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Books > Christianity > Roman Catholicism, Roman Catholic Church
Religious Lessons tells the story of Zellers v. Huff, a court case
that challenged the employment of nearly 150 Catholic religious in
public schools across New Mexico in 1948. The "Dixon case," as it
was known nationally, was the most famous in a series of midcentury
lawsuits, all targeting what opponents provocatively dubbed
"captive schools." Spearheaded by Protestants and Other Americans
United for Separation of Church and State, the publicity campaign
built around Zellers drew on centuries-old rhetoric of Catholic
captivity to remind Americans about the threat of Catholic power in
the post-War era, and the danger Catholic sisters dressed in full
habits posed to American education. Americans at midcentury were
reckoning with the U.S. Supreme Court's new mandate for a "wall of
separation" between church and state. At no time since the nation's
founding was the Establishment Clause studied so carefully by the
nation's judiciary and its people. While Zellers never reached the
Supreme Court, its details were familiar to hundreds of thousands
of citizens who read about them in magazines and heard them
discussed in church on Sunday mornings. For many Americans,
Catholics and non-Catholics, the scenario of nuns in veils teaching
children embodied the high stakes of the era's church-state
conflicts, and became an occasion to assess the implications of
separation in their lives. Through close study of the Dixon case,
Holscher brings together the perspectives of legal advocacy groups,
Catholic sisters, and citizens who cared about their schools. Her
account of the public arguments over sisters posits the captive
school crusade as a transitional episode in the Protestant-Catholic
conflicts that dominate American church-state history. Religious
Lessons also goes beyond legal discourse to consider the interests
of Americans - women religious included - who did not formally
articulate convictions about the separation principle. The book
emphasizes the everyday experiences, inside and outside classrooms,
that defined the church-state relationship for these people, and
that made constitutional questions over sisters relevant to them.
Representing the highest quality of scholarship, Gilles Emery
offers a much-anticipated introduction to Catholic doctrine on the
Trinity. His extensive research combined with lucid prose provides
readers a resource to better understand the foundations of
Trinitarian reflection. The book is addressed to all who wish to
benefit from an initiation to Trinitarian doctrine. The path
proposed by this introductory work comprises six steps. First the
book indicates some liturgical and biblical ways for entering into
Trinitarian faith. It then presents the revelation of the Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit in the New Testament, by inviting the reader
to reflect upon the signification of the word "God." Next it
explores the confessions of Trinitarian faith, from the New
Testament itself to the Creed of Constantinople, on which it offers
a commentary. By emphasizing the Christian culture inherited from
the fourth-century Fathers of the Church, the book presents the
fundamental principles of Trinitarian doctrine, which find their
summit in the Christian notion of "person." On these foundations,
the heart of the book is a synthetic exposition of the persons of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their divine being and
mutual relations, and in their action for us. Finally, the last
step takes up again the study of the creative and saving action of
the Trinity: the book concludes with a doctrinal exposition of the
"missions" of the Son and Holy Spirit, that is, the salvific
sending of the Son and Holy Spirit that leads humankind to the
contemplation of the Father.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it bluntly, if privately, in
1942-the United States was "a Protestant country," he said, "and
the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance."
In Tri-Faith America, Kevin Schultzexplains how the United States
left behind this idea that it was "a Protestant nation" and
replaced it with a new national image, one premised on the notion
that the country was composed of three separate, equally American
faiths-Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Tracing the origins of the
tri-faith idea to the early twentieth century, when Catholic and
Jewish immigration forced Protestant Social Gospelers to combine
forces with Catholic and Jewish relief agencies, Tri-Faith America
shows how the tri-faith idea gathered momentum after World War I,
promoted by public relations campaigns, interfaith organizations,
and the government, to the point where, by the end of World War II
and into the early years of the Cold War, the idea was becoming
widely accepted, particularly in the armed forces, fraternities,
neighborhoods, social organizations, and schools.
Tri-Faith America also shows how postwar Catholics and Jews used
the new image to force the country to confront the challenges of
pluralism. Should Protestant bibles be allowed on public school
grounds? Should Catholic and Jewish fraternities be allowed to
exclude Protestants? Should the government be allowed to count
Americans by religion? Challenging the image of the conformist
1950s, Schultz describes how Americans were vigorously debating the
merits of recognizing pluralism, paving the way for the civil
rights movement and leaving an enduring mark on American culture.
This monograph studies the professionalization of History of
religions as an academic discipline in late 19th and early 20th
century France and Europe. Its common thread is the work of the
French Modernist priest and later Professor of History of religions
at the College de France, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), who
participated in many of the most topical debates among French and
international historians of religions. Unlike his well-studied
Modernist theology, Loisy's writings on comparative religion, and
his rich interactions with famous scholars like F. Cumont, M.
Mauss, or J.G. Frazer, remain largely unknown. This monograph is
the first to paint a comprehensive picture of his career as a
historian of religions before and after his excommunication in
1908. Through a contextual analysis of publications by Loisy and
contemporaries, and a large corpus of private correspondence, it
illuminates the scientification of the discipline between
1890-1920, and its deep entanglement with religion, politics, and
society. Particular attention is also given to the role of national
and transnational scholarly networks, and the way they controlled
the theoretical and institutional frameworks for studying the
history of religions.
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