Download or read book Conversion and Narrative written by Ryan Szpiech and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1322, a Jewish doctor named Abner entered a synagogue in the Castilian city of Burgos and began to weep in prayer. Falling asleep, he dreamed of a "great man" who urged him to awaken from his slumber. Shortly thereafter, he converted to Christianity and wrote a number of works attacking his old faith. Abner tells the story in fantastic detail in the opening to his Hebrew-language but anti-Jewish polemical treatise, Teacher of Righteousness. In the religiously plural context of the medieval Western Mediterranean, religious conversion played an important role as a marker of social boundaries and individual identity. The writers of medieval religious polemics such as Teacher of Righteousness often began by giving a brief, first-person account of the rejection of their old faith and their embrace of the new. In such accounts, Ryan Szpiech argues, the narrative form plays an important role in dramatizing the transition from infidelity to faith. Szpiech draws on a wide body of sources from Christian, Jewish, and Muslim polemics to investigate the place of narrative in the representation of conversion. Making a firm distinction between stories told about conversion and the experience of religious change, his book is not a history of conversion itself but a comparative study of how and why it was presented in narrative form within the context of religious disputation. He argues that between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, conversion narratives were needed to represent communal notions of history and authority in allegorical, dramatic terms. After considering the late antique paradigms on which medieval Christian conversion narratives were based, Szpiech juxtaposes Christian stories with contemporary accounts of conversion to Islam and Judaism. He emphasizes that polemical conflict between Abrahamic religions in the medieval Mediterranean centered on competing visions of history and salvation. By seeing conversion not as an individual experience but as a public narrative, Conversion and Narrative provides a new, interdisciplinary perspective on medieval writing about religious disputes.

Download or read book Conscience and Conversion written by Thomas Kselman and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious liberty is usually examined within a larger discussion of church-state relations, but Thomas Kselman looks at several individuals in Restoration France whose high-profile conversions fascinated their contemporaries. Exploring their reasons and the repercussions they faced, Kselman demonstrates how this expanded sense of liberty informs our secular age.

Download or read book The Modernity of Others written by Ari Joskowicz and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-11-06 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most prominent story of nineteenth-century German and French Jewry has focused on Jewish adoption of liberal middle-class values. The Modernity of Others points to an equally powerful but largely unexplored aspect of modern Jewish history: the extent to which German and French Jews sought to become modern by criticizing the anti-modern positions of the Catholic Church. Drawing attention to the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic anticlericalism among Jewish thinkers and activists from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the book turns the master narrative of Western and Central European Jewish history on its head. From the moment in which Jews began to enter the fray of modern European politics, they found that Catholicism served as a convenient foil that helped them define what it meant to be a good citizen, to practice a respectable religion, and to have a healthy family life. Throughout the long nineteenth century, myriad Jewish intellectuals, politicians, and activists employed anti-Catholic tropes wherever questions of political and national belonging were at stake: in theoretical treatises, parliamentary speeches, newspaper debates, the founding moments of the Reform movement, and campaigns against antisemitism.

Download or read book The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara written by David I. Kertzer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-12-30 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soon to be a major motion picture from Steven Spielberg. A National Book Award Finalist The extraordinary story of how the vatican's imprisonment of a six-year-old Jewish boy in 1858 helped to bring about the collapse of the popes' worldly power in Italy. Bologna: nightfall, June 1858. A knock sounds at the door of the Jewish merchant Momolo Mortara. Two officers of the Inquisition bust inside and seize Mortara's six-year-old son, Edgardo. As the boy is wrenched from his father's arms, his mother collapses. The reason for his abduction: the boy had been secretly "baptized" by a family servant. According to papal law, the child is therefore a Catholic who can be taken from his family and delivered to a special monastery where his conversion will be completed. With this terrifying scene, prize-winning historian David I. Kertzer begins the true story of how one boy's kidnapping became a pivotal event in the collapse of the Vatican as a secular power. The book evokes the anguish of a modest merchant's family, the rhythms of daily life in a Jewish ghetto, and also explores, through the revolutionary campaigns of Mazzini and Garibaldi and such personages as Napoleon III, the emergence of Italy as a modern national state. Moving and informative, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara reads as both a historical thriller and an authoritative analysis of how a single human tragedy changed the course of history.

Download or read book Madeleine Sophie Barat 1779 1865 written by Phil Kilroy and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book also explores Sophie Barat's spiritual journey, from her dark Jansenistic roots to her belief in a loving, warm and tender God, as expressed in devotion to the Sacred Heart."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Forced Baptisms written by Marina Caffiero and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book makes use of newly available archival sources to reexamine the Roman Catholic Church’s policy, from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, of coercing the Jews of Rome into converting to Christianity. Marina Caffiero, one of the first historians permitted access to important archives, sets individual stories of denunciation, betrayal, pleading, and conflict into historical context to highlight the Church’s actions and the Jewish response. Caffiero documents the regularity with which Jews were abducted from the Roman ghetto and pressured to accept baptism. She analyzes why some Jewish men, interested in gaining a business advantage, were more inclined to accept conversion than the women. The book exposes the complexity of relations between the papacy and the Jews, revealing the Church not as a monolithic entity, but as a network of competing institutions, and affirming the Roman Jews as active agents of resistance.

Download or read book Association de pri res pour demander Dieu la d finition dogmatique de l Immacul e Conception de la Tr s Sainte Vierge written by and published by . This book was released on 1854* with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Consuming Visions written by Suzanne K. Kaufman and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plastic Madonnas, packaged holy tours, and biblical theme parks can arouse discomfort, laughter, and even revulsion in religious believers and nonbelievers alike. Scholars, too, often see the intermingling of religion and commerce as a corruption of true spirituality. Suzanne K. Kaufman challenges these assumptions in her examination of the Lourdes pilgrimage in late nineteenth-century France.Consuming Visions offers new ways to interpret material forms of worship, female piety, and modern commercial culture. Kaufman argues that the melding of traditional pilgrimage activities with a newly developing mass culture produced fresh expressions of popular faith. For the devout women of humble origins who flocked to the shrine, this intensely exciting commercialized worship offered unprecedented opportunities to connect with the sacred and express their faith in God.New devotional activities at Lourdes transformed the act of pilgrimage: the train became a moving chapel, and popular entertainments such as wax museums offered vivid recreations of visionary events. Using the press and the strategies of a new advertising industry to bring a mass audience to Lourdes, Church authorities remade centuries-old practices of miraculous healing into a modern public spectacle. These innovations made Lourdes one of the most visited holy sites in Catholic Europe.Yet mass pilgrimage also created problems. The development of Lourdes, while making religious practice more democratically accessible, touched off fierce conflicts over the rituals and entertainments provided by the shrine. These conflicts between believers and secularists played out in press scandals across the European continent. By taking the shrine seriously as a site of mass culture, Kaufman not only breaks down the opposition between sacred and profane but also deepens our understanding of commercialized religion as a fundamental feature of modernity itself.

Download or read book Masked Atheism written by Maria Lamonaca and published by . This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Popes Against the Jews written by David I. Kertzer and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this meticulously researched, unflinching, and reasoned study, National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer presents shocking revelations about the role played by the Vatican in the development of modern anti-Semitism. Working in long-sealed Vatican archives, Kertzer unearths startling evidence to undermine the Church’s argument that it played no direct role in the spread of modern anti-Semitism. In doing so, he challenges the Vatican’s recent official statement on the subject, We Remember. Kertzer tells an unsettling story that has stirred up controversy around the world and sheds a much-needed light on the past.

Download or read book Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth Century France written by Christine Adams and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2005-08-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together eight essays (all but one previously unpublished) that offer innovative strategies for studying society and culture in eighteenth-century France. Divided into three sections, the chapters map out current research paths in social, cultural, and political history. The authors engage the most heated subjects of debate in the field today, including the changing nature of political life in the age of Enlightenment, the role of public opinion in undermining absolutism, and the impact of gender on social relationships and political language in the late eighteenth century. They demonstrate a marked interest in the lives of ordinary and humble French people, finding that exclusion from the main corridors of power fostered cunning and resourcefulness, not political indifference or ignorance. The articles encompass the Old Regime and the revolutionary era without falling into the teleological trap of using the former as the backdrop for the events of 1789. On the contrary, many of the authors consciously avoid this bias by investigating the Old Regime in its own right or by consciously linking the pre- and postrevolutionary eras. This decision alone marks an important turning of the tide. By establishing a dialogue between the Old Regime and the revolution, this volume implicitly pays homage to those historians who insist on the structural continuities that underlay the rupture of 1789. Contributors are Cissie Fairchilds, Christine Adams, Orest Ranum, Lisa Jane Graham, Harvey Chisick, John Garrigus, Lenard Berlanstein, and Jack Censer.

Download or read book The Certeau Reader written by Michel de Certeau and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book America s Rome Catholic and contemporary Rome written by William L. Vance and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This remarkable book examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic to the present. In volume I: Classical Rome Vance shows, for example, how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and how the Pantheon presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality. In volume II: Catholic and Contemporary Rome, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. In the section on contemporary Rome, he addresses American attitudes toward Rome's earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II"--Publisher's website, viewed August 23, 2018.

Download or read book Therese of Lisieux written by Thomas R. Nevin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), also known as St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, is popularly named the Little Flower. A Carmelite nun, doctor of the church, and patron of a score of causes, she was famously acclaimed by Pope Pius X as the greatest saint of modern times. Therese is not only one of the most beloved saints of the Catholic Church but perhaps the most revered woman of the modern age. Pope John Paul II described her as a living icon of God. Her autobiography Story of a Soul has been translated into sixty languages. Having long transcended national and linguistic boundaries, she has crossed even religious ones. As daughter of Allah, she is venerated widely in Islamic cultures. Therese has been the subject of innumerable biographies and treatises, ranging from hagiographies to attacks on her intelligence and mental health. Thomas R. Nevin has gained access to many untapped archival materials and previously unpublished photographs. As a consequence he is able to offer a much fuller and more accurate portrait of the saints life and thought than his predecessors. He explores the dynamics of her family life and the early development of her spirituality. He draws extensively on the correspondence of her mother and documents her influence on Thereses autobiography and spirituality. He charts the development of Therese's career as a writer. He gives close attention to her poetry and plays usually dismissed as undistinguished and argues that they have great value as texts by which she addressed and informed her Carmelite community. He delves into the French medical literature of the time, in an effort to understand how the tuberculosis of which she died at the age of 24 was treated and lamentably mistreated. Finally, he offers a new understanding of Therese as a theologian for whom love, rather than doctrines and creeds, was the paramount value. Adding substantially to our knowledge and appreciation of this immensely popular and attractive figure, this book should appeal to many general readers as well as to scholars and students of modern Catholic history.

Download or read book Association de pri res pour demander Dieu la d finition dogmatique de l immacul e conception de la tr s Sainte Vierge written by Association de prières pour demander à Dieu la définition dogmatique de l'Immaculée Conception de la très Sainte Vierge and published by . This book was released on 1854 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Catholicism and Children s Literature in France written by Sophie Heywood and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book-length history of the classic French children’s author, the Comtesse de Ségur. Virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, in France, Ségur is a national icon and a cultural phenomenon. Generations of children have grown up reading her stories. This book combines a discussion of her life, her works, and their reception with a broader analysis of the cultural context of the mid-nineteenth century. It offers a unique insight into the political engagement of Catholic women through the medium of children’s literature and education, and brings out new aspects of the history of publishing aimed at children, with particular reference to the market for books for girls. With its lively subject matter and accessible style, this book will appeal not only to scholars of nineteenth-century France, but also to specialists and students interested in the fields of children’s literature, gender studies, and religious history.

Download or read book Romantic Paris written by Michael Marrinan and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romantic Paris is a survey of Parisian art and culture during the first half of the nineteenth century, when the experiments of Romantic artists and writers directly challenged the norms of tradition and when dramatic changes in the habits and spaces of everyday life shaped the social foundations of an urban modernity.