scholarly journals Reconversion and Retrieval: Nonlinear Change in African Catholic Practice

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 353
Author(s):  
Devaka Premawardhana
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Nonlinear Change ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Catholic History

Against models of conversion that presume a trajectory or a progression from one religion to another, this article proposes a less linear, more complex, and ultimately more empirical understanding of religious change in Africa. It does so by foregrounding the particularities of Roman Catholicism—its privileging of materiality and practice, and of community and tradition. In the course of so doing, this article explores the overlaps between modernist thinking, Protestant ideals, and teleological trajectories; the factors behind reconversion and religious oscillation in sub-Saharan African contexts; inculturation and other continuity paradigms in Catholicism; the significance of the Renaissance for early modern Catholic missions; and the ministry of a contemporary Italian Catholic missionary serving in northern Mozambique. This article proposes that Catholic history and Catholic assumptions offer valuable resources for thinking beyond and thinking against linear models of religious conversion.

Reading Revelations

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Book Of Revelation ◽  
End Point ◽  
Special Revelation ◽  
Good And Evil

This chapter explores the end-point of typological history, apocalypse. The discussion of the Book of Revelation focuses on the ways in which the ongoing struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism was filtered through an eschatological lens. Post-Reformation interpretation of this book claimed a special revelation, one that understood the historic juncture of religious change as the final battle between good and evil. Within this schema, the narratives and figures of Revelation became a mechanism to delineate Protestantism visually and ideologically from Catholicism. The work of Spenser, Dekker, and Middleton illuminates the extent to which drama and poetry participated in the extrapolation of Revelation’s meaning for the present. Yet these literary interpretations also highlight the intrinsic difficulty of reading Revelation’s apocalypse in relation to the early modern present, namely, the progression of time. These reimaginings of apocalypse question if the final typological uncovering will be perennially delayed.

Coda: Repositioning Early Modern Prague on the Global Stage

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The City

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.

RELIGIOUS CHANGE AND THE TIMING OF BAPTISM IN ENGLAND, 1538–1750

2009 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. M. KITSON
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Common Prayer

ABSTRACTThe religious reforms of the sixteenth century exerted a profound impact upon the liturgy of baptism in England. While historians' attention has been drawn to the theological debates concerning the making of the sign of the cross, the new baptism liturgy contained within the Book of common prayer also placed an innovative importance on the public performance of the rite in the presence of the whole congregation on Sundays and other holy days. Both religious radicals and conservatives contested this stress on ceremony and publicity throughout the early modern period. Through the collection of large numbers of baptism dates from parish registers, it is possible to measure adherence to these new requirements across both space and time. Before the introduction of the first prayer book in 1549, there was considerable uniformity among communities in terms of the timing of baptism, and the observed patterns are suggestive of conformity to the requirements of the late medieval church. After the mid-sixteenth century, parishes exhibited a range of responses, ranging from enthusiastic adoption by many communities to complete disregard in religiously conservative parts of Lancashire and Cheshire. Additionally, the popularity of saints' festivals as popular days for baptism fell markedly after 1660, suggesting a decline in the observance of these feasts.

Towards a New Model of Conversion Careers: the Impact of Personality and Contingency Factors

Exchange ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henri Gooren
Keyword(s):  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Guatemala City ◽  
Practical Point ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe central question of this article — why people may change their religious affiliation or become disaffiliated — is relevant from both an academic and a practical point of view. The article makes first an inventory of existing literature on religious conversion. Next I sketch the contours of the new conversion careers approach I am currently working on. I make some comparisons with a region that is not usually mentioned in the literature on conversion: Latin America. These comparisons are based on my earlier fieldwork on Roman Catholicism, Pentecostalism, and Mormonism in Costa Rica and Guatemala (H. Gooren, Rich among the Poor: Church, Firm, and Household among Small-scale Entrepreneurs in Guatemala City, Amsterdam: Thela Thesis 1999).

Martyrdom in Early Modern England

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shanyn Altman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Temporal Control ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
Papal States

At the advent of England’s Reformation, the monarch assumed sovereignty over the English Church. This created an established state church, which was designed to counter the papacy’s assertion of supremacy. In doing so, the English Church more emphatically linked itself to the monarchy’s temporal control and its attendant realpolitik than was the case with the Pope’s authority over Roman Catholic territories, barring the small Papal States. For those in England who remained faithful to Roman Catholicism, this created an environment where some Protestants took “popery” to be akin to sedition. Whereas during Mary I’s regime, where the English Church was back under papal authority and martyrs died under heresy statutes rather than treason statutes, it was held under Protestant regimes that to act against the English Church was to act against the English state. Given the wide sway of perspectives within English Protestantism from Presbyterianism to Arminianism, as well as the old faith’s continuing appeal among many, English subjects were confronted with competing notions of what it meant to be a good Christian and, consequently, conflicting views about who qualified as a Christian martyr and what precisely Christian martyrdom involved. Martyrologies and other discourses on martyrdom were powerful tools for defining true religion and influencing the behavior of religious adherents, even if the popular representation of the martyr-figure that arises from these works did not necessarily reflect all of the views on martyrdom held by Catholics and Protestants in contemporary society.

Ambiguous Welcome: The Protestant Response to American Catholics

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
Patrick Allitt
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Irish Catholics ◽  
American Catholic History ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
American Catholic

This chapter examines aspects of American Catholic history that lay outside the commonly told story of parishes and immigrants by surveying the efforts of American Protestants—from the colonial era to the present—to properly map that Catholic place in the life of their nation and their own religious sensibilities. It shows how the ambivalent greeting initially extended to Catholic immigrants by U.S. Protestants was shelved for outright hostility during the nativist era prior to the Civil War, when the mass emigration of impoverished, famine-stricken Irish Catholics greatly aggravated preexisting fears of “popish superstition.” At the same time a number of Protestants—often from elite backgrounds—found themselves powerfully drawn to Catholic art and ritual, and more than a few took the plunge into religious conversion.

‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

Conversions ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chloë Houston
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Religious Identities ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Complex Relationships ◽  
Early Modern Travel Literature

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.  

Deconversion and Disaffiliation in Contemporary US Roman Catholicism

Horizons ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Beaudoin
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Spiritual Identity ◽  
Classroom Teaching ◽  
Religious Change ◽  
Roman Catholicism ◽  
Evangelical Church ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Roman Catholics ◽  
The Church

Disaffiliation—when members of religious communities leave—has recently become a popular topic for theological and social scientific investigation. Today, fewer Roman Catholics than in recent memory describe themselves as strong members of their church. Many have left to seek other spiritual paths, and many of those who remain do not believe and practice as the Church teaches that they should. These essays propose that the theoretical framework of “deconversion” provides a broader and more effective way to understand forms of religious change that are occurring in contemporary America. In the classroom, teaching theology can take on a specific productive shape when the surrounding culture challenges theologians to take deconversion seriously as an element of, and larger context for, spiritual identity today. Theology remains vital when patient curiosity about the current adventure of religious identity is foregrounded pedagogically. Concluding thoughts sketch some important characteristics of an evangelical church, more concerned with its mission and witness in the world than with maintaining its internal life.

Festivity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika T. Lin
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Linear Models ◽  
Historical Time ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Economic Exchanges ◽  
Complex Project ◽  
Cultural Functions ◽  
Modern Perspective

This chapter locates festivity within the early modern theatre. Through an analysis of Thomas Dekker’sThe Shoemaker’s Holiday, it considers how holidays functioned not as communal rituals but as commodified entertainments; how one-off experiences tied to the cyclical rhythms of the seasons came to be understood as performances that could be enacted year-round—that is, rendered intelligible as theatre within linear models of historical time; and how playing came to be imagined not only as a mode of sociality but also as a vendible commodity. The chapter shows how the commercialization of theatre altered the economic exchanges at the heart of traditional festivity and argues that the professional stage was engaged in a complex project to situate its own performances in relation to existing festive practices. By focusing on early modern contexts, it highlights the ways in which theatricality serves and produces multiple—and, from a modern perspective, often unexpected—cultural functions and effects.

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