Religious Vocation Research Articles

God's Call Is Everywhere: A Global Analysis of Contemporary Religious Vocations for Women by Patricia Wittberg, S.C. et al. (review)

God's Call Is Everywhere: A Global Analysis of Contemporary Religious Vocations for Women by Patricia Wittberg, S.C. et al. (review)

Religious Attraction and Its Discontents: Tensions Surrounding the Monachization of Baptized Jews in Early Modern Italy

Both female monasticism and Jewish conversion acquired an accentuated significance in Catholic Europe during the age of reformations. Their convergence was ritually expressed in the celebration of the monastic vestition of converts from Judaism. This article centres on the experiences of baptized Jewish girls who entered monastic communities, based on an analysis of cases from central and northern Italy. It argues that Church authorities valued the radical break of formerly Jewish girls with the religious traditions of their ancestors. Yet at the same time, the highly esteemed attraction to female monasticism on the part of baptized Jews could also arouse considerable anxiety, which led to distancing attempts. These, the article suggests, were manifested by restricting converts’ monastic professions to designated institutions; by giving the cold shoulder to baptized Jews who took the veil and socially isolating them within their communities; or by not assisting sickly neophytes to fulfill their religious vocations.

Out of sight, out of mind? The wills of monastic and mendicant bishops in Britain and Ireland, 1350–1535

ABSTRACT This article examines the wills of bishops in late medieval Britain and Ireland who were members of religious orders, and attempts to answer two questions: to what extent can these wills be distinguished from those made by their secular counterparts; and did these monks, canons and friars refer or allude to their status as regular clergy in the wills? The wills of 47 regular bishops have been identified, dating between 1350 and 1535, from England, Wales and Ireland, and are compared with those of 111 secular prelates for the same period. While only a handful of the monastic and mendicant bishops explicitly mention their status as regulars, the vast majority – and friars in particular – do appear to have made decisions when drawing up their wills that were a result of their religious vocations. Only seven wills make no allusion to their testators’ regular status at all.

Błogosławiona Elżbieta Róża Czacka (1876-1961) – niewidoma Matka niewidomych

BLESSED ELŻBIETA RÓŻA CZACKA (1876-1961) – A BLIND MOTHER OF THE BLINDS Elżbieta Róża Czacka (1876-1961) was a member of a family with rich patriotic, social and charity traditions. After she lost her eyesight in her early youth, she devoted her life to work for the blind combined with a religious vocation. Officially, in 1911, thanks to her initiative, the Society for the Care of the Blind (TOnO) was established as the first organization that became the beginning of the so-called Opus of Laski. In 1915, she headed the congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Cross (Sorores Franciscanes Ancillae Crucis – FSK), which was the first female religious congregation created after Poland regained independence. This article aims to introduce the person of Mother Czacka, who, despite suffering and diseases, devoted her life to the implementation and development of typhlology in Poland. Recognition of her activities combining the religious and charity spheres was achieved by proclaiming her blessed to the Catholic Church in 2021. To show the topicality of the activities it promotes, the activities of TOnO, as one of the institutions established by it, were also presented.The works initiated by Róża Czacka can not be considered in isolation. Despite the secular nature of the TOnO board and the religious nature of the religious community, they were based on Christian care and Catholic principles of helping weaker people.

FÉ E TRIBUTO_UMA ANÁLISE DO INSTITUTO DA IMUNIDADE TRIBUTÁRIA E DAS OBRIGAÇÕES VINCULADAS ÀS PREBENDAS

This article results from the documentary analysis of the normative precepts that govern the differentiated tax regime that grants religious organizations immunity from the incidence of taxes and exemption from government contributions. Taking as a premise that the basic characteristic of tax immunity is the fact that it is unconditional and subjective, we sought to observe the practical implications of the incidence of this fundamental guarantee supported by the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil of 1988. Extending the analysis of the differentiated tax regime to which religious organizations submit, observations were made of the governmental mechanism for taxing the prebenda (stipend) and the risk of a possible mischaracterization of its nature. As a result, the inviolability of the tax immunity of religious organizations was proved, which makes it possible to recover all types of taxes improperly collected, in the last five years, and the contributory nature of the prebenda was verified, which, as a result of the religious vocation, aims at the propagation of the faith, which is instituted for the benefit not of the ecclesiastical legal entity, but, rather, of the community served by the religious temple, which is the basis of the main foundations of the immutable character of the tax immunity of temples of any cult.

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

Deseret Hospital, Women, and the Perils of Modernization

Rainbow in The Convent: LGBTQ+ Community and Religious Vocation Inclusivity

This study sought to determine the acceptability of the LGBTQ+ community and religious vocation inclusivity among the select residents in the City of San Pablo, Laguna in the Philippines. Transcendental phenomenology was employed using twenty respondents and were interviewed via Google Meet. Results showed that the respondents were generally accepting the LGBTQ+ community towards religious vocation inclusivity. Majority of them were generally accepting the LGBTQ+ members based on three thematic areas identified such as religious vocation as a call for everyone, LGBTQ+ expressions of religiosity and LGBTQ+ members as church leaders. However, the study also presented areas of development the LGBTQ+ community and religious institutions could dialogue towards improved welfare of the LGBTQ+ community in the realm of religious vocation inclusivity. Hence, this paper suggests further representation of LGBTQ individuals in various religious activities, and educational drive and discussions with religious organizations. The results imply a starting element for further research and education for both the LGBTQ+ and religious communities.

Umandawa: Buddhist Transformation in Modern Sri Lanka

Charismatic Buddhist monks are instrumental in modernising Buddhism as they have been entrusted with an important role of resurrecting religion and Sinhala society throughout the course of Sri Lankan history. Ven. Pitaduwe Siridhamma, later known as Siri Samanthabhadra Arahat Thero, is known as a cosmopolitan modernist monk figure who envisions a modernised form of Buddhism in recent times, which is derived creatively from the discourses and practical ideals in traditional Buddhism. He went further by founding his style initiatives to address Buddhist transformations in modern Sri Lanka. Samanthabhadra revolutionised the monastery space, allowing his supporters to embrace ideals and incorporate them into their everyday life. His project includes a wide range of such activities, expanding opportunities for Buddhist women to pursue their religious vocations, favouring traditional forms of meditation over farming and similar activities. The mission to reform Buddhism in Sri Lanka is not entirely modern, as it also incorporates elements of tradition, as shown in the case study at Umandawa. The modernist ideals and societal demands that define contemporary Buddhism are reflected in the transformation of Buddhism in Sri Lanka.

Vocational Awe and Theological Librarianship

This essay applies Fobazi Ettarh’s concept of “vocational awe” to theological librarianship, suggesting that theological librarians’ strong sense of religious vocation may be leading to burnout, low pay, and dwindling resources for libraries. It proposes a series of truths that may apply to theological librarians, indicating ways forward for theological librarians to create a relationship with their work that is not all-consuming and self-defeating. These truths are framed in part with Christian references that modify this traditional sense of vocation. This renewed relationship with work welcomes diverse persons to the profession by understanding that not everyone has the ability or desire to totally give their lives over to their work.

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Transfiguring Medievalism: Poetry, Attention, and the Mysteries of the Body

Marie Guyart de l’Incarnation (1599–1672): le singulier parcours d’une ursuline missionnaire de Tours à Québec. Par Vincent Grégoire

In this slim volume, Vincent Grégoire undertakes to tell the story of Marie de l’Incarnation, renowned seventeenth-century mystic and founder of the Ursulines in French North America, as a ‘femme forte’ who surmounted obstacles both social and religious to become ‘la première missionnaire française en Amérique du nord’ (p. 14). Organized around the theme of obstacles, Grégoire’s book advances an interpretation of Marie de l’Incarnation as an active woman, an agent determined not to shrink before challenges but to overcome them. Adversity, argues Grégoire, was Marie’s daily bread, but ‘l’obstacle a fait Marie, n’ayant pu la défaire’ (p. 23). Following an introductory chapter in which he locates Marie and the Ursulines within the context of post-Tridentine Catholicism and early modern missionary movements, Grégoire proceeds to interrogate five different sorts of obstacles that gave shape to Marie’s religious vocation, each explored in its own chapter: demonic temptation; the perilous transatlantic journey of 1639; her maternal obligations towards the son she abandoned for religious life; cultural and linguistic barriers to teaching in New France; and conflicts with her male ecclesiastical superiors. Throughout, Grégoire gives due attention to Marie’s agency, her determination in the face of challenges, her persistence in surmounting them, and her creativity in refiguring them as opportunities to suffer in imitation of Christ. Given the ways in which Marie (as Grégoire affirms in the chapter on ‘Le Fils sacrifié’) interpreted her own life as one lived in subordination to the uncompromising will of God, one does wonder whether Marie would recognize the portrait constructed here — not that it matters to the validity of Grégoire’s interpretation. Readers both new to Marie de l’Incarnation and familiar with her will find much in Grégoire’s study of interest, including a provocative analysis of Marie’s live sense of demonic presence (which is often elided in studies of this Ursuline mystic) and a thorough analysis of her conflicts with Jesuit Father Vimont and Bishop François de Laval over the rules governing the Ursulines of Quebec. Unsurprisingly, given the brevity of the study, Grégoire passes over some aspects of Marie’s biography too quickly and leaves open and unresolved some promising lines of enquiry. For instance, he tantalizingly notes (as have many before him) that, once in New France, Marie no longer experienced demonic assaults and her mystical experiences waned in intensity, while at the same time acknowledging that for Marie, and others of her time, New France was considered ‘une terre essentiellement sous l’influence du diable’ (p. 49) and the Iroquois believed to be instruments of the devil. ­Exactly how — and to what degree — Marie (and her French, Catholic counterparts in New France) assimilated Indigenous Americans to the devil is worth more analysis than Grégoire gives it here, but perhaps one of the yields of a book like this is to stimulate future research.

Semantic and Thematic Aspects in the Carrion Comfort by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins sought a stronger rhetorical style in verse-sprung rhythm for the shape, sound, and sense of Carrion Comfort. The poet shows a sense of desolation produced partly by spiritual aridity and partly by a feeling of artistic frustration. The poem reveals strong tensions between his delight in the sensuous world, his urge to express it, and his equally powerful sense of religious vocation in the sonnet. This sonnet is enriched with the vivid use of echo figures of speech, alliteration, repetition, and a highly compressed syntax to project profound personal experiences, including his sense of God’s mystery, grandeur, and mercy in the energizing prosodic element of his verse sprung rhythm, in which each foot may consist of one stressed syllable and any number of unstressed syllables instead of the regular number of syllables used in the traditional meter. Despair and dejection play a prominent role in displaying the writer’s semantic point of view. The tone of the octave and sestet differ drastically in aspects. Initially, the tone is full of distress, while later, the technique is cheerful. This research attempt will seek answers to how the poem's mode and structure dramatize the speaker's exchange with his interiority and the exterior world? What is the effect of the variations in syntax reflecting a claustrophobic interior consciousness? Therefore, this paper explores the semantic and thematic aspects of the sonnet successfully, keeping in mind the poem's thematic aspects and perspectives.

Exploring Life Narratives on Challenged Religious Vocation

Vocation research has advocated that the current Catholic Church is facing issues regarding its decreasing numbers of religious missionaries, hindering their evangelical pursuits. The purpose of the study was to explore the reactive nature of differing approaches to targeted communities. The study applied a qualitative phenomenological method to the lived experiences of those involved. Three Christian brothers from the congregation of the Alliance of Two Hearts served as participants and engaged in face-to-face interviews. Findings revealed that six themes of discussion emerged from the interviews: calling as communication between God and religious brothers; the call of a religious vocation; resources for conversion efforts; discernment and nurturing in vocation; resilience in the face of troubled conversion; and the impact of vocation on the Christian lifestyle. Additionally, the recognition of one’s calling often involves a period of doubt or crisis of faith. To carry out missionary works, one must recognize the value of doubt in vocation, and how it may be utilized to strengthen one’s beliefs and efforts.

Teaching vocation or religious vocation: examining the changing identity of Irish teaching sisters c.1940–1970, an oral history approach

ABSTRACT This article discusses oral history sources that give insight into how a specific group of teaching sisters (also known as nuns or women religious) reflect on their primary identity as vowed women, and their professional identity as teachers. Their identity was bound up with the fact that they had taken religious vows, and entered a congregation with a clear charism or identity of its own, and they each had their own understanding of vocation. The article also considers the different ways in which they became involved in education; some did not chose to become teachers, while others had a clear desire to teach. The article also discusses the impact of the changes that followed the Second Vatican Council, and notes how these changes impacted upon some of the women in this study.

A Dominican Sister Confronts Caste: The Racial Justice Awakenings of Sister Mary Ellen O’Hanlon, O.P.

In the 1930s, Sister Mary Ellen O’Hanlon, O.P. (1882–1961), a Dominican Sister of Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, combined scientific and religious reasons in combating racism and anti-Semitism. A nationally recognized biologist, botanist, and college professor, she was awakened to the problem of “caste,” leading her to author two important works: Racial Myths (1946) and The Heresy of Race (1950). Late in her life, she wrote an autobiography titled “Three Careers,” in which she detailed the complex routes that led to her religious vocation, scientific studies, publications, and lectures and—most significantly to her— confronting caste in all its forms.

The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden

Reviewed by: The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation ed. by Amy V. Ogden Joan Tasker Grimbert amy v. ogden, ed. and trans., The Life of Saint Eufrosine: In Old French Verse with English Translation. MLA Texts and Translations. New York: MLA, 2021. Pp. 192. isbn: 978-1-60329-505-5. $17. A new edition (and translation) of the Vie de sainte Eufrosine (VSE) was long overdue, and doubtless no one was in a better position to undertake it than Amy Ogden. Early in her graduate studies, she read Raymond T. Hill's 1919 edition of the poem (Romanic Review 10: 159–69 and 191–232) and eventually chose to write her dissertation on VSE's clerical and secular culture, a study she published in 2003 as Hagiography, Romance and La Vie de sainte Eufrosine (Princeton: Edward C. Armstrong Monographs). The VSE is contained in four manuscripts and Ogden based her edition on the oldest one, which is catalogued as Canon. Misc. MS 74 in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University (O). It contains anonymous saints' lives and other didactic texts, including the Vie de saint Alexis and the Vie de sainte Marie l'Egyptienne. Linguistic features suggest that the VSE was composed around 1200 in the West of France or Wallonia and copied in western Wallonia shortly thereafter. Although Ogden uses the same base manuscript as Hill, she has taken a considerably less interventionist approach. MS O presents stanza-laisses of variable lengths (nine to forty lines), an arrangement that Ogden preserves, whereas Hill had reordered them as a series of ten-line stanzas and filled in 'missing lines' based on the other three codices. Ogden limits her corrections to nonsensical words or phrases and preserves the text's linguistic idiosyncrasies. The goal of her 'single-manuscript edition' is to replicate as much as possible the experience of someone reading MS O around 1200. Given current interest in LGBTQ concerns, this new edition is quite timely because Eufrosine is one of a group of saints known as monachoparthenoi ('monk virgins'), women who, eschewing the traditional role reserved for young ladies of their time (marriage and motherhood), don men's clothing and leave their parents' home to pursue a religious vocation. The VSE poet, though anonymous, was clearly someone who was educated in clerical subjects but also conversant with secular culture and knew how to apply some of the poetic techniques of epic and romance to hagiography. Since Eufrosine chooses to enter a Benedictine monastery, the poet may have been a Benedictine monk, or even a nun. Speculation that the poet was a woman has been fueled by certain passages in the VSE, but since the text offers contradictory clues to authorial gender, Ogden suggests referring to the author as neither she nor he. By using they, she notes, 'we not only [End Page 107] acknowledge the indeterminacy of the anonymous poet's gender but also respect the poet's apparent efforts to convey an identity that exceeds binary gender categories' (p. xiii). Ogden's excellent translation is idiomatic but hews closely to the Old French text. She is scrupulous about respecting the poet's indications of gender. But, as she explains (pp. xlvi–vii), it's a tricky business: possessive adjectives in Old French are ambiguous since they agree with the gender of the noun they modify rather than that of the subject, and the subject pronoun is often omitted. Moreover, Eufrosine herself complicates matters. She presents herself at the abbey dressed as a knight and claims to have served at court as a eunuch. When the abbot gives her the name 'Emerald,' he notes that it is a name given to both men and women. Since everyone at the monastery sees the new recruit as a man (albeit so beautiful that Emerald must live isolated from the other monks lest their sexual desires be aroused!), Ogden follows the VSE poet in referring to Emerald as a woman only when conveying her private thoughts or when she finally reveals her identity to her father. There is no evidence for the historical existence of Eufrosine (or 'Euphrosyne'), but she has been celebrated as a model...

Review: How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others, by T. M. Luhrmann

Review: <i>How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others</i>, by T. M. Luhrmann

The Party for Justice and Development’s “Specialization” in Politics: Metamorphosis and Contradictions

Abstract Based on empirical research, this article analyzes “the specialization” of the Moroccan Party for Justice and Development and the internal tensions between its political and religious vocations. The latter is one of the Islamist parties with the longest political experience in the Maghreb area which started its “professionalization” in politics at an early stage, at least since 1997–1998. However, little is known in the literature if this pragmatic decision led to the reformation of the movement’s classical ideology. In fact, the “inclusion-moderation hypothesis” showed that the institutionalization of the Islamists parties does not necessarily entail their ideological moderation. By analyzing the contradictions of the structural reform between the party and the Movement for Unity and Reform this article argues that some practices could question the “specialization” thesis. It highlights that despite the “specialization,” the pjd did not reform its core beliefs which are preserved for both religious and political reasons.

A History of Solitude, by David Vincent

Social histories tend to take as their subjects activities that people have engaged in together—joint enterprises made possible through shared ways of life, collective ideals, infrastructures and group identities. Work, family, religion, education, sport or political activism all make natural subjects for social history. One of the achievements of David Vincent’s excellent new study is to show that being on one’s own is a social activity too. The ability to pursue a solitary religious vocation, to spend hours on one’s own sewing, reading or doing puzzles, or to choose to live alone, can never be truly autonomous, asocial, atomic. Vincent coins several useful phrases to help him make this point. He calls being mentally detached from society while in the company of others ‘abstracted solitude’. Historically one could imagine a paterfamilias hiding from his family behind the newspaper, or a busy mother engaged in her needlework, trying to ignore the...

Vocation to Love: Supererogation in Aquinas

AbstractThomas Aquinas’s account of religious vocation has been interpreted as involving a qualified duty, where ordinary people fall short of living up to the moral ideal of becoming a monk or nun. Such an account of religious vocation makes a hash of Aquinas’s thought and misses important aspects of his ethics. Aquinas holds that religious life is praiseworthy, but not morally required, because there are multiple sources of normativity. I conclude by proposing that, while elements of Aquinas’s notion of supererogation might be shared with other traditions in virtue ethics, his theological commitments are central to his notion of supererogation.