Christian ideas on family, religion, and the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The cult of domesticity has often been linked to the privatization of religion and the idealisation of the motherly ideal of the 'angel in the house'. This book revisits the Christian home of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and sheds new light on the stereotypical distinction between the private and public spheres and their inhabitants. Emphasizing the importance of patriarchal domesticity duri...

Missionaries have been subject to academic and societal debate. Some scholars highlight their contribution to the spread of modernity and development among local societies, whereas others question their motives and emphasise their inseparable connection with colonialism. In this volume, fifteen authors – from both Europe and the Global South – address these often polemical positions by focusing on education, one of the most prominent fields in which missionaries have been active. They ela...

The earliest Christian myths emerged in the melting pot of Gnostic Alexandria, not in orthodox Jerusalem, classical Athens or legalistic Rome. In this book, Tjeu van den Berk traces the sources of the Christian faith to the banks of the river Nile.

In terms of symbolism, the Christian religion is virtually identical to that of the ancient Egyptians. From the perspective of religious history, we can agree with the theologian Eugen Drewermann who described ‘ a complete dependence of Christia...

Religion and science on paranormal events.

Described as 'the hand of God', as 'pathological' or even as 'a clever trick', exceptional corporeal phenomena such as miraculous cures, stigmata, and incorrupt corpses have triggered heated debates in the past. Depending on their definition as either 'supernatural', 'psycho-somatic' or 'fraudulent', different authorities have sought to explain these enigmatic occurrences by stimulating inquiries and claiming jurisdiction over them. As a consequence,...

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879), Pope Leo XIII expressed the conviction that the renewed study of the philosophical legacy of Saint Thomas Aquinas would help Catholics to engage in a dialogue with secular modernity while maintaining respect for Church doctrine and tradition. As a result, the neo-scholastic framework dominated Catholic intellectual production for nearly a century thereafter.

This volume assesses the societal impact of the Thomist revival movement, with particular atten...

Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Archbishop of Malines, was the incarnation of the Belgian resistance against the German occupation during the First World War. With his famous pastoral letter of Christmas 1914 ‘Patriotisme et Endurance’ he reached a wide audience, and gained international influence and respect.

Mercier’s distinct patriotic stance clearly determined his views of national politics, especially of the 'Flemish question', and his conflict with the German occupier made him a...

One hardly known but fascinating aspect of the Cold War was the use of the holy Virgin Mary as a warrior against atheist ideologies. After the Second World War, there was a remarkable rise in the West of religiously inflected rhetoric against what was characterised as “godless communism”. The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church not only urged their followers to resist socialism, but along with many prominent Catholic laity and activist movements they marshaled the support of Catholics in...

Even though the policy impact of Catholicism has increasingly been acknowledged, existing scholarship lacks a coherent view on its changing influence over time and in different political contexts. In this book, Fabio Bolzonar investigates the influence of Catholicism on developments in French social protection from World War II to the mid-2010s. He discusses the factors that have favoured or inhibited it and explores the hybridization between Catholic values and secular principles in the soci...

Sacred architecture as reality and metaphor in secularised Western society.

Christian monasteries and convents, built throughout Europe for the best part of 1,500 years, are now at a crossroads. This study attempts to understand the sacred architecture of monasteries as a process of the tangible and symbolic organisation of space and time for religious communities. Despite the weight of seemingly immutable monastic tradition, architecture has contributed to developing specific religious ident...