Church Figures Research Articles

M. Jan Hus v ideologii Komunistické strany Československa ve světle díla Zdeňka Nejedlého a archivních dokumentů

Churches were perceived as an ideological enemy under the reign of Communism and therefore the Establishment tried to systematically liquidate them. One of the forms of the anti-religious struggle was the abuse of historical church figures by Communist ideology. In this study, the author tries to highlight the ideological character of the abuse of Jan Hus, who was deliberately portrayed as a social revolutionary and rebel against the old order, even at the cost of distorting historical facts. This abuse is documented particularly using the works of the Communist minister Zdeněk Nejedlý Hus and Our Time and Communists - the Heirs of the Great Traditions of the Czech Nation. In the following part of the study, the author demonstrates the research possibilities in contemporary literature, particularly daily periodicals, along with other materials deposited in South Bohemian archives. These all serve to document this abuse in practice with mention made of the persecution of the renowned church historian Jaroslav Kadlec by the Communist regime.

Gottesdienste zählen: Ergebnisse einer Studie zum Gottesdienstbesuch

Abstract Counting Church Services: Results of a Study on Church Attendance. A survey on all church services and figures of attendance for a whole region of the Protestant parishes in Southern Germany produced new data. Whereas the typical church statistics are solely based on attendance at a few selected Sunday services and the Christmas Eve service, here the significance of services beyond those on Sunday mornings becomes obvious also regarding the quantitative dimension

Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought par Michael Moriarty

dimension of her letters, their sobriety and simplicity, which Yolanda Viñas del Palacio links to Maintenon’s ethos of contrariété, the need for self-sacrifice as a form of expiation for the king’s favor and of self-protection against ever-present calumny. Indeed, the two central notions underlying Maintenon’s epistolary lexicon are those of droiture of mind, soul, and body, and verticalité expressed through absolute obedience and submission to earthly authorities (Stéphanie Miech). Further contributions on Maintenon’s epistolary rhetoric explore her tense relations with church figures such as Fénélon (Hans Bots, Pauline Chaduc) and the Cardinal de Noailles (André Blanc); Maintenon walked a tightrope in trying to assert her influence and protect her reputation , playing with these powerful figures a‘game of cat and mouse’(André Blanc). The second part examines the reception and provenance of Maintenon’s letters, beginning with how her letters came into the possession of La Beaumelle who published three editions in the 1750s (Claudette Fortuny and Claude Lauriol).While some eighteenthand nineteenth-century anthologies and academic textbooks containing a selection of Maintenon’s letters privilege her ‘style simple’ and moralizing nature (Jean-Noël Pascal),others repeat the acerbic criticisms of La Beaumelle and the Duc de Saint-Simon concerning Maintenon’s ‘negative’ influence on Louis XIV and his court (Béatrice Bomel-Rainelli). So does the edition of Maintenon’s sayings, the Maintenoniana (1773), published by Bosselman, a little-known writer from Lille, who sided with the Encyclopedists in presenting her as contradictory and fanatical (Huguette Krief). Finally, the last six articles explore her reception in Romania in the nineteenth century (Ileana Mihaila), in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century (Madeleine van StrienChardonneau , Suzan van Dijk), among the English Bluestockings and Ladies of Llangollen (Gillian Dow), and for writers such as Mme de Genlis, a great admirer of Maintenon (Lesley H. Walker), and the Vicomte de Ségur, Amélie Suard, and Genlis again (Francesco Schiariti). This rich collection opens new paths for further exploration of this complex literary figure. Hope College (MI) Anne R. Larsen Moriarty, Michael. Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-958937-1. Pp. x + 409. $125. This painstaking and illuminating study complements the work carried out in two previous books by Moriarty, Early Modern French Thought: The Age of Suspicion (2003) and Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (2006). The focus in this third volume derives from La Rochefoucauld’s insight that virtue is frequently disguised vice.Moriarty provides extensive background in moral philosophy, starting with Aristotle, for better understanding La Rochefoucauld’s thinking on vice and virtue. The book’s initial chapters examine theories of virtue in antiquity: for 228 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 229 Aristotle, virtue must be sustained consistently in practice as the moral life unfolds; Cicero’s civic ideals combine moral good with sociopolitical efficacy; Seneca and the Stoics involve the self in its own problematic diagnoses. All three see virtue grounded in the wisdom of an enlightened few. With the analysis of Saint Augustine, much of Moriarty’s discussion centers on the Christian ethics that would set the terms of debate on vice and virtue from the Middle Ages to the early modern period.Augustine’s view of humanity, tainted by original sin and in need of divine grace to achieve the transcendent ends definitive of virtuous action, provides the theological battleground on which debates would eventually rage in the seventeenth century. In the meantime, Augustine is filtered through Aquinas, who provides for the possibility of relative virtue even if absolute virtue remains unattainable. Chapters on Reformation and CounterReformation theologians reveal how Augustine continued to be cited by opposing camps. Doctrinal disputes would culminate in the controversy over Jansenius; a chapter is devoted to the Augustinus and its discontents. Moriarty places these debates in historical context: “Early modern Europe [...] was shaken up by [a] loss of confidence not just in particular doctrines, institutions or authorities, but in what we might call the naturalness of the way things are” (118). The loss of unquestioned objectivity led to the valorization of the kind...

Madame de Maintenon: une femme de lettres éd. par Christine Mongenot, Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval

Reviews 227 “perfect conjugation of woman and writer through visual emphasis on her domestic fealty”[82]); of the disjunction between the women’s press and mainstream media; of the efforts to make the “chères lectrices” feel like collaborators rather than observers; and especially of the “interactive, almost symbiotic relationship” (27) between the magazines and popular women’s novels such as Marcelle Tinayre’s La rebelle and Louise Marie Compain’s L’un vers l’autre, both “feminist fables” (131) from which a rather paradoxical feminism emerges. Just how expertly Mesch navigates the “contradictory ideological terrain” of Belle Époque literary feminism, where a selfdeclared feminist can call her partner “master” if doing so might reconcile love, marriage, feminism, and femininity without requiring a choice between them (138) cannot be over-emphasized. In her conclusion Mesch grapples with a sobering reality: changes that seemed so nigh during the magazines’ heyday (suffrage, a more equal legal definition of marriage, the“academization”of women) would not be achieved for decades. But she argues convincingly for the significance of the magazines’“dreaming” and the momentous ideological shift it represents (187). Femina and La Vie Heureuse stand, in the final analysis, as potent reminders of the need to“look beyond traditional historical markers of change [...] in order to recognize other kinds of signs of social progress” (187). Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, Having it All is also remarkably timely: as the magazines beckoning from grocery check-out stands demonstrate, we still worship celebrities, just as we continue to debate whether women can be both“feminine”and“feminist”and to strive for a work-life balance—that“holy grail of achieving women to this day”(28) that first became a possibility thanks to the magazines showcased here. University of Arkansas Hope Christiansen Mongenot, Christine, et Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, éd. Madame de Maintenon: une femme de lettres. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2012. ISBN 978-2-75352100 -1. Pp. 322. 17 a. A new era in critical studies on Françoise d’Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), is evidenced in this collection of eighteen articles by critics who, in large part, have availed themselves of the first ever complete and reliable edition of Maintenon’s correspondence in seven volumes by Champion. While the majority of studies to date on Maintenon have focused on her life and educational writings, the articles in this collection analyze her epistolary rhetoric and transnational reception. Part one examines the diversity of Maintenon’s epistolary style and her adept use of the lettre d’amitié to contemporaries such as Mme de Caylus and Mme de Dangeau (Marianne Charrier-Vozel), and the letter of compliment to Mme des Ursins (Philippe Hourcade), as well as the lettre d’affaires in the administration of her property of Maintenon (Dominique Picco). Religious inflection is never far given the ascetic dimension of her letters, their sobriety and simplicity, which Yolanda Viñas del Palacio links to Maintenon’s ethos of contrariété, the need for self-sacrifice as a form of expiation for the king’s favor and of self-protection against ever-present calumny. Indeed, the two central notions underlying Maintenon’s epistolary lexicon are those of droiture of mind, soul, and body, and verticalité expressed through absolute obedience and submission to earthly authorities (Stéphanie Miech). Further contributions on Maintenon’s epistolary rhetoric explore her tense relations with church figures such as Fénélon (Hans Bots, Pauline Chaduc) and the Cardinal de Noailles (André Blanc); Maintenon walked a tightrope in trying to assert her influence and protect her reputation , playing with these powerful figures a‘game of cat and mouse’(André Blanc). The second part examines the reception and provenance of Maintenon’s letters, beginning with how her letters came into the possession of La Beaumelle who published three editions in the 1750s (Claudette Fortuny and Claude Lauriol).While some eighteenthand nineteenth-century anthologies and academic textbooks containing a selection of Maintenon’s letters privilege her ‘style simple’ and moralizing nature (Jean-Noël Pascal),others repeat the acerbic criticisms of La Beaumelle and the Duc de Saint-Simon concerning Maintenon’s ‘negative’ influence on Louis XIV and his court (Béatrice Bomel...

Commemorative literary monuments in ancient Russia

The article discusses the memorial practices of ancient Russia on a concrete example of description of the history of the origin, development and authorship of Synodikon with literary introductions associated with the names of prominent church hierarchs St Joseph Volotsky and Nil of Sora, who played a key role in the development of Russian spiritual culture. With the help of source study (istochnikovedenie) the author explores the claims and counterclaims about the dating of redactions of the literary introduction and concludes that the earliest version of the text is linked with the literary and liturgical works and activity of Iosif Volotskii, abbot of Volokolamsk Monastery and a leading church figure in the debate over church landholding in the fifteenth century.

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, the ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’ (Jer. 1:10) was employed by countless ecclesiastical writers. Building on an established tradition, medieval contemporaries began applying the allegory of ‘uprooting and destroying, building and planting’ with an intentionally moral and political message. This article examines the Old Testament call narrative with a view to understanding how and why it served medieval popes and other high-ranked ecclesiastics as a political and rhetorical mechanism for legitimising ecclesiastical authority. It argues for a noticeable and deliberate shift in textual interpretation in the ninth century, after which period medieval popes and influential church figures alike marshalled the Injunction to help strengthen the centralising ideology of Rome and her bishop. The effect, it is concluded, contributed ultimately to reinforcing the papacy's claims to govern spiritual and temporal matters throughout Christian society.

Tawney and Temple's Legacy to New Labour: Values for a Moral Society

Christian Socialism rose to prominence in the 1990s, particularly through the leadership of the Labour Party by John Smith and Tony Blair. Both recognized publicly that their Christian faith had influenced their political ideas and both claimed an indebtedness to the English ethical socialist tradition that had developed in the early part of the twentieth century. R. H. Tawney and William Temple were two major exponents of English ethical socialism. Through their writings, and their relationships with significant political, church and academic figures, they developed a very particular critique of English society. They sought to make society more moral by promoting fellowship, freedom, service and equality. Underlying their work was the highly significant concept of acquisitiveness. This involved the rejection of the functionless ownership of wealth, and proposed that each citizen should be rewarded according to the purposeful function or service that they offered to the community as a whole. In the present day, this concept is largely neglected and requires re-evaluation. Developing a contemporary response to their ideas offers an alternative to many assumptions of the free market system and provides a framework for active citizenship.

Russian Orthodoxy, Russian Nationalism, and Patriarch Aleksii II

The Russian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) is a highly visible institution in Russia, and arguably the most prominent and influential religious or cultural body. The Orthodox Church figures prominently in various discussions as the driving force behind Russia's post-Soviet renewal and recovery. Surveys show that Russians trust the Orthodox Church more than any other public institution, including law courts, trade unions, mass media, the military, the police and the government. Estimates of the number of self-identified Orthodox adherents range from 50 million, which amounts to slightly more than one-third of Russia's population, to 70 million, or roughly one half of the population. A leading newspaper consistently ranks Patriarch Aleksii II, head of the Moscow Patriarchate, the governing body of the Orthodox Church, in the top 15 of the country's most influential political figures. These indicators confirm that the Orthodox Church has a significant role in Russia's post-Soviet development. This is widely accepted by commentators both within and without the Orthodox Church, and within and without Russia.

The Ethics of Faith: Isn't the Threat to Democracy?

I want to express my own position on the introduction of Christian ethics in the school course. The problem, which is being actively discussed in Ukrainian society - the problem of spirituality - has been particularly intensified today in connection with the initiatives of the President of the State on the early implementation of the Ethics of Faith in school education. This idea added additional headache to the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, opened the hands of some church figures in their ambitions and raised many questions for scholars who still cannot decide what it is - the ethics of faith.

The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880-1905)

For most of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church in the post-emancipation era was dismissed as a handmaiden of the state, a moribund institution, a purveyor of empty rituals, increasingly isolated and irrelevant in the context of industrial modernization and secularization. The last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in the Church among cultural and social historians of late imperial Russia. Gregory Freeze has recently observed that in its preoccupation with social and political factors in the revolutionary process, the traditional historiography has "ignored its cultural and especially religious dimensions; apart from examining the ideology of the intelligentsia, it has otherwise discounted the role of culture, especially in configuring popular perception and behavior."1 Seeking to redress the balance, Freeze contends: "the Russian Orthodox Church, without question, provided one of the major cultural dynamics in the Russian pre-Revolution ... it claimed a strong hold over the faithful ... and subjected the laity to a constant barrage of liturgies, sermons, publications, and religious instruction in schools."2 [End Page 451] The present article addresses a narrow but important component of this religious discourse: the stigmatization of religious dissent. Alarmed by the growth of sectarianism in post-emancipation Russia, the servitors of spiritual purity increasingly drew on languages of illness and contagion to illustrate the scale and nature of the threat to the Church. Here I discuss the Church's representation of religious dissent not to make a case for its role in "configuring popular perception and behavior"—although that role is by no means discounted—but to explore the ways in which discursive innovations within the Church both reflected and creatively appropriated significant contemporary developments in secular understandings of the social order and the threats posed to it by the spread of moral deviance. Languages of illness and contagion have historically formed a stable part of the lexica of European churches in their attempts to stigmatize religious dissenters, and I make no claims for particularity in the existence of this language in Russian Orthodoxy.3 What does appear particular to Russia is the persistence of this preoccupation with the purity of faith right into the 20th century and its coexistence with the secular, scientific languages of epidemiology, psychology, and psychiatry. The church authorities drew on these disciplines to emphasize the contagious properties of religious deviance. In so doing, they increasingly moved away from a traditional insistence on the virtues of therapeutics, understood as pastoral care, to calls for a prophylactic quarantining of the infected in the interests of collective health. Such a strategy would inevitably require the intervention of the state as it lay beyond the institutional capacities of the Church. Anxious therefore to encourage the expansion of the state's involvement in the persecution of the sectarians, leading church figures sought to stress the intimate relationship between religious and political dissent through a secular language of criminal deviance that stressed their fundamental equivalence. Not only were the state authorities uniquely capable of dealing with the sectarian threat, but they also could not afford, any more than the Church could, to ignore it. Thus the medicalization of religious deviance in late 19th-century Orthodox discourse constituted part of a sustained campaign to summon the secular arm of the state to crush the sectarian movements. On the very eve of the religious liberalization of 1905, the Church's secularization of its rhetoric paradoxically illustrated a reinvigoration of traditional concerns with spiritual and moral purity as the foundation of a secure socio-political order. The Church's resort to medical and secular remedies in the campaign against spiritual nonconformity leads us at the end of this article to reconsider the links between religion and revolution, Orthodoxy and Bolshevism, a disputed issue that has long been debated but has recently been addressed by a...

An Eroding Milieu? Catholic Youth, Church Authority, and Popular Behavior in Northwest Germany during the Third Reich, 1933-1938

I cannot make homesick feelings go away. I miss the community life greatly. I am happy to be a part of the congregation here, but I cannot participate in the evenings because I am 3/4 of an hour from the city. How is it going? Are the Heimabende still nice? Do you attend Marianum on Wednesday evenings? It is too bad that I could not have continued the training longer.1 A young woman conscripted into the Labor Service wrote this anxious letter to a fellow Catholic youth member, Christel Beilmann, in March, 1938. On the eve of World War II, she was one of many young people uprooted from her home religious milieu through the Labor Service, Land Year, and Land Service. The Catholic youth separated from their home diocese by Nazi policies were known as the Wandering Church, and this letter demonstrates how the phenomenon affected the lives of everyday worshipers. This young woman's religiosity demonstrated the continuing authority of the Church over its youth. However, it is unclear whether her feelings were typical of the hundreds of thousands of Catholic adolescents removed from their religious milieu for state service and Nazi indoctrination. While current scholarship remains entrenched in debates about church hierarchy, prominent dissenters, and the decline of the Catholic milieu, it ignores such issues surrounding the intersection of religion and everyday life. Two strands of scholarship dominate the current historiography of the Catholic Church during the Third Reich. On the one hand, numerous books and articles form a fiery and long-standing debate about the complicity of Catholicism in the Third Reich. Postwar Catholic scholars constructed a narrative portraying the Church as an institution of persecuted resisters, emphasizing areas of conflict between Nazis and Catholics, such as euthanasia, the dissolution of youth groups and religious schools, and the imprisonment of clergy,2 and exceptional protesters, such as Bishop Clemens August Count von Galen from Munster.3 A fierce challenge to the one-sided church interpretation began in the 1960's and continues into the present. Scholars consistently criticize the bishops for their failure to speak in favor of the Jews and their nationalistic support for Nazi policies4 and challenge the legacies of revered church figures, such as von Galen.5 Although these critical historians provide corrections to the Church's mythical narrative, they belittle conflicts as single issue opposition6 and underestimate Nazi destruction of Catholic institutions. In the search for martyrs and villains, scholars on both sides ignore the ambiguous interactions between Catholic leaders and their followers under a regime hostile to the public practice of Catholicism. Alternatively, a handful of more recent studies focus on the social history of Catholicism by examining the state of the so-called Catholic milieu during the 1920's and 1930's. Many historians describe modern German politics and society in terms of Catholic, socialist, bourgeois-Protestant, and aristocratic socio-moral milieus,7 each of which shared distinctive values, leaders, and organizations. In theory, a Catholic milieu organized all aspects of its followers' lives around their religious beliefs through Catholic schools, professional associations, youth groups, and religious activities. These recent studies portray a weakening German Catholic milieu, arguing that associational life and church attendance declined. These conclusions, however, are debatable because of the lack of attention to the social history of religious practice during the 1930's.8 New historical methods developed by social historians, such as David Blackbourn, Jonathan Sperber, and Werner Blessing, help illuminate such questions.9 They study rituals, pilgrimages, and popular religiosity to gauge Catholic sentiment during the nineteenth century, but few historians apply these methods to Catholicism during the 1930's.10 Using methodologies pioneered by historians of the nineteenth century, this essay examines three case studies of Catholic Youth in north-western Germany between 1933 and 1938. …

Pleasure drugs and classical virtues: temperance and abstinence in U.S. religious thought

This essay considers U.S. Christian attitudes toward psychoactive substances. It presents classical Christian thought and the opinions of major historical church figures about pleasure drugs (especially alcohol) for comparison with contemporary attitudes about licit and especially illicit pleasure drugs (cannabis, cocaine, etc.). The Four Cardinal Virtues of Thomas Aquinas are the primary analytic rubric but selected Protestant denominational leaders are also cited. U.S. drug policies are critiqued in light of each virtue. The active moral character of the virtues is contrasted with the authoritarian and conformist aspects of abstinence ideology. The rhetoric and diverse viewpoints of the so-called Temperance Era are also considered.

History reconstruction: Third century parallels to 20th century South African Church 'History Origen Adamantinus

History reconstruction: Third century parallels to 20th century South African Church History - Origen Adamantinus. In this paper a possible third century contribution to Church History reconstruction is considered. This is employed as an example for South African church historians who are dedicated to history interpretation, whether it be from the perspective of: acceptance on face value; justification; verification; criticism or renunciation of twentieth century historical events and the WG)'S in which they have influenced the prophetic task of the church in South Africa. To this end, a parallel is drawn between third century Origen and a few South African church figures from the twentieth century, which will highlight the church's continuing prophetic ministry.

Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev: An Argument for a Russian State Church

In any overall assessment of the changing relationship between the church and the state in late imperial Russia it is important to include an account of the thought and activity of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. Although not a clergyman, he was probably the most visible of all Orthodox Church figures of the period, both in the empire and in Western Europe. As the emperor's Ober Procurator of the Most Holy Governing Synod, a post he occupied between 1880 and 1905, he was the perfectly placed official to represent the power of the Romanov government in church affairs and, in its turn, the will and needs of the church to the emperor and his chief councilors of state. Nor, in this case, was it merely the office that made the man. Pobedonostsev himself was a thoughtful and critical student of Western and Russian culture who used his authority in a way that fulfilled his own visions and not the whims of the tsar. He was not a Count Protasov, the loyal Ober Procurator of Nicholas I, and he insisted that the office of Ober Procurator stand equally in the high councils of the tsar along with all other government ministries. Finally, it must be added that Pobedonostsev revealed in his thought and in his public acts a consistent body of religious and political opinion that enjoyed a respectable following among the so-called conservatives of the educated classes, and he was known and admired in this company both for the views he espoused and for the enemies he made.

Retrieving History: Margarethe von Trotta's Marianne and Juliane

part of that project. WTH REMARKABLE consistency, Margarethe von VW Y Trtrotta's films criticize the historical and political sensibilities of liberal humanists and the radical Left. Pastor Klein, the publicly antifascist exemplar in Marianne and Juliane; Wolfgang, Juliane's leftist companion; Hans, the antinuclear activist in Sheer Madness; and Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg's lover and political ally in Rosa Luxemburg-these are only the more obvious instances of liberals and leftists whom von Trotta indicts for refusing to see that the historical and the political are indivisible from the personal.' Von Trotta views feminism, with its insistence that the personal is the political, as more than just another item on the liberal agenda; it is itself the lens through which history is examined-deconstructed and re-visioned. Her feminism is nonessentialist (i.e., historical). The personal psychologizing that is anathema to the leftist critical model derived from sixties historical practices is her indispensable tool for exposing what those practices repress, for shaping narrative, for investigating and destabilizing spectatorship, and for making ambiguity and contradiction visible. In no other film is her attempt to re-vision history more persuasive than in Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit). Ironically, promoters of the New German Cinema have marginalized von Trotta's work in a way that parallels liberalism's marginalization of the personal and psychological. Although in the United States von Trotta is the best known of several extraordinary German women filmmakers, studies of the New German Cinema typically treat her as ancillary to her husband, Volker Schlondorff, with whom she collaborated until she realized that this arrangement-much like the conventional domestic one-placed her in a subordinate position (see, e.g., Rentschler; Corrigan; Franklin; and Sandford).2 Thomas Elsaesser, the author of the most detailed history of the New German Cinema to date, discusses von Trotta at greater length but still attempts to classify her under the rubric of bourgeois humanist historyspecifically that of the German Lutheran Church-even though the church figures importantly in only two of her films, while a vigorous

‘Neither Male nor Female’

The prominence of women in the spread of Christianity in the earliest period has long been a commonplace. It was recognized as such by the early Christians themselves. On the other hand, St. Paul's willingness to use women in setting up the organization of the early church seems to conflict with his opinion that they should stay in their subordinate place. Now Christian women of the early Empire do not usually fall into the scope of books on women in antiquity. But there is no obvious reason for this exclusion, especially when the role of women in the early Church figures prominently in the work of New Testament scholars. A closer look suggests that both sides have something to learn from the other and this paper sets out to examine from the point of view of classicists some of the large claims made in recent New Testament scholarship, which are indeed beingbrought into sharp focus by the current debate on the ordination of women. In particular, a recent book by John Gager6 has stressed Christianity's appeal to women as an important factor in its success, while an interesting article by W. Meeks relates the well-known prominence of women in the Acts of the Apostles to a supposed rising status of women in the contemporary Greek world and to a general questioning of male/ female roles which is said to have been taking place in the early Empire. It is obviously vital foranyone interested in the position of women in antiquity to consider these claims seriously.

They Came to Louisiana: Letters of a Catholic Mission, 1854-1882 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS269 ment of "differential segregation" has demonstrated the need to apply new perspectives to the post-bellum period. The White Savage, however, is not without serious flaws. In his eagerness to make his case, Friedman has embraced some psychoanalytic judgments that simply cannot be corroborated by factual criteria. Thus white southerners alarmed by black soldiers "may have seen a phallic implication in the Negro's gun." Among Watterson's motives for desiring conservative control of southern society was "the element of ego gratification." If Watson wanted black participation in the Populist movement, "it was only to dominate them the more." If he later exploited racial distinctions, it was "to avoid recognizing the crudity and duplicity of his own conduct." In short, Friedman has indulged in some rather arrogant "overkill" to support a thesis strong enough to stand without it. Despite these shortcomings, The White Savage does much to revise traditional interpretations of many important southern theorists. Friedman 's study merits the consideration of all serious scholars attempting to come to grips with the complex, often contradictory tenets of racial ideology in the postbellum South. Roger A. Fischer Southwest Missouri State College They Came to Louisiana: Letters of a Catholic Mission, 1854-1882. Edited by Sister Dorothea Olga McCants. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970. Pp. xxiii, 263. $8.50.) The Daughters of the Cross contributed much to the cause of Catholic education in central and notìiern Louisiana. Beginning with a small, struggling school in Avoyelles Parish in 1855, the determined missionaries overcame penury, disease, civil war, and the indifference of a predominantly Protestant population to develop a thriving educational enterprise which today includes six parochial schools. This book consists of letters written by the individuals who were most responsible for die Daughters' success. Motíier Mary Hyacinth Le Conniat , leader of die mission, wrote a majority of die missives; Bishop August Martin and Fatìier Yves-Marie Le Conniat, Mother Hyacinth's brother, authored most of die rest. The letters provide much worthwhile information on social customs and economic conditions in northern and central Louisiana during die Civil War and Reconstruction period. They also shed as much light upon die characters of diese dedicated, but very human, French missionaries as tìiey do upon die society to which they ministered. Motìier Hyacinth apparently never quite overcame a certain disdain for Americans, whom she thought guilty of the grossest materialism . "These people have no religion," she wrote: "They are baptized, married, and buried, that is all. Life is used for enjoying gold, pleasure and honors!" She also deplored American tastes in dress and food. And die work habits of Louisianians did not impress her favorably; she tìiought it deplorable diat only die blacks did physical labor. White 270civil war history Americans, she concluded, were more handsome than the French, "but they are effeminate and lazy." Mother Hyacinth and her band of missionaries nevertheless adjusted to American ways and learned to tolerate them. In this connection historians will find Mother Hyacinth's changing views on Negroes interesting . On first encountering the slave market in New Orleans she was horrified , and she indignantly rejected a suggestion by the Bishop that she purchase a slave for use at the Daughters' convent. Within a few months, however, she had overcome her repugnance enough to buy a bondsman. And when the slave escaped, in 1863, she revealed the extent to which she had embraced Southern attitudes when she wrote: "Our ugly Simon, tired of being happy [has escaped], taking with him one of our horses. That's what a slave is!!!" Mother Hyacinth was not much interested in politics, but when the war began she, like most other southern Catholics, unquestioningly supported the southern cause. Her general views of the war were naive and simplistic, but her first-hand observations of Banks's operations provide interesting information on the Red River Campaign. Sister McCants has done a competent job of editing. Her translation is fluent and she has selected letters carefully with an eye for continuity and interest. She is particularly good at identifying church figures mentioned in the correspondence and in explaining historical developments affecting the Daughters of the Cross...

Constitutional Separation of Church and State: The Quest for a Coherent Position

This clause of the First Amendment, recently applied by the Supreme Court to invalidate certain religious practices in the public schools, has called down a new storm over the Supreme Court. The storm has not consisted merely of the political bombast of predictable critics. Rather, it has included Dean Griswold of the Harvard Law School who perceived in the first school prayer case an unyielding and unwarranted absolutism in the position of the Court. It includes also highly regarded church figures, such as Episcopal Bishop Pike, who has called for a constitutional amendment to alter the Court's mandates. It has percolated within the law schools, and within the Court itself where lengthy separate opinions were composed to clarify what has and what has not been done. Yet, even within the Court, as within the larger academic and public forums, wide disagreement remains as to the applied meaning of the opaque language of the religion clause.This article cannot quiet the storm over the Supreme Court, but it can make clear which parts of the storm are entitled to be taken seriously and which are merely bluster. Beyond this, there are more significant purposes to be served. The first of these is to make sense of existing cases in terms of some coherent doctrine, responsive to the First Amendment and possessing substantial predictive value: to describe the standard of church-state separation which the Supreme Court applies in fact. The second is to demonstrate that a number of open questions remain to be answered before a more precise boundary of church-state separation can be known.

Religious Preference and Interreligious Mixtures in Marriages and Divorces in Iowa

Interreligious marriages are far more numerous than is generally recognized. Catholics in Iowa are more numerous than church figures show and account for a sizable number of the divorces, although they are only half as likely (or less) to divorce as are Protestants. Mixed-Catholic marriages show a greater proportion of dissolution than marriages in which both parties are Catholic.