JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY最新文献

Written from the perspective of a social historian trained in the French tradition, this article investigates how the study of nineteenth-century Irish migrations to Britain contributes to the study of the nature of “religious archives.” In France, the writing of social history during the twentieth century was heavily influenced by sociologists and their view that religious facts were cultural and social phenomena. This outtake was also encouraged by the classification of ecclesiastical archives which were transferred to State repositories and organised according to lay and secular categories after the French Revolution. This article explores nineteenth-century Roman Catholic schooling in Scotland as a case study. Since 1918, Scottish Catholic school records have been transferred to public repositories and categorised in “secular” fashion. Investigating the case of religious schools means looking for secular matters in ecclesiastical school records and clerical notes (the diaries of Father Michael Condon, d. 1902, are an exceptional source on that matter). In the end, this article argues that there can be no strict separation in the historical exploration of the past between the use of “religious” and “secular” archives. Ecclesiastical preoccupations never excluded worldly concerns, and down-to-earth considerations were an integral part of parish and school lives.

This article examines the thinking behind the Religious Toleration and Peace (RETOPEA) project, and specifically the construction of a digital archive of sources concerning religious diversity in Europe and beyond, past and present. It argues that European young people tend to accept Enlightenment assumptions about the past and ‘religious conflict’ and that their views of religious history are shaped by ‘presentism’. The article explores RETOPEA's approach to selecting, preparing, and curating a digital archive which presents to young people a fuller picture of both religious intolerance and tolerance in the past, and which enables them to think ‘with’ history rather than assume simplistic lessons from the past.

From mid-1960 to early 1961, the Melbourne Catholic weekly newspaper The Advocate carried an extended controversy on evolutionary science and its compatibility with the teachings of the Church. An intra-denominational debate among Catholic scientists, clergy and laymen, the controversy was shaped by the theological framework of Pope Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis (1950), which included the first ever papal statement on evolution. As a grassroots debate in which official Catholic policy as outlined in the encyclical was open to interpretation by competing interests, the controversy serves as an index of the ambiguities of Humani Generis, and of the uncertainties of wider Church policy at the time, regarding evolutionary science and human evolution in particular. The article considers the Advocate controversy and its immediate aftermath within the context of Humani Generis's strictures on human evolution, and within the longer history of Catholic responses to and engagement with evolutionary science.

Hugh Ray Easton (1906–1965) was a leading mid-twentieth century British designer of stained-glass windows. His works combined neo-baroque style with an aesthetic that was attuned to glamour in contemporary media such as film and homoerotic physique magazines. His work was installed in a large number of Anglican churches as well as in a range of other buildings. He was particularly noted for his war memorial windows including those at Westminster Abbey. These featured images of military service personnel, Jesus, saints, and angels modelled on an ideal type of youthful, muscular, blond masculinity. The article argues for a reappraisal of Easton's art and explains that the relative absence of critical discussion of these artworks can be explained by homophobia on the part of the artistic establishment and the closeting of same-sex desire within the Church of England.