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"From anti-Reagan riots in West Berlin to pictures of revolutionary Nicaragua, it is often impossible to grasp social protest movements of the 1980s without referring to how they imagined "the Americas". This edited volume is aimed at historicizing the representations of the United States and of Latin America among Western European protesters around that decade. By researching dominant interpretation patterns, practices and symbols within these movements, this book offers a fresh and compelling look at protest in the second half of the 20th century."--Page 4 of cover.
An ambitious, original book describing a century of Europe coping with America: its inventions, personalities, films, armies, business, and politics. These decades reveal how much emotional energy Europeans invested in finding their own ways to reconcile tradition and modernity under the pressure of the ever-evolving American challenge.
In this expanded and thoroughly updated English edition of the Italian edition (2008), Massimo Faggioli offers us a history and broader context of the so-called ecclesial movements of which Focolare, Community of Sant'Egidio, Neocatechumenal Way, Legionaries of Christ, Communion and Liberation, and Opus Dei are only some of the most recognizable names. Their history goes back to the period following the First Vatican Council, crosses Vatican II, and develops throughout the twentieth century. It is a history that prepares the movements' rise in the last three decades, from John Paul II to Francis. These movements are a complex phenomenon that shapes the Church now more than before, and they play a key role for the future of Catholicism as a global community, in transition from a Eurocentric tradition to a world Church.
This edited collection offers a new approach to the study of Italy’s foreign policy from the 1960s to the end of the Cold War, highlighting its complex and sometimes ambiguous goals, due to the intricacies of its internal system and delicate position in the fault line of the East-West and North-South divides. According to received opinion, during the Cold War era Italy was more an object rather than a factor in active foreign policy, limiting itself to paying lip service to the Western alliance and the European integration process, without any pretension to exerting a substantial international influence. Eleven contributions by leading Italian historians reappraise Italy’s international role, addressing three complex and intertwined issues, namely, the country’s political-diplomatic dimension; the economic factors affecting Rome’s international stance; and Italy’s role in new approaches to the international system and the influence of political parties’ cultures in the nation’s foreign policy.
The changing attitude of Catholic culture towards modernity After decades of a problematic, if not plainly hostile, approach to modernity by Catholic culture, the 1960s marked the beginning of a new era. As the Church employed a more positive approach to the world, voices in the Catholic milieu embraced a radical perspective, channeling the need for social justice for the poor and the oppressed. The alternative and complementary world views of ‘universalism’ and ‘liberation’ would drive the engagement of Catholics for generations to come, shaping the idea of international community in Catholic culture. Because of its traditional connection with the papacy and because of its prominent role in the map of European progressive Catholicism, Italy stands out as an ideal case study to follow these dynamics. By locating the Italian scenario in a broader geographical frame, Universalism and Liberation offers a new vantage point from which to investigate the social and political relevance of religion in an age of crisis.
Vatican II profoundly changed the outlook and the message of the Catholic Church. After decades, if not centuries, in which Catholic public opinion appeared to be primarily oriented towards the distant past and bygone societal models, suddenly the Catholic Church embraced the world as it was, and it joined in the struggle to create a radiant future. The Sixties were a time of great socio-cultural and political ferment in Europe as a whole. Especially the second half of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s witnessed an astounding range of 'new' and 'old' social movements reaching for the sky. Catholic activists provided fuel to the fire in more ways than one. Catholics had embarked on th...
For the first time, this volume takes a global and comparative approach to the lived local history of Vatican II.
The first comprehensive study of Italian Christian Democracy in English, Italy's Christian Democracy unravels the encounter between Catholicism and democracy from pre-unification Italy in the eighteenth century to the near-present. Forlenza and Thomassen put the triumphant emergence of the Christian Democratic political party that ruled Italy from 1948 to 1994 into historical perspective. With a focus on critical moments of modern Italian history - the Enlightenment and French Revolution, the Risorgimento, World War I, the fascist period, World War II, the post-war Republic - Italy's Christian Democracy demonstrates the often-dramatic ways in which Catholic thinkers, from laymen to priests a...
"African authors have consistently returned to childhood to find their personal as well as their racial roots. Far from being merely nostalgic yearnings for a lost paradise, many of the treatments of childhood as shown in articles in this issue have exposed a grim reality of cruelty, harshness, parental (particularly paternal) egocentrism and extraordinary bruisings of the vulnerable child psyche. Camara Laye may have portrayed a paradise state but Yvonne Vera has treated one of the cruelest features of childhood anywhere. African authors generally have been sternly responsible in their portrayal of childhood." -- Publisher's description
The death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI constituted two important elements in the broad theological and cultural landscape of Catholicism. This change of pontificate has also nourished the journalistic and political dispute about Vatican II, its history and its legacy, and not only the historiographical and theological debate. But the research on Vatican II is already proceeding forward and beyond the state of knowledge about the Council reached at the end of the 90s. For 21st century Catholics and theologians interested in understanding contemporary Catholicism in the light of Vatican II the intellectual undertaking is far from accomplished yet. The book offers comprehens...