Suchergebnisse

Although the eminent Spanish novelist and anticlericalist Vicente Blasco Ibánez (1867-1928) received little scholarly attention outside his homeland for several decades, he gained significantly greater international notice in the latter half of the twentieth century. His novel of 1903, La Catedral, published in both the United Kingdom and the United States of America six years later as The Shadow of the Cathedral, is a scathing indictment of the conservative Roman Catholic religious establishment in Spain. Blasco Ibánez faulted its intolerant monopoly on national spiritual life for much of the country's cultural, political, and economic backwardness. Relying heavily on the subsequently discredited nineteenth-century belief that Andalusian Spain had been a model of religious toleration under Islamic hegemony for many generations following the Moorish invasion in the eight century and that this had fostered a golden era of cultural flourishing, he argued for the dismantling of Catholic privilege in favour of secularism, toleration, and pluralistic religious freedom to spur the country out of its stagnancy. This article explores both the construction and recent dismantling of the myth of religious harmony in Moorish Spain and how that perception of the Middle Ages is used rhetorically in The Shadow of the Cathedral.

The article discusses the Norwegian-South African whalers' participation in World War II against Germany and Axis Powers, including military recruitment of whalers in Durban, South Africa. An overview of the impact that the 1940 German invasion and occupation of Norway had on Norwegian-South African involvement in World War II, including in regard to the exiled Norwegian government in London, England, is provided.

Standing at the apogee of post-Protestant theological liberalism, the scholarly Unitarian minister Ramsden Balmforth, who served the Unitarian Church in Cape Town from 1897 until 1937, responded to a broad spectrum of issues affecting South African religious, political and economic life. Having been moulded by Fabian socialism in his native Yorkshire, however, and informed by the theology of such denominational fellows as Joseph Estlin Carpenter during his student years in Oxford, he remained relatively marginalised on the ecclesiastical landscape of South Africa. Despite this quasi-isolation, Balmforth sought in the late 1920s to predict the future of Christianity or religious life generally not only in his adopted homeland, but also on an international scale. In the present article his conceptualisation is analysed in the historical context of his theological liberalism generally, and a critique of his prognostications is offered which highlights Balmforth's failure to come to grips with the fact that his liberalism, which he regarded as a virtually inevitable product of cultural history, had failed to make nearly any inroads on the increasingly complex kaleidoscope of South African Christianity.

Gabriel Scott's comedy Babels taarn (Babel Tower), first performed at the National Theatre in Kristiania in 1911, satirises the language controversy that was raging in Norway at the time. The play is regarded as important in linguistic and literary terms, but has been largely forgotten. This article argues that Scott was disillusioned by the politicisation of the language controversy and regarded the advance of landsmål as an artificial and unwelcome phenomenon in the unfolding of Norwegian culture which failed to understand the complexities of inevitable cultural syncretism. Babels taarn is discussed as a means by which Scott critiqued the defenders of riksmål for their passivity. Finally, it is argued that Babels taarn is a scathing indictment of what Scott perceived as misdirected and shallow nationalism. ; http://www.scandinavica.net/about-scandinavica.php ; http://www.scandinavica.net/2013-1.php

The words fundamentalist (as both a noun and an adjective) and fundamentalism were coined in 1920 within the Northern Baptist Convention when that and other American Protestant denominations were experiencing theological turmoil due to the advance of theological modernism. It is argued in the present article that both terms initially had positive meanings when used by defenders of orthodoxy. However, within weeks of their birth both were criticised by less conservative Christians. Like many other theological terms they underwent semantic change – in this case pejoration and lexical extension. Moreover, by 1923 'fundamentalist' had been extended into political journalism to refer to strict adherents of one ideology or another. The greatest change, however, and one that fixed these neologisms in the public mind in both North America and the United Kingdom, came with the widely published 'Scopes monkey trial' of 1925, when the association of 'fundamentalists' and 'fundamentalism' with anti-intellectualism and obscurantism reached its apogee. ; http://www.inluceverbi.org.za/index.php/skriflig ; http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/ids.v47i1.672 ; http://www.indieskriflig.org.za/index.php/skriflig/article/view/672

That the highly prolific and versatileAnglo-French littérateur, historian, editor, and commentator Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953), like his friend and confrère Gilbert Keith Chesterton, made a profound impact on many Englishmen of conservative bent, especially intellectually inclined fellow Catholics, with regard to political, cultural, and religious issues early in the twentieth century, is widely acknowledged, but the way in which he did so has rarely been discussed in detail in published scholarly works.1 The assessment of the eminent historian and theologian Adrian Hastings is representative. In an essay titled 'Some reflexions on the English Catholicism of the late 1930s', he described a religio-cultural scene distinguished more by literary accomplishments than by theology or the pure vita academica in general: 'It was a world, moreover, which had emerged, not from the discipleship of Newman or Acton or evenVon Hügel, but rather from the swelling circle of Belloc and Chesterton – and Belloc far more than Chesterton, perhaps because Belloc had been a Roman Catholic all the time and his spirit harmonised a great deal more readily with that dominant within the Church of this period.'With regard to the specific content of Belloc's influence on a generation, Hastings noted that although his Catholic identity and eagerness to serve as an apologist permeated most of what he put to paper, he ignored almost completely the New Testament and theology as such. 'The post-Bellocian Catholicism of the 1930s was moulded very strongly in this image,' Hastings generalised.2 The pivotal question, which has never been adequately answered, is how this occurred. The authors of general surveys of twentieth-century English literary history have not evinced a particular interest in the question. Little about Belloc's influence can be gleaned from works like Adam Schwartz's The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham, Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones.3 In this article I shall take steps towards filling this lacuna by exploring pivotal dimensions of Belloc's ideational influence on one of his most productive Catholic disciples. Douglas Francis Jerrold (1893–1964) was an increasingly prominent man of letters in London from the 1920s until the 1950s. He wore several hats. Jerrold began his career in publishing on the staff of the Ernest Benn firm in 1923, and from 1929 until 1959 he served sequentially as director and chairman of Eyre and Spottiswoode. Jerrold also edited The English Review from 1930 until 1936 and The New English Review from 1945 until 1950; in addition, he contributed a plethora of articles to these periodicals. He was also a columnist in the weekly Catholic press. His two novels, The Truth about Quex and Storm over Europe, were published in 1927 and 1930, respectively, and a dramatisation of the latter was staged in theWest End in 1936. As a prolific amateur historian Jerrold also wrote several volumes of English and general European history. ; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291468-2265/

What concerns social scientists, of course, is the question of who will support an aging population legally entitled to lifelong social security.

For decades research into the history of Christian social ethics in South Africa has illuminated responses within a broad spectrum of major denominations to public issues, but has thus far shed considerably less light on how believers outside these denominations reacted to various questions. Unitarians are in the latter camp. Although few in number, they offered opinions and engaged in activities from a noteworthy intellectual perspective which was largely an extension of nineteenth- century developments in European theology, philosophy, and political thought amalgamated with a focus on the ethical teachings of Jesus. For forty years beginning in 1897 while he ministered to the Free Protestant Church in Cape Town, English-born Ramsden Balmforth commented prolifically on a variety of important issues and in some instances participated in movements to redress grievances voiced by disadvantaged groups within the ethnic amalgam of the Union of South Africa. The present study examines several of this Christian socialist's positions against the backdrop of his meta-ethical precepts.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, both the government of Sweden and various non-governmental agencies in that country stood at the forefront of the international campaign against apartheid. To a considerable extent, representatives of the Church of Sweden Mission were involved in this struggle. Among them was Gunnar Helander (1915-2006), a missionary in Natal and on the Witwatersrand from 1938 until 1956. After he returned permanently to Sweden, his role escalated and became known internationally, especially due to his prominence in the leadership of the International Defence and Aid Fund. Between 1949 and 1986 Helander wrote seven novels set in South Africa. In these works one can trace the unfolding of his position on apartheid, which evolved from mild criticism of race relations in South Africa to advocacy of international subversion of the P.W. Botha regime ; http://www.koersjournal.org.za/index.php/koers/article/view/417