scholarly journals The Dialogues Bioregional Project: Landscape Ecology in Central Italy from the Sixth Century to the Present

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-85
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Landscape Ecology ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Cultural Awareness ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Environmental Narratives ◽  
Pope Gregory I ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Pope Gregory I (r. 590-604), commonly known as Saint Gregory the Great, is celebrated for re-organizing both the institutional and liturgical life of the Roman Catholic Church; for instigating the first recorded large-scale mission from Rome to England; and for his writings. Among these, a distinct importance has been attributed to his “Dialogues,” a collection of four books of miracles, signs, wonders, and healings carried out by then little-known holy men, which represent a portion of central Italy as a sacred space where the Christian God is present in both human and non-human form, while also interacting with the environment by performing landscaping functions. This article outlines the “Dialogues Bioregional Project,” a digital, interdisciplinary interface on Italian landscape ecology which would promote dialogues between scientists and humanists as well as provide a modeling tool for environmental and cultural awareness. Shaped around the “Dialogues” of Pope Gregory I, this digital humanities project explores continuities and discontinuities between the socio-political and ecological history of a specific section of Italian territory, a set of multidisciplinary environmental narratives (from c. 600 AD to the present), and local communities. My aim is to introduce readers to the ecological potentials of Gregory’s book and thus prompt scholars interested in the environmental humanities and the integration of biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives to become part of the “Dialogues Bioregional Project” and collaborate in its further development.

scholarly journals A beleaguered church the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) 1941-1945

Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 269-287
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Stojanovic
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Orthodox Church ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
Mass Killings

In the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) from its establishment only days after the German attack on Yugoslavia in early April 1941 until its fall in May 1945 a genocide took place. The ultimate goal of the extreme ideology of the Ustasha regime was a new Croatian state cleansed of other ethnic groups, particularly the Serbs, Jews and Roma. The Serbian Orthodox Church (SPC), historically a mainstay of Serbian national identity, culture and tradition, was among its first targets. Most Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries were demolished, heavily damaged or appropriated by the Roman Catholic Church or the state. More than 170 Serbian priests were killed and tortured by the Ustasha, and even more were exiled to occupied Serbia. The regime led by Ante Pavelic introduced numerous laws and regulations depriving the SPC of not only its property and spiritual jurisdiction but even of its right to existence. When mass killings stirred up a large-scale rebellion, a more political and seemingly non-violent approach was introduced: the Croatian regime unilaterally and non-canonically founded the so-called Croatian Orthodox Church in order to bring the forced assimilation of Serbs to completion. This paper provides an overview of the ordeal of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the NDH, based on the scholarly literature and documentary sources of Serbian, German and Croatian origin. It looks at legislation, propaganda, the killings and torture of Orthodox clergy and the destruction of church property, including medieval holy relics. The scale and viciousness of some atrocities will be looked at based on unused or less known sources, namely the statements of Serbian refugees recorded during the war by the SPC and the Commissariat for Refugees in Serbia, and documents from the Political Archive of the Third Reich Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

scholarly journals ‘A development of practical Catholic Emancipation’: laying the foundations for the Roman Catholic urban landscape, 1850–1900

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
NIAMH NICGHABHANN
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Church Building ◽  
Foundation Stone

ABSTRACT:The infrastructures of devotion and religious worship in Ireland changed dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. This article examines the foundation stone ceremonies that marked the beginning of several large-scale building Roman Catholic church building projects between 1850 and 1900, and in particular considers the extent to which these highly visible and ceremonial events prefigured the more permanent occupation of public space by the new buildings. These foundation stone ceremonies were complex events that reflected contemporary political issues such as land rights as much as they engaged with the spiritual concerns of the Roman Catholic congregations in Ireland during this period.

Musical Solidarities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea F. Bohlman
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
Popular Art ◽  
Transnational Media ◽  
Solidarity Movement ◽  
The Media

This book studies the relationship between music making and social movements using the Solidarity movement in 1980s Poland as a case study. Its central argument is that while music offered a means of performing and commemorating the Solidarity movement as unified, the media of the opposition to state socialism also revealed—and continue to reveal—dissonant discourses on citizenship, culture, and history. The story unfolds along crucial sites of political action under state socialism: underground radio networks, the sanctuaries of the Polish Roman Catholic Church, labor strikes and student demonstrations, and commemorative performances. The musics and sounds of the 1980s are traced through a long history of musical nationalism in East Central Europe and across a transnational media network specific to the Cold War and life under state socialism. By revealing the diverse repertories—singer-songwriter verses, religious hymns, large-scale symphonies, experimental music, and popular song—that played a role across the decade, the book challenges paradigmatic visions of a late twentieth-century global protest culture that place song and communitas at the helm of social and political change. Musical Solidarities draws equally on the methods of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and sound studies to propose a model for understanding popular, art, and sacred musics alongside one another and in the context of singing, shouting, and listening within the study of political action.

Popes, Saints, Beato Bones and other Images at War

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-364
Author(s):  
Kristin Norget
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Moral Authority ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Peripheral Populations ◽  
New Strategy ◽  
Catholic History ◽  
Local Cultures

This article explores new political practices of the Roman Catholic Church by means of a close critical examination of the beatification of the Martyrs of Cajonos, two indigenous men from the Mexican village of San Francisco Cajonos, Oaxaca, in 2002. The Church’s new strategy to promote an upsurge in canonizations and beatifications forms part of a “war of images,” in Serge Gruzinski’s terms, deployed to maintain apparently peripheral populations within the Church’s central paternalistic fold of social and moral authority and influence, while at the same time as it must be seen to remain open to local cultures and realities. In Oaxaca and elsewhere, this ecclesiastical technique of “emplacement” may be understood as an attempt to engage indigenous-popular religious sensibilities and devotion to sacred images while at the same time implicitly trying to contain them, weaving their distinct local historical threads seamlessly into the fabric of a global Catholic history.

DIALOG Z HUMANIZMEM RENESANSOWYM W DZIEŁACH PIOTRA SKARGI / PIOTR SKARGA’S DIALOGUE WITH RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

2013 ◽  
Vol 54 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 405-424
Author(s):  
Alina Nowicka -Jeżowa
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
Roman Catholic Church ◽  
Ignatian Spirituality ◽  
Clear Cut ◽  
Renaissance Humanism ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The City ◽  
The Church

Summary The article tries to outline the position of Piotr Skarga in the Jesuit debates about the legacy of humanist Renaissance. The author argues that Skarga was fully committed to the adaptation of humanist and even medieval ideas into the revitalized post-Tridentine Catholicism. Skarga’s aim was to reformulate the humanist worldview, its idea of man, system of values and political views so that they would fit the doctrine of the Roman Catholic church. In effect, though, it meant supplanting the pluralist and open humanist culture by a construct as solidly Catholic as possible. He sifted through, verified, and re-interpreted the humanist material: as a result the humanist myth of the City of the Sun was eclipsed by reminders of the transience of all earthly goods and pursuits; elements of the Greek and Roman tradition were reconnected with the authoritative Biblical account of world history; and man was reinscribed into the theocentric perspective. Skarga brought back the dogmas of the original sin and sanctifying grace, reiterated the importance of asceticism and self-discipline, redefined the ideas of human dignity and freedom, and, in consequence, came up with a clear-cut, integrist view of the meaning and goal of the good life as well as the proper mission of the citizen and the nation. The polemical edge of Piotr Skarga’s cultural project was aimed both at Protestantism and the Erasmian tendency within the Catholic church. While strongly coloured by the Ignatian spirituality with its insistence on rigorous discipline, a sense of responsibility for the lives of other people and the culture of the community, and a commitment to the heroic ideal of a miles Christi, taking headon the challenges of the flesh, the world, Satan, and the enemies of the patria and the Church, it also went a long way to adapt the Jesuit model to Poland’s socio-cultural conditions and the mentality of its inhabitants.

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