Suchergebnisse

This volume explores the critical reactions and dissenting activism generated in the summer of 1968 when Pope Paul VI promulgated his much-anticipated and hugely divisive encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which banned the use of 'artificial contraception' by Catholics. Through comparative case studies of fourteen different European countries, it offers a wealth of new data about the lived religious beliefs and practices of ordinary people – as well as theologians interrogating 'traditional teachings' – in areas relating to love, marriage, family life, gender roles and marital intimacy. Key themes include the role of medical experts, the media, the strategies of progressive Catholic clergy and laity, and the critical part played by hugely differing Church-State relations. In demonstrating the Catholic church's important (and overlooked) contribution to the refashioning of the sexual landscape of post-war Europe, it makes a critical intervention into a growing historiography exploring the 1960s and offers a close interrogation of one strand of religious change in this tumultuous decade.

Drawing upon a multi-disciplinary methodology employing diverse written sources, material practices and vivid life histories, 'Faith in the Family' seeks to assess the impact of the Second Vatican Council on the ordinary believer, alongside contemporaneous shifts in British society relating to social mobility, the sixties, sexual morality and secularisation

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to 'resolve the issue' through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails. As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek's private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a 'modern' Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.

Dr Letitia Fairfield's admission to Middle Temple in 1923 is usually a footnote in descriptions of her trailblazing career as a public health official and Catholic controversialist. Yet while she did not practise as a barrister, her legal formation, powers of oratory and fascination with jurisprudence were enduring legacies in a long and illustrious career. Whether providing intellectual resources to tackle the Eugenics Society or practical tools to adjudicate the relationship between remedial medicine and the State, Fairfield's legal ethics were founded on her interpretation of the Judeo-Christian roots of the English common law. In her enduring jurisprudential commitment to the rights and dignity of the individual, Fairfield's call to the bar was another aspect of her feminism and lifelong pursuit of the politics of conscience.

Drawing on case studies of urban settings across the world, this book provides a more nuanced understanding of the religious identities of migrants within the 'modern metropolis', and makes a significant contribution to fields as diverse as twentieth-century immigration history, the sociology of religion and migration studies, as well as historical and urban geography and practical theology.

Drawing upon extensive oral history interviews and long scale participantobservation in two London churches, an ethnically diverse Catholic parish inCanning Town and a predominantly West-African Pentecostal congregationin Peckham, this article compares and contrasts differing Christian expressionsand understandings of 'civic engagement' and gendered articulations of laysocial 'ministry' through prayer, religious praxis and local politics. Throughcommunity organizing and involvement in the third sector, but also throughspiritual activities like the 'Catholic Prayer Ministry' and 'deliverance', Catholicsand Pentecostals are shown to be re-mapping London – a city ripe for reversemission – through contesting 'secularist' and implicitly gendered distinctionsbetween the public and private/domestic, and the spiritual and political. Greaterscholarly appreciation of these subjective understandings of civic engagementand social activism is important for fully recognizing the agency of lay people,and particularly women often marginalized in church-based and institutionalhierarchies, in articulating and actuating their call to Christian citizenship andthe (re)sacralization of the city.

The new histories of love and romance within this edited collection illustrate changes (and indeed continuities) in understandings of affection, intimacy and sex from the First World War until the beginning of the Women's Liberation movement. Both established and emerging scholars contribute to understandings about the power, knowledge and pleasure of love and romance within twentieth century Britain. Together, the essays in Love and Romance in Britain, 1918-1970 problematize notions of a 'golden age' of romance in the 1950s, and received periodisations that plot a rapid 'rise' and 'fall' of modern love. They expand our notions of what was modern about romantic love, and reveal the complex sources, spaces and times in which love was made in twentieth-century Britain.