During the first decade of the twentieth century the Roman Catholic Church was shaken to its core by an intellectual reform movement, 'modernism', seeking radical changes in the traditional approaches to biblical studies, philosophy and theology. The repercussions of the church authorities' condemnations and repression of the so-callled modernist heresy persisted for more than half a century. Then, liberated by Pope John XXIII, himself suspected of being a modernist, the Second Vatican Council created the possibility for many modernist ideas to resurface and initiate a renewal of the church in the modern world. The present work contains the integral correspondence of the leader of this modernist movement, Baron Friedrich von Hugel to Maude D. Petre along with her two extant letters to him. The correspondence offers a unique glimpse into the history of the movement and an example of how its leading protagonist promoted the novel ideas of many of the seminal thinkers of the time among his friends and colleagues. Sadly, the letters also depict the often unchristian nature of the authorities' response and the subsequent suffering inflicted on some of the church's most critical but faithful and enlightened members.

This rich volume by an interdisciplinary group of American and European scholars offers an innovative portrait of the complex formation of clerical and confessional identities within the context of the radically changed religious and political situations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe.

Given the renewed interest in Evelyn Underhill with the publication of Evelyn Underhill’s Prayer Book (SPCK, January 2018), the time seems right to offer a fresh perspective on the writer’s spiritual formation. Having undertaken original research, Robyn Wrigley-Carr first explores the spiritual nurture that Evelyn Underhill received from Baron Friedrich von Hügel (‘to whom I owe my spiritual life’). Second she reveals the spiritual nurture that Underhill gave to people herself, utilizing both published and unpublished materials. At the heart of the book is the idea of a ‘long obedience in the same direction’: Underhill’s life had purpose and meaning as a result of the Baron’s spiritual direction and the soul care she tirelessly bestowed on others.

This book project traces the thought of several Roman Catholic Modernists (and one especially virulent anti-Modernist) as they confronted the intellectual challenges posed by the Great war from war from 1895 to 1907.

Acclaimed author and Catholic thinker Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964) penned two novels, two collections of short stories, various essays, and numerous book reviews over the course of her life. Her work continues to fascinate, perplex, and inspire new generations of readers and poses important questions about human nature, ethics, social change, equality, and justice. Although political philosophy was not O'Connor's pursuit, her writings frequently address themes that are not only crucial to American life and culture, but also offer valuable insight into the interplay between fiction and politics. A Political Companion to Flannery O'Connor explores the author's fiction, prose, and correspondence to reveal her central ideas about political thought in America. The contributors address topics such as O'Connor's affinity with writers and philosophers including Eric Voegelin, Edith Stein, Russell Kirk, and the Agrarians; her attitudes toward the civil rights movement; and her thoughts on controversies over eugenics. Other essays in the volume focus on O'Connor's influences, the principles underlying her fiction, and the value of her work for understanding contemporary intellectual life and culture. Examining the political context of O'Connor's life and her responses to the critical events and controversies of her time, this collection offers meaningful interpretations of the political significance of this influential writer's work.

This is the first book-length study to examine the interface between literary and theological modernisms. It provides a comprehensive account of literary responses to the modernist crisis in Christian theology from a transnational and interdenominational perspective. It offers a cultural history of the period, considering a wide range of literary and historical sources, including novels, drama, poetry, literary criticism, encyclicals, theological and philosophical treatises, periodical publications, and wartime propaganda. By contextualising literary modernism within the cultural, religious, and political landscape, the book reveals fundamental yet largely forgotten connections between literary and theological modernisms. It shows that early-twentieth-century authors, poets, and critics, including Rainer Maria Rilke, T. S. Eliot, and Czesław Miłosz, actively engaged with the debates between modernist and neo-scholastic theologians raging across Europe. These debates contributed to developing new ways of thinking about the relationship between religion and literature, and informed contemporary critical writings on aesthetics and poetics.

This book offers a new perspective on the often-overlooked lives of lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. It explores how over a century ago in England some exceptional Catholic lay women – Margaret Fletcher, Maude Petre, Radclyffe Hall, and Mabel Batten - negotiated non-traditional family lives and were actively practicing their faith, while not adhering to perceived structures of femininity, power, and sexuality. Focusing on c. 1880-1930, a time of dynamism and change in both England and the Church, these remarkable women represent a rethinking of what it meant to be a lay women in the English Roman Catholic Church. Their pious transgressions demonstrate the multiplicity of ways lay women powerfully asserted aspects of their faith while contravening boundaries traditionally assumed for them in an ostensibly patriarchal religion. In fact, the Church could be a place for expressions of unconventional religiosity and reinterpretations of womanhood and domesticity. Connecting together the lives of these women for the first time, this work fills a lacuna in the scholarship of modern Catholic and gender history. Drawing from private collections and numerous archives, it illustrates the surprising range of modes of Lived Catholicism and devotion to faith. Students and scholars of Catholicism, gender, and LGBTQIA+ studies will find significant merit in a book that assigns lay women a more prominent role in the English Catholic Church and offers examples of the flexibility of Roman Catholicism.