Crisis Of Faith Research Articles

Reception Frame of Iris Murdoch’s Critical Studies

The article analyzes the enrichment of the reception frame of I. Murdoch's oeuvre due to the complementation of different discourses (fiction, philosophy, culture study, criticism and theory of literature). In this context the rethinking of post-structuralism and deconstruction theories as a conceptual basis of literary postmodernism for revealing specific features of the writer’s literary text is shown. Murdoch’s theoretical views regarding the role of criticism in the contemporary literary process are considered, in particular her categorical rejection of deconstruction. The literature of postmodernism is a phenomenon that unites different discourses; in this perspective Murdoch's oeuvre fits the outlined framework. Readers know Iris Murdoch both as a writer, theorist and critic of her own works, as well as works of other writers; and also as a moral philosopher, that resorts to an artistic, poetic way of thought verbalization. However, concerning Murdoch's works, postmodernism is related only as a specific way of world perception, world outlook, and not as a concept of postmodern fiction or literary criticism. Approximation of the writer's literary manner to postmodernism is not defined as a theoretical philosophical reflection; it is rather a semi-conscious emotional reaction to the crisis of the modern world, crisis of faith in established values. In Murdoch's novels, the echo of the signs of postmodern consciousness is realized through manifestations of philosophical pluralism and genre metamorphism.

Mabel Loomis Todd and the Will of God: Three Crises of Faith in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Mabel Loomis Todd and the Will of God: Three Crises of Faith in Late Nineteenth-Century America

The mental health of societies

It has been common to think that societies which become pathological and extreme are the responsibility of deranged leaders such as Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Jong-Un or Saddam Hussein. In fact these are usually a reflection and symbol of deeper social disorders. This article considers the mental health of societies, and looks at the loss of equilibrium in what have liked to think of themselves as models for the rest of the world to follow. The advent of Trump has uncovered a profound crisis of faith in what the US represents; a crisis of loss of meaning, in its heartland, of an imperialism which has scattered and laid waste with impunity cultures and societies across the globe.

Reflections on place, mobility and belonging in Gujarat

This article translates four essays from the memoirs of Gujarati writer Sharifa Vijaliwala that are replete with sociological insights. Methodologically, the genre of memoir affords a rich source portraying the everyday social fabric of rural Gujarat in the 1970s and the changing landscape of the state in later years. In the course of essaying her life stories, she depicts the predicaments and contestations about place, mobility and social interactions within the larger matrix of Gujarati society. What is depicted in graphic detail is the transformation in the web of social relations at the margins of Gujarati society and the present ‘crisis of faith’ that underlies its civil society.

Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances, 1850–1930 by Claudie Massicotte

Reviewed by: Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances, 1850–1930 by Claudie Massicotte S. Brooke Cameron Claudie Massicotte, Trance Speakers: Femininity and Authorship in Spiritual Séances, 1850–1930. McGill-Queen's up, 2017. Who knew that Susanna Moodie dabbled in séances? I certainly didn't. But after reading Trance Speakers on the link between the supernatural arts and women's social empowerment, I can certainly see why the Canadian author was drawn to such spiritualist practices. Massicotte argues that through trance speaking, many female mediums "were able to publically voice ideas and arguments for the advancement of women's rights while preserving their identities as true women" (9). In pursuit of this argument, Trance Speakers intervenes in the growing critical conversation on nineteenth-century spiritualism by shifting the focus to North America and Canadian women, specifically. The study is notable in its attempt to take trance speaking seriously. Although not a defense of the supernatural arts, neither is the book an accusation of fraud against the women who practised mediumship; rather, Trance Speakers is focused on the cultural forces that drew women to trance as a means to power and social authority (13). To make this argument, the book adheres to a two-part structure: the [End Page 133] first on the historical and theoretical accounts of female mediumship and the second on femininity and authorship among Canadian trance speakers. The first chapter looks at the major cultural debates and attitudes surrounding trance speaking in nineteenth-century Canada. Massicotte cites transnational influences, such as the Fox sisters' importation of the séance from the U.S. in the 1850s (attended by Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Trail), to continental influences such as Emma Harding Britten, the English advocate of spiritualism who toured Canada giving public talks. But this burgeoning spiritualist movement was also the target of critique in the press and within religious communities. The latter group included Evangelicals, Methodists, and the Catholic Church. Massicotte explains how the spiritualist movement benefited from the Victorian crisis in faith following the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), and for this reason it was perceived as a threat to religious orthodoxy. Catholics, for example, suggested that the spirits conjured through séances were evil (32) or satanic threats (32), in an effort to deter people from joining the spiritualist movement. Despite such critiques from dominant social and political forces, spiritualism still managed to evolve from a fringe movement on the margins into a serious platform for women looking to rethink gender roles and female authority in the nineteenth century. The second chapter shifts our attention from historical to theoretical contexts. Massicotte is specifically interested in adapting psychological discourses in order to explain this feminist engagement with spiritualism. "[C]ontemporary studies have largely focused on the cultural impacts of séances," she explains, whereas "authors of the time were fascinated by the authorial voice of spiritual communications," and thus they "put forward new theories of subjectivity through their attempts to explain the spirits' mysterious identities" (43). This chapter charts medical professionals' efforts to exert authority over women's bodies by labeling the unruly a so-called "hysteric." Yet even Freud recognized some kind of curative potential in trance speaking (athough he later switched from hypnosis to the talking cure); "mediums revealed the secrets of the mind" and "made way for new discoveries and provided new interpretations of subjectivity that transformed the definition and treatment of madness" (60). Drawing largely on work by French feminists like Luce Irigaray, Massicotte argues that psychoanalysis, given its early affinity with forms of trance speaking, thus proves useful in thinking through the medium's complicated relationship to language and a symbolic that typically privilege the unified or singular subject. [End Page 134] The second part of the book, on "Femininity and Authorship Among Canadian and Transnational Mediums," begins with chapter 3 on the relationship between mediums and medicine. Massicotte recounts the story of Anna O. (Pappenheim) whose blocked speech could be traced back to her frustrations with gender roles. According to Massicotte, Anna O. serves as a powerful example of orthodox medicine's fight for authority by labeling as "hysteric" those women...

Faith, Realism, and Universal Reason: MacIntyrean Reflections on Fides et Ratio

Faith, Realism, and Universal Reason:MacIntyrean Reflections on Fides et Ratio Mats Wahlberg Introduction According to the classical secularization thesis, secularization is a crisis of faith precipitated by the modern ascendancy of reason and scientific rationality. Charles Taylor has called theories that promote this thesis “subtraction stories” because they describe secularization in terms of humans “having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from earlier confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.”1 A case can be made that such stories represent the exact inversion of the truth. To the extent that modernity has ushered in a crisis of faith, this is arguably a crisis precipitated by an even deeper crisis of reason. Beginning with nominalism in the late middle ages, modern thought embarked on a path that would lead to great accomplishments in the areas of instrumental and scientific rationality, but also to a disenchanted world where people think they can have no ascertainable grounds for their existential convictions. In this world, a conception of freedom has emerged that makes a virtue out of reason’s proclaimed incapacity to answer the “big questions” about human life. “At the hearth of liberty,” Justice Kennedy wrote, “is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”2 As Max Weber predicted, unconstrained [End Page 1313] lifestyle choices, arbitrary desires, and agonistically opposed Weltanschauungen have come to occupy the territory formerly ruled by reason. Weber’s description of this situation is less upbeat than Kennedy’s: “Many old gods ascend from their graves; they are disenchanted and hence take the form of impersonal forces. They strive to gain power over our lives and again they resume their eternal struggle with one another.”3 Twenty years ago, Pope Saint John Paul II issued Fides et Ratio, his Encyclical Letter on the Relationship between Faith and Reason, to address this state of affairs in Western culture: “It has happened therefore that reason, rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being” (§5).4 At the time of its publication, many commentators found it ironic that the Pope, the institutional embodiment of faith, felt called to defend reason.5 However, well aware that reason and faith are communicating vessels, the Pope knew that the crisis of one necessarily affects the other: “The religious impulse is the highest expression of the human person, because it is the highpoint of his rational nature. It springs from the profound human aspiration for the truth” (§33, footnote 28). A culture in which the human aspiration for truth is not nurtured is a culture where religion and faith cannot thrive. The encyclical is incredibly rich and spans many themes. The focal point, however, is the notion of truth and its importance in human life. “One may define the human being,” the Pope says, “as the one who seeks the truth” (§28). Truth is something that calls humans, enticing them to self-transcendence, and faith and reason are the “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” [End Page 1314] Faith is inherently connected to certain historical events; it is the grace-enabled response to the Incarnation of Truth in history, a response that leads to knowledge that we could not otherwise have had. Reason is a very generic human capacity that draws on sense perception and logical inference (§9). It can be used independently of God’s self-revelation, taking the guise of an “autonomous” philosophy. The autonomy of philosophy should be “supported and strengthened” (§75), says the Pope, on the condition that philosophy does not close the door to supernatural revelation. Reason can also be used in “dynamic union” with faith (§76) so that it is stimulated by the truths of divine revelation—this is called “Christian philosophy”—or it can assist theology in the explication of divine revelation. Respecting the fact that faith and reason—like the two natures of Christ—can never be confused or...

Grief as a Mystical Journey: Fowler's Stages of Faith Development and Their Relation to Post-Traumatic Growth.

This paper explores the relationship between embedded theological assumptions and the ways in which one copes with loss and bereavement. Based on James Fowler's research on Stages of Faith Development, the paper examines common Western psycho-spiritual beliefs related to loss, trauma, and grief, and proposes that profound loss experiences have the potential to lead the griever to a shift in theological thinking. It addresses the ways in which a "crisis of faith" triggered by loss or trauma prompts the questioning of closely-held beliefs, which can lead to an expanded spiritual perspective that can be beneficial to the healing process.

Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain

Spirit Matters: Occult Beliefs, Alternative Religions, and the Crisis of Faith in Victorian Britain

The disillusionment of Robert Dell: the intellectual journey of a Catholic socialist

ABSTRACTThis article considers attempts in the late nineteenth century to bring about a confluence of Catholicism and Socialism in Britain by examining the writing and correspondence of one man, the art critic and Fabian socialist Robert Dell. Beginning with Dell’s involvement as a young man in London-based radical politics, the article examines his efforts to bring his socialist politics and Catholic faith together. Dell attempted this through stressing a narrative of Catholic collectivism, under the aegis of a benevolent Church, contrasted with a post-Reformation Protestant individualism leading to the inequities of capitalism. The appeal of Catholicism in a Victorian Britain undergoing a collective crisis of faith is addressed. The second part of the article documents the failure of these attempts and Dell’s disillusionment with the Catholic hierarchy that by 1908 had led to a complete break on Dell’s part with the Catholic establishment. The catalyst for this break was the brutal treatment of Catholic Modernists such as George Tyrrell, Maude Petre and St George Mivart by the Vatican and the English Catholic leadership. Dell’s final rejection of organised Catholicism is charted through pamphlets, newspaper articles and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the article considers how Dell’s early political and theological career reflects on the relative positions of Catholicism and socialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and more broadly the dynamics of personal belief and political allegiances.

500 Years of Reformation: The History of Martin Luther's Pathography and its Ethical Implications

Introduction In the context of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation, it is time to take a survey of the history of Martin Luther's (1483-1546) pathography and to deduce possible conclusions from it for psychiatric practice. Results In a 1035-page work written in German between 1937 and 1941, the Dane Paul Reiter retrospectively diagnosed Luther as manic-depressive. In 1956, Grossmann was unable to prove persistent synchronicity of depressive mood and reduced motivation in Luther in the key years 1527 and 1528, which led him to conclude that Luther had a cyclothymic personality with a pyknic constitution. Discussion One very central source of Luther's life's work may have arisen from the tension between emotional constraints and crises of faith, on the one hand, and resilience and trust in God, on the other. Conclusion Luther can be used as an example of the importance of religiousness as a curative resource for the psyche.

SCIENTIFIC DISCOURSE AND CRISIS OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN S. BYATT’S NOVELS

In the paper, the philosophical issues raised in A.S. Byatt’s novels have been outlined. The bonds between the religious crisіs in A. S. Byatt’s English Victorian and Retro-Victorian novels have been elucidated. The discussion about the two cultures initiated by Ch. P. Snow and its interpretation in A. S. Byatt’s novels have been explained. The specific features of the discussion about the two cultures have been spotlighted taking into account the analyzed novels. The intertextual relations between the texts have been explained. A.S. Byatt’s works have been analyzed as representative ones in order to demonstrate a specific transformation of the English novel from postmodern to post-postmodern. The complex system of key topics and motifs has been determined. Using hermeneutic and myth-criticism approaches the Christian motifs and the old Scandinavian myths represented in A. S. Byatt’s novels have been revealed. The author of the paper examines Byatt’s writing about the Victorian crisis of faith and belief in science. Both of these topics are also of great relevance to the writer’s novels set in the 20th century. In Byatt’s fiction set in the Victorian period, however, we can see the process of the opposition between religion and science at work, often within one character. Throughout the nineteenth century the requirement to believe in Christian Truths was eroded by the human need to know and to seek a new Truth based on curiosity and understanding rather than faith. In fact, a link between her fiction set in the nineteenth century and that set in A. S. Byatt’s own lifetime is that both involved a move from religious faith which, as mentioned in this paper, the author rejected even in his childhood to a conviction that science provides many of the answers that the characters seek, especially concerning environmental issues. Byatt’s latest book, a reworking of the Scandinavian myths of the downfall of the gods, Raknarök, is the culmination of this process, a tale of the destruction of the natural world and gods. Keywords: contemporary English literature, English novel of the end of the 20th century, postpostmodernism, scientific discourse in literature, religious crisіs, Christianity.

Designing and implementing the humane crisis organizing framework for resilience with Grief, Stress, and Faith stakeholders

The crisis organizing frameworks of US higher education institutions prioritize institutional response and recovery at pre‐, mid‐, and postcrisis stages, and too often understate the role of human(e) resilience. At its core, resilience is very personal as seen in times of grief, stress, and crises of faith. To improve institutional response and recovery as well as human(e) resilience, a new crisis organizing framework to enhance human(e) resilience accentuates the role of grief, stress, and faith.

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish interiority, the Internet, and the crisis of faith

This article argues for a recuperation of interiority. Rather than conflate interiority with belief, as immaterial and individualized, research with ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York reveals interiority to be as public and political as is the material. Over the past fifteen years, ultra-Orthodox Jews have been increasingly concerned with religious doubt. Many communal leaders have called the current moment “a crisis of faith,” with the perception that there are new challenges to ultra-Orthodoxy, especially from the Internet. In response, leaders have turned to explicit communal talk about interiority in their attempts to strengthen faith and therapeutically treat those with religious doubts. Public talk, where certain forms and locations of interiority are cultivated and others disciplined, shows efforts by ultra-Orthodox leadership to defuse the power of secular epistemologies, such as psychology and technologies, while harnessing their potentialities for religious authenticity.

Brak sacrum jako problem człowieka nowej epoki. Bluźnierstwo i profanacja – paradoksalny koniec pojęć

Nowadays one of the greatest problems of people is uncertainty. People are touched by a crisis of faith and the accompanying crisis of confidence in science. Paradoxically in response their statements in fundamental problems are not more cautious. Especially in the field of art they negate taboo, which they are not sure – not sure, but also which they can not denied. In Poland there are many examples of that tendency. Some of them are constructed like blasphemy – but we should ask if blasphemy can be made by somebody who do not believe in God? Maybe it is only some strategy, element of publicity – but even if it is true, it shows, that faith is still important element of social order. Only if it is true, provocation can be successful.

Spiritual Distress and Depression in Bereavement: A Meaning-Oriented Contribution

One key focus of a meaning reconstruction model of bereavement concerns spiritual meanings attributed to the death, whether consoling or troubling. Specifically, previous studies in our research program suggest that religiously inclined violent death survivors are at risk for elevated levels of both bereavement distress and complicated spiritual grief, a crisis of faith following loss that refers to the erosion of the mourner’s relationship to God and/or the religious community. However, more research is needed to understand the convergence of depression and spiritual struggle in the context of violent and natural loss. In this study of a diverse sample of 59 American Christians bereaved less than 5 years, we sought to: (1) determine if individuals bereaved by homicide, suicide or fatal accident differed from those bereaved by natural causes in their levels of depression and spiritual coping; (2) investigate the relation between the latter constructs; and (3) ascertain if cause of death mediates the effect of religious coping on depression. We found that: (a) violently bereaved individuals endorsed more negative religious coping, and (b) depression was associated with greater spiritual struggle, particularly a sense of disrupted relationship with God. Contrary to expectations, positive religious coping was unrelated to post-loss depression, and cause of death did not mediate the relationship between spiritual coping and depressive symptomatology. A clinical case study concludes the article, illustrating the interweaving of spiritual and psychological distress in tragic bereavement, and their implications for a meaning-oriented grief therapy.

Reconciling Queer Disappearance

Reconciling Queer Disappearance Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire, by Amy Villarejo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. 216 pages. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paperback.Representation has for some been bad object of theory: entity that contains a slew of anxieties surrounding continuance, crystallization, and confirmation of as a generic code, as an intelligible sign that can be deployed (paradoxically) as an antigrammar, as a discipline that cannot exist. Queer is vestibule for nothing and everything, and thus much of work on media that has arisen out of theory has invested less political energy in potentials of identity than its inevitable limitations and foreclosures. Media figured queerly is intangible, contingent, and prone to obsolescence, its absence as such placed affectively in line (ironically, straightly) with negative, unproductive, fleeting, relationally obscure. The necessity to contest normalizing principles of identification (especially for folks outside mainstream reach) becomes its own normalizing principle,1 a dogmatic restructuring wherein must strive for a status of nonexistence, of failure, of semiascetic removal from cultural life, often in a manner that arguably reinforces masculinist models of critique predicated on distanciation, isolation, and destruction. Queer is separate from intimacy, is outside social affirmation, and must constantly eulogize its own death.At its most provocative, Amy Villarejo's Ethereal Queer functions as a renegotiation of these terms of engagement. Her book is simultaneously a phenomenology of televisual signals as nonobjects and a reminder that television2 is a crucible for identity's persistence, what she calls the modern implantation of gendered and sexualized social time (7). Villarejo's thesis thus requires a genealogical assertion of presence across many historical periods,3 but she is careful to delineate between relational queerness (her preferred mode) and ontological queerness of either oppositional or incorporative varieties. She is, for instance, suspicious of progressive argument that twenty-first-century television is somehow queer than its past iterations simply by fact that characters are permitted to be out in a self-identified manner, and she consistently critiques facile mimeticism of GLAAD enumerative polls. However, she is equally unwilling to abandon representation altogether and is particularly attentive to means through which pop media express desire for commonality, less as a definitive affirmation and more as a form (like analogue signals) that never translates perfectly into a substantiated object. In this sense, Villarejo urges media scholars to turn their attention back toward television itself,4 examining its fundamental ephemerality and consequences this poses for its figuration as a sexual hermeneutic or, perhaps more important in her terms, an apparatus that encloses public, retrospective temporality. Thus, her proposal of as an ethereal figure, simultaneously present and absent, elucidates both her political commitment to ambivalence and her intervention into television studies: in particular a careful, empathetic parsing of representations deemed retrograde or insufficiently complex.Due to fact that Villarejo is invested in this sort of macrocriticism, it can sometimes feel as though her conceptual scope is too wide, producing excursions that are as oblique as they are illuminating. The best of these occurs in chapter 3, titled Television Ate My Family, wherein a careful examination of Lance Loud's repeated coming outs on An American Family is proceeded by a close analysis of All in Family's Christmas-centric Edith's Crisis of Faith. The episode concerns emotional fallout of family friend (and drag queen) Beverly's murder, whereas Villarejo's privileged moment in Loud saga details an attempt (partially recognized) at transgenerational enunciation between a distanced mother and her (purposefully) presentational son. …

Victorian Children's Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love by Ruth Y. Jenkins

Reviewed by: Victorian Children's Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love by Ruth Y. Jenkins Patrick C. Fleming (bio) Ruth Y. Jenkins, Victorian Children's Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Print. From its title, Victorian Children's Literature led me to expect an argument about nineteenth-century culture and society. I might be forgiven this assumption, since the book jacket promises revelations about "social, economic, religious, and national energies" and Jenkins's earlier book, Reclaiming [End Page 406] Myths of Power: Women Writers and the Victorian Spiritual Crisis (1995), had examined gender roles and the Victorian crisis of faith. Astute readers of Jenkins's subtitle—those drawn to the term "abjection"—might have more accurate expectations, for the book ultimately has less to do with the Victorian period than with Julia Kristeva. Though Jenkins discusses texts published between 1858 and 1911, Kristeva's writings, rather than anything particularly Victorian, provide the foundation holding the chapters together. She reads Victorian-era texts "through Julia Kristeva's theories of abjection, the beloved authority, and Herethics" (173). Citing the chapter on the "Adolescent Novel" in Kristeva's New Maladies of the Soul, Jenkins explains Kristeva's concept of subjects-in-process who, through literature, "can experiment with alternative constructs of self without the risk of sanction." For young readers, "the open psychic structure enables experimentation with personalities that endorse or challenge, test or develop responses to cultural values" (7). Jenkins explores how texts for adolescents challenge those values and allow for the reader's psychic development. Jenkins's approach is perhaps best revealed in the verb most often used in her claims: "illustrate." In chapter 2, the metaphor of bathing in The Water-Babies "illustrates a return to the Semiotic state for Tom" (25). In chapter 4, the experiences of Ralph, the narrator of The Coral Island, "illustrate what is at the heart of Kristeva's theories of the signifying process" (71) while Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers "illustrates a variety of opportunities for a beloved authority to acknowledge the emerging self" (83). In chapter 5, which is about animal narrators, Rambles of a Rat "illustrates the process Kristeva posits as necessary for the emergent self" (103) while "Black Beauty illustrates a reassessment of the inevitability or appeal of binaried constructs" (108). In each case, a Victorian text "illustrates" a concept from Kristeva (such as the signifying process, beloved authority, the emergent self, or binary constructs). Those readings are convincing, as far as they go, but in my view the most insightful and compelling readings come in the last two chapters. In chapter 6 Jenkins responds to interpretations of The Secret Garden as a restoration story that, in shifting attention from Mary to Colin, privileges male energy and re-establishes traditional social patterns. Jenkins instead reads the novel as offering "an alternative model of social interaction" that challenges the "Victorian discourse of competition," even though its 1911 publication puts it slightly outside the period (120–21). The chapter is framed by readings of Friedrich Fröebel's and Herbert Spencer's educational theories, claiming that "Fröebel's description of mother-love anticipates" a Kristevan dynamic that challenges Spencer's model of "competitive struggle" (123). In Jenkins's view, "Burnett is not just replacing one cultural model with another; she is [End Page 407] blurring the boundaries between them … dismantling the binary oppositions and offering a non-competitive, companion image in its stead" (131). So any interpretation that reads the novel's return to Colin as re-establishing traditional social patterns "falls into a trap built from binary constructs—that it is either Mary's or Colin's story, that theirs is a competitive relationship" (137). Jenkins's application of Kristeva offers an alternative interpretation, based in compassion rather than competition. Chapter 7 applies Kristeva's "maternal thinking" and Herethics to one of Christina Rossetti's less famous works, Speaking Likenesses. Jenkins shows how "Speaking Likenesses illustrates the dynamic relationship of abjection's sublime, empathy, and love central to Herethics" (145). Jenkins situates her reading within the critical reception of Rossetti's text, which since its publication has been criticized...

Is Europe in a Crisis of Faith?

The British want to leave the EU and the rest of Europe is shocked. The Europeans may have lost their faith in their common destiny. The large number of strong arguments for a membership in the Union did not convince the majority of the British voters, although those arguments have been clearly demonstrated again and again. Many political fields cannot be ploughed unilaterally. Environmental protection is a global challenge. The tough competition prevalent in the global economy will not be suspended by referendums of ageing, wealth-saturated European societies. The single European market is more resilient against global competitive pressure than an array of small domestic economies on their own. All these reasons do not seem to pervade. EU- opponents see the membership of their country as an act of self-enslavement and the Brexit as a new biblical Exodus incident. Boris Johnson – a modern Moses? The construction of Europe in this perspective is no longer a rational calculation but turns into a question of faith and it congeals into political theology.

Christian Doubt and Hope in Early Socialism

The diverse forms of socialism which emerged in the nineteenth century had a complex relationship with both Christian beliefs and the Churches. Socialist movements are commonly remembered as anti-religious and anti-clerical. Doubt, forged in the familiar nineteenth-century ‘crisis of faith’, shaped not only Marxism, but also Owenism, the earlier social theories of Robert Owen. Church historians have long pointed to another narrative of socialism and religion in the Victorian era: the rise of Christian Socialism after 1848, led by F. D. Maurice, J. M. Ludlow, Charles Kingsley and others. Here, they recall a response to doubt with faith, and an answer to anti-clericalism with a new vision for the Churches’ social role. Yet socialism before 1848 had a more contested interaction with Christianity than this history assumes. By exploring the specific nature of Christian doubt among early Owenite socialists, then following how this doubt was answered by contemporary Christian supporters of Owen, this essay uncovers an alternative, noteworthy response to doubting Christianity – the nature of Christian hope in early socialism.

‘Dowting of ye Cupp’: Disbelief about the Eucharist and a Catholic Miracle in Reformation England

This essay is inspired by an intriguing late sixteenth-century Catholic liturgical object, the Bosworth Hall burse. It commemorates a vision of the crucified Christ seen by the missionary priest (and later martyr) John Payne in Douai in 1575, which apparently dispelled a moment of doubt about the real presence in the consecrated eucharist. The incident is situated in the context of the heated Catholic and Protestant controversies about the doctrine of transubstantiation in post-Reformation England and against the backdrop of similar medieval miracles designed to counter disbelief, including the Mass of St Gregory and the miracle of Bolsena of 1263. The essay illuminates the persistence and transformation of anxieties about the sacred in the sixteenth century, considers the part they played in private and public crises of faith, and explores the mechanisms by which they were resolved. It also investigates how the memory of Payne's miraculous vision was crystallized in a material object.