Matches in SemOpenAlex for { <https://semopenalex.org/work/W1978713042> ?p ?o ?g. }
Showing items 1 to 68 of
68
with 100 items per page.
- W1978713042 endingPage "472" @default.
- W1978713042 startingPage "468" @default.
- W1978713042 abstract "Reviewed by: Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland by Brian Porter-Szűcs Nathaniel D. Wood Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland. By Brian Porter-Szűcs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 496 pp. $55.00 (cloth). With the exception of Italy, perhaps no other nation-state is more closely connected with Roman Catholicism today than Poland, and [End Page 468] with reason: 98 percent of all children born there are baptized into the faith and at least 90 percent of all adult Poles self-identify as Catholic (p. 4). The late Pope John Paul II, as is well known, hailed from Poland, where he served as archbishop of Cracow before taking upon the leadership of the entire Church in 1978. And yet the association of “Pole” with “Catholic” is not limited merely to these largely unassailable facts; rather, as Brian Porter-Szűcs points out in his masterful study Faith and Fatherland, “it is supported by a deeply ingrained but highly selective telling of national history,” a history that makes it difficult to account for the religious diversity of the former incarnations of the Polish state (including before World War II, when only two-thirds of the population was Catholic), to acknowledge the Protestant Reformation there, or to admit that clergy began to connect faith and fatherland only at the beginning of the twentieth century (p. 5). If Church leaders have sought to remove the Church and the nation from historical time, asserting the constancy (and hegemony) of Polish Catholicism, Porter-Szűcs methodically and emphatically reinserts the specificity and exigency of history back into the narrative, showing how the contours of Polish Catholic thought on matters such as sin, modernity, the nation, the Jews, and the Virgin Mary have morphed over the last two centuries. As he observes, “Profound transformations often involve a seemingly subtle shift in the bounds of the permissible, a normalization of what had been unspeakable or a quiet repudiation of what was once commonplace” (p. 141). This book offers an excellent example of the power of intellectual history to explicate the complex and shifting relationship between two worldviews, the Catholic and the national, while problematizing their simple conflation. In ten chapters Porter-Szűcs explores key themes in Polish Catholic rhetoric as its adherents struggled to make Catholicism modern. The overarching theme, unsurprisingly, is the encroachment of nationalism into Catholic thought, manifest most importantly and disturbingly in a worldview that blamed Masons, Jews, and Bolsheviks for the perceived challenges of modernity to faith and family. Porter-Szűcs notes the logical inconsistency of a doctrine premised upon love for one’s neighbors combined with the hatred of national exclusivity and anti-Semitism—a subject he explored from the secular side in his first book, When Nationalism Began to Hate (Oxford University Press, 2001)—while showing precisely how such configurations came about. Each chapter—“The Church,” “Sin,” “Modernity,” “The Person and Society,” “Politics,” “The Nation Penitent,” “Ecclesia Militans,” “The Jew,” “Polak-Katolik,” and “Mary, Militant and Maternal”—begins [End Page 469] with nineteenth- or early twentieth-century discourse among Polish Catholic clergy on the given topic, before following its development to the present. Deeply knowledgeable about Catholic theology, both within Poland and in its larger global context, and highly sensitive to the semantics of key Polish words and phrases, Porter-Szűcs offers trenchant analysis of sermons, clerical debates, and public discussions published in sources ranging from official encyclicals to secret police records or Internet chatroom posts. Overall, one notes a shift in Polish Catholic thought from emphasis on personal sin to national righteousness, from injunctions to “love thy neighbor” to exclusivist and anti-Semitic vitriol, from acceptance of hierarchical social and political arrangements to support for democracy and human rights. The chapters that focus more on the 1970s and 1980s (when the Catholic Church was at its apogee in Poland) reveal greater emphasis on love and the worth of the individual, which incidentally could be used as a weapon against the Communist authorities, while the conclusion reveals a duality or even plurality in Polish Catholic thought today, ranging from a vocal minority’s contemporary reformulation of the anti-Semitic, antimodern conspiracy..." @default.
- W1978713042 created "2016-06-24" @default.
- W1978713042 creator A5064079708 @default.
- W1978713042 date "2013-01-01" @default.
- W1978713042 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
- W1978713042 title "Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland by Brian Porter-Szűcs" @default.
- W1978713042 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2013.0035" @default.
- W1978713042 hasPublicationYear "2013" @default.
- W1978713042 type Work @default.
- W1978713042 sameAs 1978713042 @default.
- W1978713042 citedByCount "0" @default.
- W1978713042 crossrefType "journal-article" @default.
- W1978713042 hasAuthorship W1978713042A5064079708 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C111021475 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C11413529 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C135121143 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C138885662 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C144024400 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C17744445 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C199539241 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C24667770 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C27206212 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C2777019345 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C2778682666 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C2778692574 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C2780480986 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C41008148 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C48103436 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C94625758 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConcept C95457728 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C111021475 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C11413529 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C135121143 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C138885662 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C144024400 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C17744445 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C199539241 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C24667770 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C27206212 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C2777019345 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C2778682666 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C2778692574 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C2780480986 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C41008148 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C48103436 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C94625758 @default.
- W1978713042 hasConceptScore W1978713042C95457728 @default.
- W1978713042 hasIssue "2" @default.
- W1978713042 hasLocation W19787130421 @default.
- W1978713042 hasOpenAccess W1978713042 @default.
- W1978713042 hasPrimaryLocation W19787130421 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W1553737856 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W1978713042 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2030295040 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2063781052 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2334492604 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2399260806 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2491088266 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W571293274 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W612632551 @default.
- W1978713042 hasRelatedWork W2129217810 @default.
- W1978713042 hasVolume "24" @default.
- W1978713042 isParatext "false" @default.
- W1978713042 isRetracted "false" @default.
- W1978713042 magId "1978713042" @default.
- W1978713042 workType "article" @default.