms of marriage patterns, family formation, opportunities for women and attitudes towards death and its rituals are discussed. The book shows that attitudes towards the undeveloped young meant that children had few legal responsibilities. Another aim of the book is to consider the changing opportunities and possibilities for people as they progressed through life.
This innovative and timely reassessment of political theology opens new lines of critical investigation into the intersections of religion and politics in contemporary Asia. Political Theologies and Development in Asia pioneers the theo-political analysis of Asian politics and in so doing moves beyond a focus on the (Post-)Christian West that has to date dominated scholarly discussions on this theme. It also locates ‘development’ as a vital focus for critical investigations into Asian political theologies. The volume includes contributions by leading anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. Each chapter brings new theoretical approaches into conversation with detailed empirical case studies grounded in modern Asia. Not only does the volume illustrate the value and import of this approach to a diverse set of contemporary Asian societies and religions, but it also provides a forceful argument for why political theology itself requires this broader horizon to remain relevant and critical. The focus on ‘development’ – conceptualised broadly here as a set of modern transnational networks of ideas and practices of improvement that connect geographically disparate locations¬¬ – enables a fresh and critical analysis of the ways in which political theology is imagined, materialised, and contested both within and beyond particular nation-states. Investigating the sacred dimensions of power through concepts of transcendence, sacrifice, and victimhood, and aspiration and salvation, the chapters in this collection demonstrate how European and Asian modernities are bound together through genealogical, institutional, and theo-political entanglements, as well as a long history of global interactions.
Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
centuries, considers the large land mass of Western Europe with its diverse languages, customs and cultures, and ranges across the social spectrum. Such an ambitious task has its practical limitations, and the constraints of time and space have made it necessary to be selective. Plans to cover Jewish and Muslim life cycles had to be changed, and the book will focus solely on the Christian West. 7 The balance of the study
-questioning of the Christian West which dates back to Bartolomé Las Casas and Michel Montaigne and to which cultural anthropologists have contributed since the nineteenth century. I pondered here on whether there can be a Muslim equivalent to Lévi-Strauss, who treated Amerindian myth as equally worthy of respect as European philosophy and psychology. For instance, in The Jealous Potter
James Laidlaw In one of the most influential works of Anglophone moral philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century, Bernard Williams ( 1985 ) sought to challenge what he saw as the historical and cultural parochialism of the discipline at the time, by suggesting that it was imaginatively confined within a specific, rather narrow conception of ethical life that had come to be so dominant in the modern, post-Christian West that it prevented people from recognising as ethical at all
interested in how the modern secular episteme (which precedes liberal secularism as a modern political doctrine but is not the same) facilitates those sensibilities. 13 But in this book, I ask now: how is this very line of questioning fundamentally problematized by exposure to hiloniness in Israel, in all its complexity? The anthropological work of Asad, his students and others, particularly but not exclusively on Egypt, provides inroads into how we can conceptualize, problematize and interrogate empirically such matters in cases outside the culturally Christian West
the Ecumenical Councils , 2 vols (London and Washington, DC: Sheed & Ward and Georgetown University Press, 1990), II.796–7. 9 Brian Levack, The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 88