Artigos de revistas sobre o tema "Christian women – religious life – england"

One of the tendencies of modern transformations in the religious sphere, in particular in the world of Protestantism, is the desire for gender equality. The problem of "woman and religion" has become extremely urgent over the last decades, especially on the issue of women's priesthood. There is evidence that the proportion of women in the religious life of only Christian denominations has increased from 10 percent in the early twentieth century. to 40 at the beginning of the XXI century. The theological justification for the idea of ​​women's participation in organizing and conducting worship services was first formulated at the beginning of the 20th century in the Church of England. And it was the discussion around this provision that went beyond the Anglican Church that led to a radical revision of the traditional position of some Protestant churches, both as a motive and a reflection of profound changes in Christianity.

Much evidence has been brought to light recently to demonstrate the vitality of religious life among the English laity on the eve of the Reformation. Attention has been drawn to the fact that, in the period before the advent of Protestantism, lay men and women evinced a high degree of commitment to their church. The religious changes of the sixteenth century are as pressing a historical problem as ever; moreover, they provide a valuable litmus with which to test the qualities of the late-medieval church. Nevertheless, there is a danger that the fascination of the Reformation question, together with the bias of documentary sources on lay religion towards the latter end of the medieval period, may impoverish our appreciation of the ways in which, for a thousand years, Christians in Britain had been shaping their religious lives. To take a long view of religious voluntarism may help to put the developments of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in a proper perspective. There has also been a tendency, in discussion of lay religious life in the late middle ages, to accept the institutional framework as given. Yet in practice that framework was both adjustable and expressive of a wide range of lay initiatives in religion. That men and women were prepared to lend material support to a variety of religious institutions is apparent from any medieval collection of wills or set of churchwardens' accounts. But what, exactly, was expressed by such support? This is not an easy question to answer. Any assessment calls for an understanding of the medieval parish, not as a legal abstraction, nor yet as a supposedly ‘natural’ community of inhabitants, but as a more or less adaptable framework shaped by, and in turn shaping, the lives of the members. The evidence of religious activity, from processions to church-building, is, so far as it goes, not hard to find. But what of the parochial structure which gave meaning to these gestures, and which could in turn be modified by them?

[I]t is not enough to make the Jew respected, but to have JUDAISM rightly reverenced; and to do this, there must be a JEWISH LITERATURE, or the Jewish people will not advance one step. — Grace Aguilar, The Jewish Faith (1846)THE ESSAYS COLLECTED in this issue of Victorian Literature and Culture seek to introduce Victorianists to some of the many Anglo-Jewish writers of nineteenth-century England. What differentiates this moment in Anglo-Jewish scholarship from most previous considerations is that we do not purport to fill a falsely constructed “void” of Anglo-Jewish literary silence; on the contrary, this collection seeks to amplify the fullness of nineteenth century Anglo-Jewish literary life. In 1846, Grace Aguilar, the important Anglo-Jewish writer and theologian, called out for the production of a “Jewish literature” that would aid the “right reverence[e] of Judaism,” and “advance” the Jewish people in Victorian England. All too aware of the way exclusion from Hebrew literary and religious texts often precipitated assimilation, conversion, and more generalized alienation from Jewish religious life, Aguilar sought new tools to combat Jewish religious apathy. Detailing the subtle conversionary and theological assumptions that so-called secular — yet clearly Christian — literature often performed, Aguilar reasoned that a Jewish literature could provide Jewish readers — and especially Jewish women — with literary pleasure and a simultaneous sense of Jewish values and ethics; likewise, such a literature could recast the generally negative images of Jewish people and Judaism which pervade the long history of English literature.1 With her emphasis on a Jewish literature, then, Aguilar sought to claim the cultural and ideological power literature held in Victorian England for specifically Jewish uses. Significantly, Aguilar’s tone in the statement above suggests that she saw no such Jewish literature in past moments of Anglo-Jewish history; Aguilar’s intensive production of such a literature in a variety of genres was her own response to this desire for Jewish literature.

This contribution evaluates the transmission and appropriation of the vita of the ‘independent’ holy woman Christina Mirabilis from the diocese of Liège by Carthusians in England. Hers and other vitae were witness to the new Christ-centred spirituality and were mainly transmitted and adapted by members of continental reform-minded religious orders. New findings concerning the English manuscripts with the vita of Christina show that in England, Carthusians were the leading agents in the process of transmission of this hagiography. Taken together, these findings raise questions about 1) the models these vitae provided for Carthusians, 2) the interaction between Carthusians and other religious orders regarding text exchange, and 3) their interaction with laypeople and readers of vernacular translations. Why did English Carthusians transmit and appropriate the vitae of relatively unknown Liège saints? The answer lies in the spiritual models these vitae provided, stressing the importance of asceticism and a virtuous inner life.

RÉSUMÉLe principal objectif de cet article est d’encourager une approche plus large, supraconfessionnelle, du mariage et de la famille à l’époque moderne. La conjugalité a été “désacralisée” par les réformateurs protestants du 16e siècle. Martin Luther, parmi d’autres, a refusé le statut de sacrement au mariage, tout en valorisant celui-ci comme une arme contre le péché. En réaction, le concile de Trente a réaffirmé avec force que le mariage est bien un des sept sacrements chrétiens. Mais, promouvant la supériorité du célibat, l’Église catholique n’a jamais beaucoup insisté sur les vertus de la vie et de la piété familiales avant le 19e siècle. En parallèle, les historiens décèlent des signes de “sacralisation” de la famille protestante à partir du 16e siècle. Leurs conclusions doivent être relativisées à la lumière de recherches plus récentes et plus critiques, centrées sur les rapports et les représentations de genre. Elles peuvent néanmoins inspirer une étude élargie et comparative, inexistante dans l’historiographie traditionnelle, des réalités et des perceptions de la famille chrétienne au-delà des frontières confessionnelles.MOTS-CLÉ: Époque Moderne, mariage, famille, protestantisme, Concile de TrenteABSTRACTThe main purpose of this paper is to encourage a broader supra-confessional approach to the history of marriage and the family in the Early Modern era. Wedlock was “desacralized” by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. Martin Luther, among others, denied the sacramental status of marriage but valued it as a weapon against sin. In reaction, the Council of Trent reinforced marriage as one of the seven sacraments. But the Catholic Church, which promoted the superiority of celibacy, did little to defend the virtues of family life and piety before the 19th century. In parallel, historians have identified signs of a “sacralization” of the Protestant family since the 16th century. 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Une approche anthropologique, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2017, pp. 505-517.Gautier, S., “Identité, éloge et image de soi dans les sermons funéraires des foyers pastoraux luthériens aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles”, Europa moderna. Revue d’histoire et d’iconologie, n. 3 (2012), pp. 54-71.Goody, J., The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, Cambridge, 1983; L’évolution de la famille et du mariage en Europe, Paris, Armand Colin, 1985/2012.Hacker, P., Faith in Luther. Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religion, Emmaus Academic, 2017.Harrington, J. F., Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany, Cambridge, 1995.Hendrix, S. H., & Karant-Nunn, S. C., (coords.), Masculinity in the Reformation Era, Kirksville, Truman State University Press, 2008.Hendrix, S. H., “Christianizing Domestic Relations: Women and Marriage in Johann Freder’s Dialogus dem Ehestand zu ehren”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 23 (1992), pp. 251-266.Ingram, M., Church Courts. 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According to an order of Joan, Countess of Kent, for preaching Christianity in England of the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote his poems “House of Fame” and “The Legend of Good Women”. In these poems, Chaucer showed himself a maker of an ideology of gender equality. He revised the ancient philosophy of love and gender conflict in new Christian sense, drawing parallels with Ovid’s “Heroides” and female social statuses in England of the 14th century. He offered a new ideological story on the basis of the Christian reinvention of Ovid. He also reconsidered several ancient Greek myths about the female sufferers, in his ideological Christian stories.

Community lies at the heart of both church and school life in the Church of England. In some areas, church communities are sustained by families who choose to attend a particular church based on the quality of the church school in its parish. Many Voluntary Aided Church of England schools (church schools) give priority admission to parents on the basis of faith in the oversubscription criteria of their admission arrangements. While the Church stresses inclusiveness in its recommendations regarding admissions policies to church schools, where a church school is very popular and oversubscribed arguably priority must be given to parents of the faith in the school's catchment area. Otherwise parishioner children whose families regularly attend church could fail to be admitted to their local church school because of competition for places.

Borrowing books was a privilege introduced for women by several academic institutions and libraries in England in the 19th century. Cambridge University accepted women on equal terms with men in 1948. Various objectors before that feared that higher education would have untoward effects on women's bodies and minds. The eminent 19th-century psychiatrist Henry Maudsley was convinced it would make them infertile (Robinson, 2009). Yet women played an important role in the founding of many Islamic educational institutions from the first millennium, and Christian religious orders fostered education for girls and women in Europe before the modern era.

The article examines the importance of the religious factor in the life of the poet. The anti-Catholic politics of England is seen as the historical context that influenced Pope’s life and personality. Alexander Pope appears as a man who was able to use his extremely unprofitable religious affiliation in forming a career as a professional writer. The author examines the function of Catholicism, the combination of deism, concepts of natural religion, and Christian ideas in Pope’s enlightenment consciousness.

One of the most striking features of the first decades of open Jewish resettlement in England is the speed with which Jews managed to integrate themselves into so many different spheres of English life. From the first appointment of a Jew as a broker on the Exchange in 1657 to the first Jewish knighthood in 1700, the story is one of a dramatic rise in the acquisition of rights, privileges and special consideration. So, too, had Jews long been a part of English intellectual and academic life, but before Cromwell's tacit permission of Jewish residence in 1656 only Jewish converts to Christianity dared to make their appearance at English universities. This pattern was broken with the Abendana brothers, Jacob (d. 1685) and Isaac (d. 1699), Hebrew scholars and bibliophiles who came to London from Holland after the Restoration. Jacob Abendana, in the last four years of his life, was rabbi of the Sephardic community in London; Isaac, from at least 1663, taught Hebrew at Oxford and Cambridge. Both men were very much in demand by English scholars, who turned to them to solve Hebraic problems of various kinds and to procure Hebrew books for themselves and for university libraries. Both brothers worked on the first translations of the Mishnah into European languages and thus helped make available to Christian scholars this central core of the Talmud, the Jewish ‘oral’ law. Finally, it was Isaac Abendana who invented the Oxford diary and thereby made a permanent mark on the social habits of the university in which he laboured.

The word Canon means a rule or norm and it was used at quite an early stage of the Church's history to denote both general principles governing the life of the Christian society and particular enactments of Christian assemblies. The subject matter of the canons is as wide as the life of the Church itself and consequently very varied in its nature. At one end of its range it is concerned with matters fundamental to the Church's existence such as the creeds and sacraments. At the other it deals with practical arrangements such as the ownership and use of buildings. At a recent conference with German Lutherans I was asked whether the canon law was jus divinum or jus humanum, and I felt bound to reply. ‘Both’, because of this wide range which stretches from revelation to convenience.

There is a close relationship between the traditional Igbo-African culture and its treatment of women and the traditional Jewish culture and the status of women therein. This article examines the implications that the life, ministry, actions and inactions, of women prophets in the Old Testament hold for Christian women in contemporary Southeastern Nigeria where the Igbos live. Despite the obvious difference in time and clime, it is discovered, among other things, that the life and ministry of these women prophets challenge present-day Igbo Christian women to be much more courageous and self-confident, to raise their moral bars, to speak out all the more, to participate more actively in the political leadership of their region and the nation at large, to be much more committed to the Word of God, to be given, as women of fewer words but of mighty deeds, to a much more prophetic witnessing anywhere they find themselves.

This paper examines the application of cross-textual reading on the story of women around Moses in the Qur'an and the Bible by grassroots Muslim and Christian women in the village of Wendewa Utara, Central Sumba. Due to the involvement of women, then I apply the feminist approach to analyze the dynamics of cross-textual reading. During several focus group discussions, cross-textual reading was run smoothly because the participants are bound by kinship ties. They are also rooted in Sumbanese cultural values that reflect Marapu religious values. In other words, Muslim and Christian women are living in a context of socio-religious-cultural hybridity in which their religious identity intermingles with their cultural identity. For this reason, this paper describes a project bringing these women into another space of dialogue through cross-textual reading. In the cross-textual reading, both grassroots Muslim and Christian women are crossing their religious borders by finding resonant commonalities between the two texts, as they explore the affirmative, enriched, and irreconcilable difference as well. Cross-textual reading is a new adventure for both Muslim and Christian women in Wendewa Utara. The participants were enthusiastic because the material readings encourage them to share their problems, joys, hopes, and dreams. By reflecting on the struggle of women around Moses, the participants are committed to supporting one another in their daily life. Accordingly, this model of reading creates a safe space for grassroots Muslim and Christian women to learn from one another for mutual enrichment.

AbstractEvelyn Underhill is mainly known for her work in mysticism and spirituality. This article explores the political dimension of her work and argues her early work in mysticism and later work in spiritual direction and retreat work underpinned her engagement with leading figures in the interwar Anglican church and their social agenda. During this period Underhill worked closely with William Temple, Charles Raven, Walter Frere and Lucy Gardner among others. In the interwar years she contributed in important ways to the Church of England Congresses, and the Conference on Christian Politics, Employment and Citizenship (COPEC) initiative. She challenged what she called the anthropocentric tendency in the Christian Social movement and insisted on the centrality of the spiritual life for any effective social reform. Underhill worked to engage the general public, as well as Christian communities, in a spiritual life that she saw as essential to the efforts of individuals and organizations seeking to alleviate contemporary social harms.

Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) composed “The Education of a Christian Woman” in order to cement his patronage relations with the Queen of England, Catherine of Aragon and to lay the foundations of his own social thought. Scholars have been divided about the extent to which the work may be regarded as conservative, this article points to those areas of textual tension that give rise to contradictory evaluations of “The Education”. The essay analyses the use of pagan, Christian and contemporary exempla in order to demonstrate that Vives formulates a bourgeois notion of marriage which he wishes to impose on aristocratic women. His attacks on court life, the emphasis on frugality and the diatribes against conspicuous consumption lend support to a view of a women remaining invisible in the home. A queen is the test case for such an assessment and Vives attempts to diminish her autonomy as far as possible.

ABSTRACTUnderstanding Coleridge's classic work On the Constitution of Church and State requires paying close attention to the system of distinctions and relations he sets up between the state, the ‘national church’, and the ‘Christian church’. The intelligibility of these relations depends finally on Coleridge's Trinitarianism, his doctrine of ‘divine ideas’, and the subtle analogy he draws between the Church of England as both an ‘established’ church of the nation and as a Christian church and the distinction and union of divinity and humanity in Christ. Church and State opens up, in these ‘saving’ distinctions and connections, important considerations for the integrity and role of the Christian church within a religiously plural national life.

Throughout Stephen Sykes’ theological career a number of key themes continually re-emerged with respect to the Church, Christ, the ministry, the Christian life and the doctrinal tradition. This article offers a survey of and a commentary on these themes. It does this by employing a simple framework focusing on issues concerning Christian identity and relevance. Identity issues are considered from a personal, theological and ecclesial perspective. Relevance issues briefly cover Sykes’ concerns for the ministry of men and women and the question of power and leadership. Stephen Sykes’ theological and ecclesial leadership provide a remarkable resource and lasting legacy for the Church.

In 1986, Michel van Esbroeck published a remarkable new Life of the Virgin that not only is among the most profound and eloquent Mariological writings of early Byzantium but also presents a useful compendium of early apocryphal traditions about Mary. Some of the Life's episodes are already well known from their original sources, such as the Protevangelium of James and the early dormition apocrypha, but many other extrabiblical traditions appearing in this Life of the Virgin are not otherwise attested in early Christian literature. This is true especially of the section that overlaps with the gospels, where the Life expands the canonical narratives in ways unprecedented (to my knowledge) in Christian apocryphal literature. By writing Mary into the story at key points and augmenting several of her more minor appearances, the Life portrays Mary as a central figure in her son's ministry and also as a leader of the nascent church. The result is a veritable “Gospel of Mary” in the section of the Life that emphasizes Mary's essential contributions to her son's earthly mission and her leadership of the apostles in the early Christian community: the Life gives a brief account of the same events recorded in the canonical gospels, but with the Virgin Mary brought to the fore at nearly every instance. The origins of these traditions are not entirely clear, and while they may be the work of the Life's author, it is equally possible that they reflect now lost apocryphal traditions about Mary that once circulated in late antiquity. In any case, the attention that this earliest Life of the Virgin lavishes on the activities of Mary and other women as important leaders in the formation of Christianity is rather striking and quite exceptional among the literature of Christian late antiquity. In its emphasis on the roles played by these women it represents a surprising ancient predecessor to much of the recent work in New Testament scholarship to recover the importance of women in the early Christian movement.

AbstractIn late imperial China chastity of a widowed or betrothed woman, rather than virginity per se, was considered the core female virtue in social practice, in literary discourse, and in law. However, religious chastity as offered in Buddhism and other Chinese religious traditions was a way for women to evade the strictures of married life. This helps explain why, when introduced in the seventeenth century by Spanish Dominican friars, the concept of virginity as a prerequisite for consecrated religious life found enthusiastic acceptance among some women in Fujian province. To legitimize virginity as a virtue and a perpetual state of life for some Chinese women, missionaries and their converts ingeniously revised the meaning of filiality, claiming a place for Christian filiality within orthodox boundaries of filial piety (xiao), while suggesting that Christianity offered a truer meaning of filiality, subordinated to the divine prerogatives of the Christian God.

This paper focuses on the songs circulated in the first Christian woman’s magazine in China, Nü duo (1912–1951). Its first editor, American missionary Laura M. White (1867–1937), played a crucial role in creating a wide range of music for Chinese girls through journalism. White used print media to circulate songs that were viewed as an integral part of the spiritual life of ideal womanhood. Unlike the hymnody confined to congregational worship, the music circulated through Nü duo aimed to promote a vocalised expression of Christian faith in everyday life. This spiritual life was interwoven with secular concerns about the nation, social issues and home life. An exploration of music literature published in Nü duo shows how Western music was translated into local language that aimed to reach female Christians in mission schools and at home. It provided an alternative to the dominant indigenous development of Protestant hymnody in the Republican era. It went beyond the foreign and local dichotomy with a concept of universal modern citizenship. Furthermore, it added a gendered perspective to Christian sacred music that was linked to the creation of a sense of a female fellowship.

Every year, more cases of violence against women and children are reported. According to the poll done by the Ministry of Women's Empowerment, the average age of children and women in 2021 was between 15 and 64 years. This rose from prior years. The rise in cases in 2021 is a warning not only to the government, in this example, the Ministry or State Institution, but to all community institutions. This study aims to establish the role of Christian religious education in preventing domestic violence and utilizing qualitative methodologies. The study's findings imply that Christian religious education must incorporate pre-marriage marriage consultations and a curriculum emphasizing the significance of protecting women and children in the family and social life.

Religion influences people’s everyday life, including the way they structure their families, and relationships between men and women in general. Religious adherents tend to hold more traditional and even gender-stereotypical values. The association between religion and gender relations in space lends itself well to an analysis through feminist geographies of religion. Nevertheless, social relations in Czech secular society continue to be formed by Christian culture, which makes research in feminist geographies of religion important in this context. This contribution is based on a qualitative research using semi-structured interviews with young women living in Prague. Interviewed women are Catholic, Protestant, or without religious affiliation. The aim of the research was to verify the influence of Christianity on respondents’ everyday life. The biggest difference between religious and non-religious women is in their view of traditional family. In addition, Christianity shapes such a spatial behavior of religious respondents which differs from non-religious respondents mostly in their leisure time.

Abstract Attitude toward church buildings was assessed among a sample of 6,476 churchgoers in England during the first covid-19 pandemic lockdown in 2020. The six-item Scale of Attitude toward Church Buildings (sacb) assessed a range of aspects of attitude that included the importance of buildings for Christian faith generally, and buildings as central to the expression of Christian faith. Anglo-Catholics and Roman Catholics showed similar positive attitude towards buildings, Anglican Evangelicals showed a less positive attitude on average that was similar to those from Free-Churches, while Broad-Church Anglican attitude lay between these two extremes. Younger people had a more positive attitude than older people, especially among Catholics. On average, men had more a positive attitude than women, and lay people a more positive attitude than clergy. These findings suggest that the significance of buildings varies among traditions in ways that may still reflect historical issues of the Reformation.

The implementation of sharia in Aceh has have given a complex impacts to several aspects of life of the Christian, economically, culturally, politically and any other aspects of social life. Unlike other Indonesian Christian in different parts of archipelago, the Christian women in Aceh are experiencing the life that regulated by the sharia. Based on the experience in Langsa, some of them (especially teachers, employee, and students) were appealed to wear headscarf (hijab) in their appearance in Islamic public sphere. Those who reside in Aceh Singkil experienced difficulties in establishing church, beyond any difficulties that experienced by Christians in other part of Indonesian region. However, in Southeast Aceh, the Christian live the life of religious harmony among the Muslim majority who implement the Islamic sharia. This article shows that strong encouragement among the Muslim circle to implementing Islamic sharia through political approach could generate difficulties to certain Christians, while to some others it doesn't give any significant negative impact. This article aims to highlight some issues that experienced by Christians who live amid the Muslim majority who implement Islamic sharia. Data were collected during ethnographical studies conducted in the year 2013-2015 in Langsa, Aceh Singkil and Southeast Aceh. Finally, this article proposes significant policy options for managing Muslim-Christian relations in Aceh, Indonesia. Education is crucial for promoting interreligious harmony, religious freedom, and respect for people of different traditions and religion.

The theology of women's ministry is a comparatively new item on the Church's agenda. It is less than two decades since the Church of Scotland took the historic decision to open its ordained ministry to women. At the time it seemed a controversial step, and many must have wondered where it would lead the Kirk. I think that we can truthfully say that it has not led to any dire disasters, but rather to the enrichment of the ministry. That has also been the experience of many other Churches which in recent years have opened their ordained ministry to women. But controversies remain. The 1985 General Synod elections in the Church of England were dominated by the issue of women's ordination, with feelings running high in pressure-groups on both sides. In some Churches the introduction of women's ordination has exacerbated divisions already existing among members. Some of the major Christian denominations, including both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, do not permit any form of ordination for women. Even within denominations like the Church of Scotland, where the introduction of women ministers has occurred without disruption, there are still members who have doubts about whether it is really right. In many small Christian groups women are debarred from all but the most informal ministry, because it is considered unbiblical for them to preach, address assembled Christians publicly, or presume to teach men about spiritual matters.

One of the defining characteristics of Victorian culture was its insistence that women were naturally maternal. Marriage and motherhood were assumed to be the twin goals of every young woman. Those who did not bear children were termed ‘redundant’ (perhaps most famously in W.R. Greg’s 1862 article, ‘Why are women redundant?’), yet were still assumed to have maternal instincts. Equally significant to Victorian culture was its Christianity. Notwithstanding the fact that only about half of the English and Welsh actually attended religious services, the presence of an established Church, the frequency with which political and religious questions coincided, and the certainty that England was (as one clergyman confidently expressed it) illuminated by the ‘very sun-shine of Protestantism’, combined to make Victorian culture Christian, and moreover, Protestant.

Britain has a long history of fighting for religious freedom. In the Middle Ages, the official church was the Roman Catholic Church, which dominated both spiritual and political life. During the Protestant Reformation, Protestantism prevailed and the (Protestant) Anglican Church became the official state church in England. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland became the official state church in Scotland. In England, the Anglican Church discriminated against members of other Christian churches, in particular, such as Baptists and Methodists (usually called dissidents or independent). Roman Catholicism was banned. Only at the beginning of the 19th century he was given the right to exist. Since then, in the United Kingdom, for almost 200 years, there has been freedom of religious faith and practice.

Realities and narratives which shape the identity of Maghrébin women living in ormigrating to France have been minimally explored for purposes of informing missiontheory and practice in this religiously plural yet secularized nation. This paper offers anexploration of lived realities and ideological narratives that Maghrébin women maneuverin the contested nexus of secular French life and ethno-religious identity. The paperaccomplishes this by examining how gendered, migrant, ethno-religious, and racializedencounters shape Maghrébin women. The paper then demonstrates how French nationalismand la laïcité actively inform lived realities of Maghrébin women. The paper thenpresents the French national education system as a case study indicating how Frenchnationalism is codified and perpetuated so that Maghrébin women are excluded frompublic space. The paper then provides reflection on Christian mission theory in light ofMaghrébin women’s oft-contested identities in the hope of invoking more substantialreflection on Christian mission and witness in contemporary France and other centersof migration.

ABSTRACTThis paper reports a study of the religious, spiritual and philosophical responses to spouse bereavement. Twenty-five bereaved spouses aged 60 or more years living in the south of England and from Christian backgrounds were followed from the first to the second anniversary of the loss. The participants expressed a range of attitudes, from devout religious belief to well-articulated secular conceptions of the meaning of life, but the largest group had moderate spiritual beliefs that were characterised by doubts as much as hopes. Uncertain faith was more often associated with depressive symptoms and low levels of experienced meaning. Nine case studies are presented that illustrate different levels of adjustment to bereavement and both changing and stable expressions of faith across the one year of observation. Attention is drawn to the importance of both secular agencies and religious organisations developing a better understanding of older people's spiritual responses to loss. Although to many British older people, practise of the Christian faith may be less evident now than in their childhood, quality of life assessment should not ignore sources of spiritual satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Moreover, previous and especially early-life religious experiences provide useful points of reference for understanding present religious and spiritual attitudes. The study suggests that there may be a substantial need for pastoral counselling among today's older people, especially those of uncertain or conflicted belief.

Rosemary Radford Ruether’s life work demonstrates in books, conferences, and courses her commitment to facilitating dialogue to advance the well-being of women, not as a secular feminist, but as a feminist theologian providing self-critical attention within the Christian community. Her work is an exemplar of redemptive recovery from harmful thinking and the concrete contexts where harmful thinking becomes systematized and institutionalized. Drawing primarily from her Buddhist-Christian dialogues with Rita Gross, this essay provides a series of vignettes to demonstrate Ruetherian methods for self-critical Christian participation in pluralistic encounter.

Abstract This article shows how the theme of education was treated in late antique hagiographical discourse. Brief references are made to two ascetic archetypes, Antony and Macrina, who are both styled in their vitae in relation to education, either by rejecting classical education or appropriating philosophy and substituting classical literature with biblical literature. On this basis the article focuses in more detail on six hagiographical texts and their protagonists, i. e. three texts primarily on men (the Life of Hypatius of Rufiniane, the saints of Theodoret of Cyrus’ Religious History and Cyril of Scythopolis’ Lives of the Monks in Palestine) and three texts on women (the Lives of Marcella, Melania the Younger, and Syncletica). Although classical education is evaluated differently in these texts, and ascetic formation takes various shapes, it is obvious that both male and female saints played a role in the discussion about the Christian appropriation of classical education as well as in the development of particular Christian ideas of formation. A correct use of education was not a hindrance for holiness, but rather a sign of ascetic wisdom. That both men and women, on a literary level, incarnated Christian teachings in their Lives, and that they were able to live and teach Christian ideals, tells us much about the ambitious transformation of education that was visualized in the ascetic literature. The hagiographical texts themselves both reflect the discussion of education and are didactic texts with the aim of establishing new norms.

The Decalogue was central to religious education in Reformation England, but this had not always been the case. The early Christian communities sought to distance themselves from the Ten Commandments and what they saw as the legalism of the Jewish faith, while the Middle Ages saw the ascendency of a parallel moral tradition: that of the seven deadly sins. Although the Decalogue never disappeared entirely from Christian life, by the fourteenth century, the parson from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales could remark of the Commandments that ‘so heigh a doctrine I lete to divines’. The eventual triumph of the Decalogue over the sins during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was enormously significant, for the Ten Commandments not only taught religious doctrine; they also conditioned personal and communal devotions and moral and ethical behavioural norms. To an unparalleled extent, the Ten Commandments engendered a sense not only of the individual’s bond with God but also of the social and familial bonds they shared with mother and father, brother and sister, master and servant, and the broader community of neighbours wherein they dwelt. This essay will argue that one unintended consequence of the increasing prominence of the Decalogue in the households of sixteenth-century England was that it not only reinforced traditional understandings of household authority: it also modified them significantly. Understandings of gender relations in early modern England have been framed in a number of different ways over the past forty years: in terms of the essential stability of the household, the tightening of patriarchal control, and even in terms of crisis. But what these approaches fail to recognize is that, while the Decalogue undoubtedly reinforced parental (and particularly patriarchal) authority, it did so by stressing in equal measure the responsibility that was also inherent in authority, and the duties of care owed by superiors to inferiors. In both senses of the word, the commandments came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, given authority by Scripture and ubiquity through catechesis. An important aspect of this system was a much more nuanced understanding of patriarchal responsibility than has often hitherto been recognized.

When convents were re-established in mid-nineteenrh-cenrury England, after a break of over two hundred years, they mirrored the developments in religious life pioneered on the Continent during the Catholic reformation and in response to the French Revolution. By 1850 new forms of active and apostolic vocation co-existed with the traditional enclosed and contemplative vocation. Yet even the most traditional convent was novel in early nineteenth-century England, and it is only with benefit of hindsight that we assume the willing response of Irish and English women to the call of a religious vocation. The reestablished Church might promote the virtue of vocation, particularly to the new apostolic congregations which were so useful to hard-pressed priests. But it was not inevitable that the religious life would take root in a culture deeply suspicious of conventual ‘secretiveness’ and, moreover, at a time when the ideology of hearth and home had such vitality. In the event, the active congregations multiplied rapidly and attracted women of all classes. As a result, by the end of the century the Roman Catholic Church in England had found employment for thousands of women as full-time, professional church workers. More than one-third and perhaps as many as half of these women were from working-class families, and it is with the working-class members that this paper is concerned.

This article follows the exegetical and legal interpretations of the story of Adam and Eve among Jewish scholars of the High Middle Ages living in northern Europe. It argues that by following these evolving interpretations and understandings one can tease out details of the fabric of everyday Jewish life alongside tensions and norms that were under debate. It focuses on two main aspects of these reinterpretations. The first is understandings concerning conjugal life and gender hierarchies. The second is legal rights and responsibilities accorded to women as ‘daughters of Eve.’

Abstract This article surveys the development of the religious devotions and court life of David II of Scotland (1329–71). Using contemporary government and chronicle sources it discusses the favour David showed to a wide range of chivalric and pious causes, many with special personal resonance for the second Bruce king. This patronage attracted widespread support for his kingship after 1357. However, David also had political motivation for these interests, namely his agenda of securing a peace deal with Edward III of England and overawing his Scottish magnate opponents. His political circumstances meant that his legacy of chivalric and religious patronage was obscured after his early death.

How might the black church and womanist scholarship begin to re-imagine religious education in ways that attends more deliberately to the unique concerns and interests of younger black, Christian women? Throughout the history of the black church, despite being marginalized or silenced within their varied denominations, black women have been key components for providing the religious education within their churches. However, today, in many church communities, we are seeing a new, emerging trend whereby young, black, Christian women are opting out of traditional approaches to religious education. They view contemporary church education as insufficient to address their contrasting range of real-life difficulties and obstacles. Instead, these young women have been turning to the work of contemporary black female hip-hop artists as a resource for religious and theological reflection. Drawing from focus groups conducted with young black female seminarians and explored through the lens of womanist theory, I argue this trend is forming a new, legitimate type of religious education where the work of artists such as Beyoncé and Solange are framing an unrecognized womanist, spirituality of resistance for young black women. Both religious educators and womanist scholars need to pay attention to this overlooked, emerging trend. Respectively, I suggest religious education and womanist scholarship would benefit by considering new resources for religious, theological, and pedagogical reflection, one that is emerging out of young black women’s engagement with the art and music of specific black female artists within hip-hop.

Grace Aguilar’s interpretation of the Torah’s laws on female inheritance and a daughter’s vows in her 19th-century biography of biblical women The Women of Israel sits between a proselytizing Anglo-Protestant rhetoric and an androcentric Judaism. This article traces the contours of her feminized, contemplative brand of Judaism through her reading of these laws. The article finds her arguments against the main currents of Judaism of the period to be of a social-religious strain familiar to, yet contending with, the ‘tolerant’ Christianity of Victoria’s England. In staking her space between traditions, Aguilar adopts (and adapts) the terminology of Christian parlance and the Christianized domestic ideology the terms facilitate. The result is a subversive, if ambivalent, work of biblical interpretation that seconds a hegemonic cultural vision for domestic accord in substituting Judaism for its religious heart. Aguilar’s recovered ‘authentic’ Judaism, then, emerges as Christianity’s worthy twin that stands its ground against misogyny.

Through an analysis of a large corpus of sixteenth-century wills and testaments, this article explores Englishwomen’s end-of-life religious patronage a site for the production of family identity and memory, and as a mechanism by which family and faith were woven together. It considers both the influence of the family on women’s post-mortem piety, and their role as executrices for their husbands. In doing so, it argues that women were integral to producing the commemorative practices that ensured their families’ immortality, and that these practices were in turn an important means by which religious practice and belief were renegotiated and refigured during the early English Reformation.

In the political and social life of the last centuries, almost every social aspect has been debated in a context of political influences and interests, of the opposition of different groups of more or less political nature. The family has always been the most favorable environment for the birth and perfection of the human being. The procreation, care, upbringing and preparation for life of a new creature have been and are a fundamental concern of any family. Children represent the "golden fund of a people" and maintain the natural human potential, give natural and spiritual strength to a people. One of the aspects that received special attention was the right of women to have a say in their own reproduction, namely the right of women to choose whether or not to keep a pregnancy. Immoral in terms of the Church, outlawed by the legislation of some states, the right to abortion has had a sinuous evolution on the social scene of many states. This issue has many political, moral and social connotations, being politically regulated differently by different states.

The advent of the welfare state has been seen by some historians as a decisive blow for British traditions of voluntarism, echoing some of the concerns raised in the lead up to the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS). This article examines the practice of Hospital Sunday in England in the post-war period. In doing so it evidences the effect of the nationalization of the voluntary hospitals in 1948 on the relationships between clergy, their congregations and health care. It argues that much greater attention needs to be paid to the continuities evident in Christian-inspired social action in the NHS in the long 1950s and after. Attending to the role of such Christian social action allows historians both to extend our knowledge of the importance of Christianity to social life in the period and to deepen our understanding of the operation of the welfare state.

Many scholars have sought to understand renaissance culture in terms of self-fashioning, a concept that sees the sixteenth-century preoccupation with imitation and performance as symptoms of a desire to conform outwardly to social expectations. Historians of Tudor England and biographers of Thomas More, influenced by this concept, have despaired of discovering the “true” Thomas More behind a bewildering array of self-fashioned masks that More “wore” as both an author and public figure. Recent scholarship seeks to show the coherence of More's character, despite the fact that his life and writings do not fit neatly into contemporary scholarly categories. Understanding More as a “Christian Humanist” and focusing on More's intervention in a controversy between his friends Erasmus and Dorp, this study positions More as engaging in typological emulation, whereby in imitating the correspondence of Jerome and Augustine, he seeks to embody more perfectly the ideal of the Christian orator.

Abstract Christian virgins were frequently targeted in official crackdowns by Ming and Qing governments on church activities, during which officials taking a Confucianist stance placed pressure on Christian virgins by scandalizing and criminalizing their motivations for practicing celibacy as their refusal to marry was regarded as a violation of Confucian morals. The legitimacy of Christian virgins depended on whether they were able to portray themselves as an “acceptable” type of celibate women within the Confucian patriarchal framework and the legal system of the Ming and Qing governments. During their interactions with the authorities, Christian virgins invoked pre-existing categories of chaste women that were accepted in the Confucian discourse on family order, such as “virgin widows” and “filial virgins,” to justify their way of life against attempts to criminalize their behavior. They also reaffirmed their affiliation to their patriarchal families through their everyday activities, constructing a positive self-image of themselves in stark contrast to the negative image presented by the anti-Christian literati. By adopting this strategy, they were more able to avoid external interference from the government in their religious life while remaining under the patronage of their natal family; however, the protection of their patriarchal family lost its efficacy once their acts were perceived as a direct political threat.

British attitudes towards homosexuality have changed with astonishing rapidity over recent decades. Society has managed to assimilate these shifts with relative ease. The Christian churches, however, as repositories of tradition and defenders of inherited values, have been finding it increasingly difficult to adjust to the new environment. The Church of England is internally divided in the face of an external crisis: the Archbishop of Canterbury acknowledges that the global Anglican Communion could split over the issue, and the church faces similar pressures domestically. These events raise important questions about how religious institutions come to terms with modernity. The rapidity of social change, the decline in deference to authority, the increase in tolerance of anything that seems a private matter, and the sense that sexuality is fundamental to the free expression of personal identity, all make it difficult for a church to declare that sexual orientation might disqualify one from ministry or even membership. This paper analyses empirical evidence covering two decades from the British Social Attitudes and British Household Panel surveys. It is apparent that no real consensus yet exists on basic issues of sexual morality. Society as a whole is highly polarised over the question of whether same-sex unions are wrong, with significant and increasing divisions between young and old, women and men, and religious and non-religious. Far from being better placed than others to avoid disputes, Christian churches suffer from compounded problems. The attitudes of lay Christians are starkly and increasingly polarised along the dimensions of ideology and religious practice. This gulf presents a particular problem for churches with both liberal and evangelical wings, notably the Church of England.

ABSTRACT It has been observed that Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur exhibits the active and contemplative lives much discussed in medieval England as modes of Christian living. However, no one has yet explored how Malory examines the lives by foregrounding sight, which in the Morte is vital to action and contemplation. Sight brings people into relation with one another and with God but it can also mesmerize minds and overwhelm bodies. This article argues that Malory stresses the need to educate the sense of sight and better understand visual connection. His portrayal of seeing helps elucidate medieval England’s evolving models of sense perception and religious life.

ABSTRACTThe writing of ecclesiastical history is rarely disinterested, and this was especially so in eighteenth-century England. Its leading practitioner, John Jortin, wrote with a clear, determined, and dynamic purpose: to offer an effective critique of orthodoxy and its ally, persecution, and to secure civil and religious liberty in a way commensurate with maintaining an established church and liberal learning. His life and writings meditated on early eighteenth-century tendencies in thought and scholarship in a spirit that allowed often radical developments to take place. Unambiguously heterodox in tone and conclusions, Jortin's researches were drawn on by radical dissent. A scion of a Huguenot family, Jortin was a critical mediator between the culture of the Huguenot Refuge and English scholarship. He was a pioneer in the study of English literature, moving such study away from the narrowly philological methods of Richard Bentley towards more reflective literary scholarship. Above all, Jortin was determined that the Republic of Letters should be a Christian Republic; his contribution to and experience of Enlightenment substantiates J. G. A. Pocock's contention that, in England, it was largely clerical and conservative: study of Jortin in context challenges the hegemony of the Radical Enlightenment thesis that is rapidly becoming an interpretative orthodoxy.

The article presents an analysis of the “Life” of Mrs. Dorothy Lawson made by her chaplain, Jesuit William Palmes in the mid–17th c. (1646–1650). The “Life” of Mrs. Lawson was intended for the women of the English Catholic community, nuns and lay-women. The text revealed a post–Trident model of religious life adopted for the realities of the life of Catholics in England. It is shown that to describe the devotional practices of Dorothy Law-son, her biographer had to picture the actions of women that set them on collision course with secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and also contradicted the accepted gender stereotypes. The article is followed by a Russian translation of the “Life”, with commentaries.

The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.