Feminization Thesis: A Survey of International Historiography and a Probing of Belgian Grounds

Osselaer, Tine Van; Buerman, Thomas

doi:10.1484/j.rhe.3.180

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…8 This thesis has later been the subject of due criticism by historians and theologians. 9 Interesting to note, however, is the fact that the narrative of the feminization thesis palpably coincides with the narrative of the perceived feminization in the early twentieth century. In Sweden, as well as in other parts of Europe, means were taken in order to make the church appealing to men.…”

Section: Sabbatarianism and Feminizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sportful History of Christianity: The Case of Twentieth-Century Sweden

Nykvist

Maurits

2018

The International Journal of the History of Sport

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Section: Sabbatarianism and Feminizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Sportful History of Christianity: The Case of Twentieth-Century Sweden

Nykvist

Maurits

2018

The International Journal of the History of Sport

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“…By claiming that essential components of Christian life demanded stereotypically "manly" traits, it was possible to challenge the discursive feminization of Christianity. 17 Olaf Blaschke has identified a number of strategies of "re-masculinization" in the Roman Catholic context of Germany around 1900. 18 The most significant of these, according to Blaschke, was a re-coding of attributes considered masculine and feminine.…”

Section: Church Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

A Homosocial Priesthood of All Believers: Laity and Gender in Interwar Sweden

Nykvist¹

2019

Church Hist

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Around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a growing concern within the Church of Sweden that the church was, to a too large extent, managed by the clergy alone. In an attempt to give the laity a more active and influential role in the Church of Sweden, the Brethren of the Church was established in 1918. Since it was only possible for men to become members, the organization simultaneously addressed a different issue: the view that women had become a much too salient group in church life. This process was described by the Brethren and similar groups as a “feminization” of the church, a phrasing which later came to be used by historians and theologians to explain changes in Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. In other words, the Brethren considered questions of gender vital to their endeavor to create a church in which the laity held a more prominent position. This article analyzes how the perceived feminization and its assumed connection to secularization caused enhanced attempts to uphold and strengthen gender differentiation in the Church of Sweden in the early twentieth century. By analyzing an all-male lay organization, the importance of homosociality in the construction of Christian masculinities will also be discussed.

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“…Narrated within a contemporary setting, rather than the comfortably distant context of a medieval convent, it is clear that these writings, which asserted the sanctity of (Faustina's) female body and suggested the immediacy and accessibility of sacred power beyond clerical, sacerdotal structures, were deeply destabilising of a hierarchical, gendered orthodoxy and a modernist mindset. Perhaps Pope Pius XII had some of these misgivings in mind, as well as longer-term anxieties about the feminisation of religion, 69 when he reaffirmed the relevance, rationality, and authenticity of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in his 1957 Encyclical, Haurietis Aquas. Addressing charges of "sentimentalism" and that the devotion was "ill-adapted, not to say detrimental, to the more pressing spiritual needs of the Church and humanity in this present age," 70 he dismissed those who, among other complaints, viewed it as "a type of piety nourished not by the soul and mind but by the senses and consequently more suited to the use of women, since it seems to them something not quite suitable for educated men."…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Corporeal Commotions: St Faustina and the Transnational Evolution of her Cult across the Twentieth Century

Harris¹

2018

Journal of Religious History

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This article provides the first scholarly exploration of the hagiographical representations and modern mysticism of St Faustina — a Polish nun who from 1931 had a series of visions of Christ who instructed her to have a devotional image painted and to institute a series of rosary‐based prayers. It examines the visual, material, and corporeal practices associated with the transnational cult to the Merciful Heart of Jesus and excavates the ways in which the embodied and holistic intercessory strategies employed within this important strand of contemporary Catholic spirituality parallel, but also extend upon, the well‐established seventeenth‐century devotional to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It argues that the cult's theological flexibility and practical malleability, alongside the premium on corporeality within contemporary religiosity, has ensured its delocalisation from its Polish genesis and adoption well beyond the Polish diaspora. Drawing upon the lived religious experiences of a number of St Faustina's clients, often centred on healing and the dying, and exploring the evolving devotion to the saint through shrines as well as online, this article illuminates the contemporaneous and traditional impulses at play within this new extra‐liturgical, which has been designated “the most dynamically developing devotion in the Christian world.”

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Feminization Thesis: A Survey of International Historiography and a Probing of Belgian Grounds

Cited by 8 publications

References 7 publications

A Sportful History of Christianity: The Case of Twentieth-Century Sweden

A Sportful History of Christianity: The Case of Twentieth-Century Sweden

A Homosocial Priesthood of All Believers: Laity and Gender in Interwar Sweden

Corporeal Commotions: St Faustina and the Transnational Evolution of her Cult across the Twentieth Century

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