Convention and Conversion: Patterns in Late Medieval Piety

1998 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kieckhefer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
Liberal Protestantism ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Teachings ◽  
Ernst Troeltsch ◽  
The Church

Ernst Troeltsch is known to church historians largely for his classic threefold distinction of church, sect, and mysticism. In The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Troeltsch describes the church as an institution enmeshed with society and making accommodations to the world's imperfections; the sects, driven by a quest for purity, refuse to make accommodations or compromises, while the mystics stand aside from this conflict and concern themselves with “a purely personal and inward experience” in which “the isolated individual, and psychological abstraction and analysis become everything.” Troeltsch sees mysticism not as a phenomenon naturally at home within the church but rather as one that leads away from the establishment, and it is perhaps this perception in particular that gives his work lasting relevance. The assumption that mysticism veers naturally in an antiecclesial direction, and that its more orthodox manifestations are anomalies requiring explanation, remains very much alive in the literature. Indeed, from the perspective of cultural materialism, it is the political, antiecclesial, subversive bite of mysticism that is its most interesting feature. On this point liberal Protestantism and postmodernism have come together, theology and cultural studies have embraced. Troeltsch's schema thus retains relevance well beyond the sphere of historiography.

Troeltsch, Ernst (1865–1923)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
University Of Berlin ◽  
The Social ◽  
Protestant Theologian ◽  
Social Teachings ◽  
Ernst Troeltsch ◽  
The University

Ernst Troeltsch was a liberal German Protestant theologian and philosopher of religion whose work spans the last decades of the German Empire and the early Weimar Republic. He studied theology at the Universities of Erlangen, Berlin, and Göttingen before becoming a professor of theology at Heidelberg (1894), followed by an appointment in the Philosophy Department at the University of Berlin (1915–23). His most famous work is Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen (1912; The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches), which outlines a methodological approach to understanding the basic social and ethical teachings of European Christianity from the first to the eighteenth century.

The critical theory of democracy in Western political thought

2020 ◽  
pp. 117
Author(s):  
Ruqaya Saeed Khalkhal
Keyword(s):  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The Social ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
Political Realities ◽  
The Church ◽  
Theory Of Democracy ◽  
Or Applications ◽  
The Ideal

The darkness that Europe lived in the shadow of the Church obscured the light that was radiating in other parts, and even put forward the idea of democracy by birth, especially that it emerged from the tent of Greek civilization did not mature in later centuries, especially after the clergy and ideological orientation for Protestants and Catholics at the crossroads Political life, but when the Renaissance emerged and the intellectual movement began to interact both at the level of science and politics, the Europeans in democracy found refuge to get rid of the tyranny of the church, and the fruits of the application of democracy began to appear on the surface of most Western societies, which were at the forefront to be doubtful forms of governece.        Democracy, both in theory and in practice, did not always reflect Western political realities, and even since the Greek proposition, it has not lived up to the idealism that was expected to ensure continuity. Even if there is a perception of the success of the democratic process in Western societies, but it was repulsed unable to apply in Islamic societies, because of the social contradiction added to the nature of the ruling regimes, and it is neither scientific nor realistic to convey perceptions or applications that do not conflict only with our civilized reality The political realization created by certain historical circumstances, and then disguises the different reality that produced them for the purpose of resonance in the ideal application.

East Germany

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Detlef Pollack ◽  
Gergely Rosta
Keyword(s):  
Structural Transformation ◽  
East Germany ◽  
External Factors ◽  
The Political ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
State Security ◽  
Security Service ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Church

The case of East Germany raises the question of why religion and church, which had fallen to an unprecedentedly low level after four decades of suppression, have not recovered since 1989. The repressive church politics of the SED were undoubtedly the decisive factor in the unique process of minoritizing churches in the GDR. However, other external factors such as increasing prosperity, socio-structural transformation, and the expansion of the leisure and entertainment sector played an important role, too. In addition, church activity itself probably also helped to weaken the social position of churches. The absence of a church renaissance after 1990 can be explained by several factors, such as the long-term effects of the break with tradition caused by the GDR system, the political and moral discrediting of the church by the state security service, and people’s dwindling confidence in the church, which was suddenly seen as a non-representative Western institution.

scholarly journals Returning urban political elites to the research agenda: the case of the Southern Low Countries (c. 1350 – c. 1550)

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-588
Author(s):  
Frederik Buylaert ◽  
Jelten Baguet ◽  
Janna Everaert
Keyword(s):  
Special Section ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Ruling Class ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article provides a comparative analysis of four large towns in the Southern Low Countries between c. 1350 and c. 1550. Combining the data on Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp – each of which is discussed in greater detail in the articles in this special section – with recent research on Bruges, the authors argue against the historiographical trend in which the political history of late medieval towns is supposedly dominated by a trend towards oligarchy. Rather than a closure of the ruling class, the four towns show a high turnover in the social composition of the political elite, and a consistent trend towards aristocracy, in which an increasingly large number of aldermen enjoyed noble status. The intensity of these trends differed from town to town, and was tied to different institutional configurations as well as different economic and political developments in each of the four towns.

Religious Societies: Methodist and Evangelical 1738–1800

1986 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 279-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Voluntary Activity ◽  
Church Courts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Market Situation ◽  
Social Controls ◽  
The Church

One does not have to believe in free trade to recognize that in religion as well as economic life the erosion of a monopoly can provoke an uprush of private enterprise. It must be more than coincidental that two modern ‘church in danger’ crises which accompanied an erosion of Anglican hegemony - the Revolution of 1688 and the constitutional crises of 1828–32 – were followed by bursts of voluntary activity. Clusters of private societies were formed to fill up part of the space vacated by the state, as it withdrew itself further from active support of the establishment. After the Toleration Act perceptive churchmen felt even more acutely the realities of religious pluralism and competition. Anglicanism was now approaching what looked uncomfortably like a market situation; needing to be promoted; actively sold. Despite the political and social advantages still enjoyed by the Church, the confessional state in its plenitude of power had gone, and Anglican pre-eminence had to be preserved by other means. One means was through voluntary societies. The Society for the Reformation of Manners hoped by private prosecutions to exert some of the social controls once more properly exercised by the Church courts. The S.P.G. sought to encourage Anglican piety in the plantations and the S.P.C.K. to extend it at home by promoting charity schools and disseminating godly tracts. It was a task of voluntarism to reassert, as far as possible, what authority remained to a church which, because it could not effectively coerce, had to persuade.

‘Jazzing’ and Australia's First Jazz Band

Popular Music ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Whiteoak
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Knowing That ◽  
The Social ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Jazz Band

A growing tendency to study Australian popular musics as an aspect of Australian cultural studies has begun to bear fruit in the form of long overdue appraisal of the socio-cultural and musical significance of these musics. Yet in our justified enthusiasm for the exciting horizons made visible by this development, it is possible to forget that music research can serve more traditional but nevertheless important functions. In the study of popular musics, in particular, knowing how music was played can be more important than knowing what piece of repertoire was performed. For example, discovering what was ‘done’ to music in performance can tell us about the sound of unrecorded genres and can facilitate (for whatever reason) the reconstructed performance of these genres. Knowing that specific performance gestures (such as ‘flattened’ or ‘blues’ notes) were applied can of course increase our understanding of the social, cultural, and even the political nature of specific musics. In this article I am mostly concerned with applying this notion of ‘doing things’ to music to the retrieval of musical information about a specific ensemble. This more or less indigenous ensemble, which was promoted in 1918 as ‘Australia's First Jazz Band’, has captured the imagination of Australian jazz writers and is widely considered to represent the beginning of Australian jazz (Bissett 1979, p. 9).

Time, Death, and the Next Generation: The Early Elizabethan Recusancy Policy, 1558–1574

1982 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 103-117
Author(s):  
John J. LaRocca
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Recent Article ◽  
Local Level ◽  
The Political ◽  
Privy Council ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Character ◽  
The Church

In a recent article, Caroline M. Hibbard noted that recent work on Tudor-Stuart recusancy has focused on the enforcement of royal and statutory policy on the local level and has examined the social composition of the recusant community. These studies have revealed that the recusant community was not dominated by priests, not subject to the political directives of the papacy, and not plotting rebellion. The problem inherent in these local studies, as Professor Hibbard points out, is that they do not explain why the English were anti-Catholic and they do not examine the international character of the English Catholic Community. This article is an attempt to view the recusant problem from the perspective of the monarch and the privy council, because both monarch and privy council were aware of the international character of Catholicism and both stated clearly in their policies toward recusants the grounds of their objection to the Catholic community. An analysis of the recusancy policy established by Elizabeth between 1559 and 1574 reveals that her primary objection to the recusants was not religious but political. The recusants denied a fundamental claim of the monarch: the headship of the church and, therefore, the claim that the monarch was the source of all power within the realm. This article, then, will examine the ways in which she wished to contain a minority who denied her supreme power in the realm and the circumstances which caused the queen and the council to change that policy.

Agreeing on a Common Accountability: What Can the Anglican Communion Learn from Ernst Troeltsch?

2004 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Frame
Keyword(s):  
Social Economic ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Anglican Church ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Mores ◽  
Theological Debate ◽  
Ernst Troeltsch ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTIn the light of recent theological controversies, the Anglican Communion urgently needs what Archbishop Rowan Williams has described as an ‘agreement over a common accountability’. Such an agreement must differentiate the things that define the essence of the Anglican Church from those that merely imparta distinctive cultural flavour. It will be built on a nuanced theological debate involving questions of self-definition that recognize the social, economic, political and cultural contexts enveloping the Communion's various national churches. In the same way that social structures and economic conditions bear directly upon the shape of religious organizations, it will become apparent that political pressures and cultural mores influence doctrinal commitments. The church-sect-mystic group typology developed by Ernst Troeltsch has the potential to help the Anglican Communion understand the origins of its theological diversity as part of a larger project that seeks to maintain corporate identity and to preserve organizational unity. His attempts to define the ‘essence of Christianity’ in the context of what might otherwise seem random, chaotic and possibly irreconcilable responses to Christ's teaching offers some interpretative insights that will assist Anglicans achieve a consensus on which ‘agreement over a common accountability’ might be based.

The Sect to Denomination Process in America: The Freewill Baptist Experience

1965 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth B. Bordin
Keyword(s):  
Max Weber ◽  
Church History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
Christian Churches ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Ernst Troeltsch

Shortly after the turn of the century Ernst Troeltsch joined Max Weber in examining the history of religious organizations from the point of view of the newly evolving discipline of sociology. Of the contributions Troeltsch made in his monumental study, The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, the one which has proved most stimulating when applied to American church history was his differentiation of sect-type from church-type religious organization. In 1929, H. Richard Niebuhr in his Social Sources of Denoniinationalisrn elaborated Troeltsch's ideas, especially as they related to American developments, suggesting that in the American environment the denomination occupied a midway position between church and sect. While Troeltsch hints at the tendency of the sect to acquire churchly characteristics in time, Niebuhr spells out the steps in the process of transformation from sect to denomination which he sees as following inevitably, arguing that each generation's sects must become denominations in the next generation. These in turn leave behind a new group of disinherited whose needs are unmet and from which spring the next sect movement.

scholarly journals O católico e o dilema da opção partidária à luz da Doutrina Social da Igreja

2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (314) ◽  
pp. 637
Author(s):  
Elvis Rezende Messias ◽  
Marcial Maçaneiro
Keyword(s):  
Public Participation ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
The Social ◽  
Doctrine Of The Church ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

O presente artigo desenvolve a relação entre fé e compromisso político, com foco na possibilidade de opção partidária por parte dos fiéis católicos, à luz dos critérios antropológicos e sociais da Doutrina Social da Igreja, da contribuição teológica de Ratzinger/Bento XVI e dos documentos do CELAM. Problematiza-se a questão de ser ou não possível, ao católico, optar por determinados partidos ou legendas, em vista da participação pública na tarefa política. Como se trata de uma postura política e crente do sujeito, esta questão é refletida sob luz teológico-social, a partir do evento pascal de Cristo, que na Encarnação assumiu a historicidade humana, inspirando na Igreja a proposição de um humanismo integral. Daqui promanam os valores que a Doutrina Social estabelece: respeito pela dignidade humana, promoção da justiça e da paz, em vista de uma sociedade inclusiva e solidária. Com tais critérios, examinam-se os modelos ideológicos do capitalismo e do comunismo, alertando para eventuais reducionismos, em atenção a um projeto de humanidade inspirado no Evangelho. Como resultado desta abordagem propõe-se um olhar sobre a opção partidária mais dialogal que polarizado, atento à dimensão antropológica da Política e aos critérios da Doutrina Social da Igreja, em vista da condução da vida pública. Abstract: The present article develops the relationship between faith and political commitment, focusing on the possibility of an option for a given party by the Catholic faithful, in the light of the anthropological and social criteria of the Social Doctrine of the Church, of the Ratzinger/Bento xvi’s theological contribution and of the CELAM’s (Latin American Episcopal Council) documents. We question whether it is possible, for the Catholics, to opt for given parties or legends, in view of the need for public participation in the political tasks. Since we are dealing with the subject’s political posture and beliefs, this issue is looked at in a theological social light, starting with Christ’s Pascal event that in the Incarnation adopted the human historicity, inspiring the Church with the proposition of an integral humanism. From this derive the values established by the Social Doctrine: respect for the human dignity, the promotion of justice and peace, having in view an inclusive and solidary society. With such criteria, we examine the ideological models of capitalism and communism, calling attention to eventual reductionisms having in mind a project of humanity inspired in the Gospel. As a result of this approach we suggest viewing the party option in a more dialogical and polarized way, observing the anthropological dimension of Politics and the criteria of the Social Doctrine of the Church, in view of the way public life is conducted.Keywords: Faith; Politics; Party option; Social Doctrine of the Church.

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