God's Mirror

Renewal and Engagement in French Catholic Intellectual Culture in the Mid–Twentieth Century

Edited by Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt

Published: 2014

ISBN: 9780823262373

Page Count: 360

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Description: Gathering in one place a cohesive selection of articles that deepen our sense of the vitality and controversy within the Catholic renewal of the mid-twentieth century, God’s Mirror offers historical analysis of French Catholic intellectuals. This volume highlights the work of writers, thinkers and creative artists who have not always drawn the attention given to such luminaries as Maritain, Mounier, and Marcel.
Organized around the typologies of renewal and engagement, editors Katherine Davies and Toby Garfitt provide a revisionist and interdisciplinary reading of the narrative of twentieth-century French Catholicism. Renewal and engagement are both manifestations of how the Catholic intellectual reflects and takes position on the relationship between the Church, personal faith and the world, and on the increasingly problematic relationship between intellectuals and the Magisterium. A majority of the writings are based on extensive research into published texts, with some occasional archival references, and they give critical insights into the tensions that characterized the theological and political concerns of their subjects.
Reviews: God's Mirror illuminates a critical moment in the encounter between Catholicism, modernity, intellectual integrity, artistic creativity, and political commitment. Specialists will appreciate the authors' many original insights into the struggles of path-breaking French Catholic intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s. All of us should welcome the renewed attention the book brings to these forerunners of Vatican II and the transformation of world Catholicism.---—Peter Steinfels, University Professor Emeritus at Fordham

“God’s Mirror is a substantial contribution to twentieth-century French intellectual history, and more broadly to the history of Catholicism. The editors build on previous scholarship on Catholic intellectual life and political activism by highlighting the work of journalists, scholars, and artists who participated in the Catholic renewal of the mid–twentieth century.”---—Thomas Kselman, University of Notre Dame

The essays in this volume reflect a broad range of subject matters—literature, music, philosophy, theology, inter-religious dialogue, social and political events—that will expand the horizons of readers in presenting the rich texture of French Catholicism during the period surveyed. The themes of renewal and engagement, the recurrent ideas, and overlapping networks among the figures discussed in the essays give unity to the diversity, making this a work that is collaborative rather than simply collected. Familiar figures can be seen in new ways, unsuspected dimensions of movements are brought to light, and connections among disparate aspects of life are convincingly made. A book to stimulate thought and enhance appreciation of multiple dimensions of French Catholic intellectual culture.---—Charles Talar, University of St. Thomas in Houston

God's Mirror illuminates a critical moment in the encounter between Catholicism, modernity, intellectual integrity, artistic creativity, and political commitment. Specialists will appreciate the authors' many original insights into the struggles of path-breaking French Catholic intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s. All of us should welcome the renewed attention the book brings to these forerunners of Vatican II and the transformation of world Catholicism. - —Peter Steinfels, University Professor Emeritus at Fordham

The essays in this volume reflect a broad range of subject matters—literature, music, philosophy, theology, inter-religious dialogue, social and political events—that will expand the horizons of readers in presenting the rich texture of French Catholicism during the period surveyed. The themes of renewal and engagement, the recurrent ideas, and overlapping networks among the figures discussed in the essays give unity to the diversity, making this a work that is collaborative rather than simply collected. Familiar figures can be seen in new ways, unsuspected dimensions of movements are brought to light, and connections among disparate aspects of life are convincingly made. A book to stimulate thought and enhance appreciation of multiple dimensions of French Catholic intellectual culture. - —Charles Talar, University of St. Thomas in Houston

“God’s Mirror is a substantial contribution to twentieth-century French intellectual history, and more broadly to the history of Catholicism. The editors build on previous scholarship on Catholic intellectual life and political activism by highlighting the work of journalists, scholars, and artists who participated in the Catholic renewal of the mid–twentieth century.” - —Thomas Kselman, University of Notre Dame
Details: ISBN-13 9780823262373
Published: 2014-12-01
Contributors: Edited: Katherine Davies
Katherine Davies held lectureships in modern European history at Magdalen College Oxford and at Manchester, following which she became an independent researcher including consultancy work at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and the Overseas Development Institute. Her publications include “A Third-Way Catholic Intellectual: Charles Du Bos, Tragedy and Ethics in Interwar Paris,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2010), and “Continuity, Change and Contest: Meanings of ‘Humanitarian’ from the ‘Religion of Humanity’ to the Kosovo Wars” (2012).
Edited: Toby Garfitt
Toby Garfittis tutorial fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He works on French literature of the last hundred years, with a particular interest in Catholic writers such as Mauriac, Bernanos, Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and Sylvie Germain. His latest books include Jean Grenier. Un écrivain et un maître: contribution à l’histoire intellectuelle du vingtième siècle (2010) and Jean Grenier Jean Guéhenno, Correspondance 1927–1969 (2011). Among recent articles, “Newman at the Sorbonne, or, the Vicissitudes of an Important Philosophical Heritage in Inter-war France” was published in History of European Ideas (2014), and “The Embodied Philosophy of Jean Grenier” in Embodiment: Phenomenological, Religious and Deconstructive Views on Living and Dying (2014).