Author: Kristien Suenens
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702276
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 384
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Book Description
Nineteenth-century female congregation founders could achieve levels of autonomy, power and prestige that were beyond reach for most women of their time. With a subject hidden for a long time behind a curtain of modesty and mystery, this book recounts the fascinating but ambiguous life stories of four Belgian religious women. A close reading of their personal writings unveils their conflicted existence: ambitious, engaged, and bold on the one hand, suffering and isolated on the other, they were both victims and promotors of a nineteenth-century ideal of female submission. As religious and social entrepreneurs these women played an influential role in the revival of the church and the development of education, health care and social provisions in modern Belgium. But, equally well, they were bound to rigid gender patterns and adherents of an ultramontane church ideology that fundamentally distrusted modern society.
Author: Kristien Suenens
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789461663276
Category : RELIGION
Languages : en
Pages : 432
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Book Description
The fascinating story of four ambitious Belgian religious women in a male world.
Author: Mary Peckham Magray
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195112997
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 203
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Book Description
Challenging widely-held assumptions of 19th-century social history in Ireland, this book examines the influence of Irish nuns on the Irish Catholic cultural revolution. It claims they were not merely passive servants, but educated women at the centre of the creation of a devout Catholic culture.
Author: Anthony Steinhoff
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110606321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 636
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Book Description
This handbook offers a guide to research on religious culture during Europe’s long nineteenth century (1800–1914). Grounded in the latest theoretical approaches and in line with trends that have produced a "religious turn" in the study of modern Europe, the volume assesses the state of the field while making provocative recommendations for its enlargement. Unique and ambitious in its thematic breadth, it addresses the histories of all five of Europe’s main religious traditions – Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism – and brings these histories into comparative analysis. This analysis extends to a wide range of subjects, from popular belief and practice, education and modern knowledge formation, and the arts to the intersections between religion and urbanization, civil society and politics, and missions and imperialism. It also evaluates recent developments in work on religion vis-à-vis both gender and nationalism, while calling attention to newer research that proposes secularism as a form of belief in its own right. Presenting the scholarship of eighteen leaders in their respective fields, the volume explains why religion as a topic of research has moved from the periphery to the center of modern European historiography.
Author: Rebecca J. Lester
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520938205
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 368
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Book Description
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants--young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written, finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains that the Postulants work toward what they see as an "authentic" femininity--one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern society. The outcome of this process has political as well as personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very intimate experiences of "the Call"--and their choices in answering it--as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds, friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative theoretical analysis of embodied selves, Jesus in Our Wombs delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's "technology of embodiment" on multiple levels--from the phenomenological to the political.
Author: Kathryn Burns
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
A social and economic history of Peru that reflects the influence of the convents on colonial and post-colonial society.
Author: Colleen Gray
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773574727
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Nuns have often been portrayed as nascent feminists wielding an exceptional amount of power. In this formative study of the Congrégation de Notre-Dame - a religious community of uncloistered women established in Montreal in 1657 - Colleen Gray presents a more nuanced view of the foundations and exercise of power within the convent.
Author: Paul Hofmann
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429975474
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Four hundred of the 3,800 people who permanently live or work in the State of Vatican City, the smallest sovereign and independent state on the globe, are women. They are nuns and members of the laity; some are housekeepers of churchmen; others are secretaries, translators, editors, lawyers, and middle-level officials of the papal administration. Expansive in scope and enlightening in detail, The Vatican's Women recalls women who wielded power in the Vatican, including St. Catherine of Siena, Queen Christina of Sweden, Mother Pascalina (Pope Pius XII's longtime housekeeper and confidante), and Mother Teresa. With an unflinching eye, Paul Hofmann examines the papacy's reaction to Catholic women's (and nuns') liberation, and women's struggles, especially today, to fortify their positions within the Church. The Vatican's Women is a thorough and revealing exploration that will herald a new level of insight and dialogue amongst feminists, theologians, and laypeople alike.
Author: Beata Grant
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824832027
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
The seventeenth century is generally acknowledged as one of the most politically tumultuous but culturally creative periods of late imperial Chinese history. Scholars have noted the profound effect on, and literary responses to, the fall of the Ming on the male literati elite. Also of great interest is the remarkable emergence beginning in the late Ming of educated women as readers and, more importantly, writers. Only recently beginning to be explored, however, are such seventeenth-century religious phenomena as "the reinvention" of Chan Buddhism—a concerted effort to revive what were believed to be the traditional teachings, texts, and practices of "classical" Chan. And, until now, the role played by women in these religious developments has hardly been noted at all. Eminent Nuns is an innovative interdisciplinary work that brings together several of these important seventeenth-century trends. Although Buddhist nuns have been a continuous presence in Chinese culture since early medieval times and the subject of numerous scholarly studies, this book is one of the first not only to provide a detailed view of their activities at one particular moment in time, but also to be based largely on the writings and self-representations of Buddhist nuns themselves. This perspective is made possible by the preservation of collections of "discourse records" (yulu) of seven officially designated female Chan masters in a seventeenth-century printing of the Chinese Buddhist Canon rarely used in English-language scholarship. The collections contain records of religious sermons and exchanges, letters, prose pieces, and poems, as well as biographical and autobiographical accounts of various kinds. Supplemental sources by Chan monks and male literati from the same region and period make a detailed re-creation of the lives of these eminent nuns possible. Beata Grant brings to her study background in Chinese literature, Chinese Buddhism, and Chinese women’s studies. She is able to place the seven women, all of whom were active in Jiangnan, in their historical, religious, and cultural contexts, while allowing them, through her skillful translations, to speak in their own voices. Together these women offer an important, but until now virtually unexplored, perspective on seventeenth-century China, the history of female monasticism in China, and the contributionof Buddhist nuns to the history of Chinese women’s writing.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004523197
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 597
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Book Description
During the past 50 years, theological libraries have confronted secularisation and religious pluralism, along with revolutionary technological developments that brought not only significant challenges but also unexpected opportunities to adopt new instruments for the transfer of knowledge through the automation and computerisation of libraries. This book shows how European theological libraries tackled these challenges; how they survived by redefining their task, by participating in the renewal of scholarly librarianship, and by networking internationally. Since 1972, BETH, the Association of European Theological Libraries, has stimulated this process by enabling contacts among a growing number of national library associations all over Europe.
