James Chappel
Biographic Data
| ID | 1038249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Chappel |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Chappel |
| SIGNATURE | CHAPPEL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Duke University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8242-340X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Étienne Gilson: An Intellectual and Political Biography
No Country for Old Age: America's War on Aging from Valley Forge to Silicon Valley By Mischa Honeck
Wrinkles in Time: Old Age, Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth‐Century Germany
This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It show…
Is Europe Christian? By Olivier Roy. Translated by Cynthia Schoch
In this short volume, the renowned French expert on religion, Olivier Roy, offers his insight into the changing shape of Christianity in Europe today. While it has its limitations, the book offers an interesting and valuable portrait of the dilemmas faced by Christians, and especially Catholics, in contemporary Europe. The book is a sweeping history, gathering the Peace of Westphalia and recent demonstrations against gay marriage into one concept…
The God That Won: Eugen Kogon and the Origins of Cold War Liberalism
Eugen Kogon (1903–87) was one of the most important German intellectuals of the late 1940s. His writings on the concentration camps and on the nature of fascism were crucial to West Germany’s fledgling transition from dictatorship to democracy. Previous scholars of Kogon have focused on his leftist Catholicism, which differentiated him from the mainstream. This article takes a different approach, asking instead how Kogon, a recovering fascist him…
On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany
Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of th…
Jacopo Cellini. Universalism and Liberation: Italian Catholic Culture and the Idea of International Community, 1963–1978
The Catholic Church has emerged in recent years as a privileged object of study for scholars concerned with various forms of competing internationalism. It is apparent by now that the twentieth century cannot fruitfully be viewed as a long contest between socialism and liberalism, but rather that various other global imaginaries—including Catholicism—were at play as well. In this distinguished study, Universalism and Liberation: Italian Catholic …
A nnika E lisabet F rieberg . Peace at All Costs: Catholic Intellectuals, Journalists, and Media in Postwar Polish-German Reconciliation
For about two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it looked as if Europe might truly become a light unto the world, pointing the way forward to a postnational, social-democratic future. This luster has dimmed considerably in recent years as a series of political, financial, and immigration crises have cast doubt on the wisdom and sustainability of the European experiment. This has led, in turn, to a historical reassessment of some of the m…
The Logic of Sanctuary: Towards a New Spatial Metaphor for the Study of Global Religion
Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal
Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against human rights, religious freedom, and the secular state—disastrous concepts unleashed by the French Revolution. Yet by the 1960s its position was reversed. How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel finds answers in the shattering experiences of the 1930s.
The Uses of History for Life
In Nietzsche's Great Politics, Hugo Drochon provides an invaluable service by drawing our attention to Nietzsche's political philosophy, which he contends has been either neglected or misunderstood
OldVolk: Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West
Locating French Liberalism
Any historian of modern Europe has probably explained dozens of times that ‘liberalism’ means something different in the European and American contexts. In the former, it refers to a tradition of f
Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany
This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality o…
Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles in West Germany, 1920-1960
Catholicism in twentieth-century Germany was more than a Sunday-morning activity: it was a political economy, or a means of grasping and governing the social realm. Catholics began to forge their own social theories at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the Weimar era the Zentrum, a Catholic party, was able to pursue Catholic political economy using the levers of the state, largely thanks to Heinrich Brauns, a priest who served as mini…
Nihilism and the Cold War: The Catholic reception of nihilism between Nietzsche and Adenauer
The discourse of ‘nihilism’ was of central ideological significance during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, argued many politicians and intellectuals, was inherently nihilistic and could only be overcome through a retrenchment of fundamentally Western ‘values.’ This article historicizes this emphasis on nihilism, suggesting that German Catholicism was one of the conduits that ferried the concept from the dark corners of Nietzsche's posthumous writ…
Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany
Beyond Tocqueville: A Plea to Stop “Taking Religion Seriously”
We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the impera…
The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe
Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s,…
Hitler's Priests – By Kevin Spicer
The Poetics of Sainthood in Interwar Catholic Literature: A Reading of Sous le soleil de Satan and The Power and the Glory
It has long been recognized that early twentieth-century Catholicism experienced a renaissance of both mysticism and the novel. In this essay, I will examine these phenomena together, and ask what sorts of aesthetic, philosophical, and theological commitments were required to translate mystical spirituality into the characteristic genre of secular, bourgeois modernity. In the past, the mystic had been portrayed in the hagiography, a form that rem…
The Poetics of Sainthood in Interwar Catholic Literature: A Reading of Sous le soleil de Satan and The Power and the Glory
James Chappel, La littérature et la sainteté dans le catholicisme moderne : une lecture de Sous le soleil de Satan et The Power and the Glory On sait longtemps qu’il y avait une renaissance du mysticisme et du roman dans le catholicisme du XXe siècle. Dans cet article, j’examinerai ces phénomènes ensemble, et je me demanderai quelles idées esthétiques, philosophiques et théologiques étaient nécessaires pour traduire la spiritualité mystique dans …
Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction – Edited by Heike Bock, Jörg Feuchter and Michi Knecht
The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe
Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s,…
Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal
Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany
This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality o…
Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles in West Germany, 1920-1960
Catholicism in twentieth-century Germany was more than a Sunday-morning activity: it was a political economy, or a means of grasping and governing the social realm. Catholics began to forge their own social theories at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the Weimar era the Zentrum, a Catholic party, was able to pursue Catholic political economy using the levers of the state, largely thanks to Heinrich Brauns, a priest who served as mini…
On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany
Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of th…
The Logic of Sanctuary: Towards a New Spatial Metaphor for the Study of Global Religion
OldVolk: Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West
Nihilism and the Cold War: The Catholic reception of nihilism between Nietzsche and Adenauer
The discourse of ‘nihilism’ was of central ideological significance during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, argued many politicians and intellectuals, was inherently nihilistic and could only be overcome through a retrenchment of fundamentally Western ‘values.’ This article historicizes this emphasis on nihilism, suggesting that German Catholicism was one of the conduits that ferried the concept from the dark corners of Nietzsche's posthumous writ…
Beyond Tocqueville: A Plea to Stop “Taking Religion Seriously”
We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the impera…
The Poetics of Sainthood in Interwar Catholic Literature: A Reading of Sous le soleil de Satan and The Power and the Glory
It has long been recognized that early twentieth-century Catholicism experienced a renaissance of both mysticism and the novel. In this essay, I will examine these phenomena together, and ask what sorts of aesthetic, philosophical, and theological commitments were required to translate mystical spirituality into the characteristic genre of secular, bourgeois modernity. In the past, the mystic had been portrayed in the hagiography, a form that rem…
The Poetics of Sainthood in Interwar Catholic Literature: A Reading of Sous le soleil de Satan and The Power and the Glory
James Chappel, La littérature et la sainteté dans le catholicisme moderne : une lecture de Sous le soleil de Satan et The Power and the Glory On sait longtemps qu’il y avait une renaissance du mysticisme et du roman dans le catholicisme du XXe siècle. Dans cet article, j’examinerai ces phénomènes ensemble, et je me demanderai quelles idées esthétiques, philosophiques et théologiques étaient nécessaires pour traduire la spiritualité mystique dans …
Religion and Its Other: Secular and Sacral Concepts and Practices in Interaction – Edited by Heike Bock, Jörg Feuchter and Michi Knecht
The Catholic Origins of Totalitarianism Theory in Interwar Europe
Totalitarianism theory was one of the ratifying principles of the Cold War, and remains an important component of contemporary political discourse. Its origins, however, are little understood. Although widely seen as a secular product of anticommunist socialism, it was originally a theological notion, rooted in the political theory of Catholic personalism. Specifically, totalitarianism theory was forged by Catholic intellectuals in the mid-1930s,…
Hitler's Priests – By Kevin Spicer
Beyond Tocqueville: A Plea to Stop “Taking Religion Seriously”
We have all heard the admonition to “take religion seriously.” It is a perplexing command, since AHA statistics indicate that graduate students have been flocking to religious topics for years. Library shelves groan under the weight of recent works that take religion seriously. What, then, might it mean to take religion more seriously, as it has been such a booming academic field for decades now? As Elizabeth Pritchard has pointed out, the impera…
Nihilism and the Cold War: The Catholic reception of nihilism between Nietzsche and Adenauer
The discourse of ‘nihilism’ was of central ideological significance during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, argued many politicians and intellectuals, was inherently nihilistic and could only be overcome through a retrenchment of fundamentally Western ‘values.’ This article historicizes this emphasis on nihilism, suggesting that German Catholicism was one of the conduits that ferried the concept from the dark corners of Nietzsche's posthumous writ…
Quinn Slobodian, Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany
Catholicism and the Economy of Miracles in West Germany, 1920-1960
Catholicism in twentieth-century Germany was more than a Sunday-morning activity: it was a political economy, or a means of grasping and governing the social realm. Catholics began to forge their own social theories at the end of the nineteenth century, and during the Weimar era the Zentrum, a Catholic party, was able to pursue Catholic political economy using the levers of the state, largely thanks to Heinrich Brauns, a priest who served as mini…
Nuclear Families in a Nuclear Age: Theorising the Family in 1950s West Germany
This essay explores the imagination of the family in 1950s West Germany, where the family emerged at the heart of political, economic and moral reconstruction. To uncover the intellectual origins of familialism, the essay presents trans-war intellectual biographies of Franz-Josef Würmeling, Germany's first family minister, and Helmut Schelsky, the most prominent family sociologist of the period. Their stories demonstrate that the new centrality o…
Locating French Liberalism
Any historian of modern Europe has probably explained dozens of times that ‘liberalism’ means something different in the European and American contexts. In the former, it refers to a tradition of f
Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church
In 1900 the Catholic Church stood staunchly against human rights, religious freedom, and the secular state—disastrous concepts unleashed by the French Revolution. Yet by the 1960s its position was reversed. How did the world’s largest religious organization become modern? James Chappel finds answers in the shattering experiences of the 1930s.
The Uses of History for Life
In Nietzsche's Great Politics, Hugo Drochon provides an invaluable service by drawing our attention to Nietzsche's political philosophy, which he contends has been either neglected or misunderstood
OldVolk: Aging in 1950s Germany, East and West
Postsecular Catholicism: Relevance and Renewal
The God That Won: Eugen Kogon and the Origins of Cold War Liberalism
Eugen Kogon (1903–87) was one of the most important German intellectuals of the late 1940s. His writings on the concentration camps and on the nature of fascism were crucial to West Germany’s fledgling transition from dictatorship to democracy. Previous scholars of Kogon have focused on his leftist Catholicism, which differentiated him from the mainstream. This article takes a different approach, asking instead how Kogon, a recovering fascist him…
On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany
Historical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension policy, a sphere of human experience that is often interrogated in parochial terms, if at all. An analysis of the culture and policies of old age in East Germany in the 1950s and 1960s shows the importance of a transnational history of th…
Jacopo Cellini. Universalism and Liberation: Italian Catholic Culture and the Idea of International Community, 1963–1978
The Catholic Church has emerged in recent years as a privileged object of study for scholars concerned with various forms of competing internationalism. It is apparent by now that the twentieth century cannot fruitfully be viewed as a long contest between socialism and liberalism, but rather that various other global imaginaries—including Catholicism—were at play as well. In this distinguished study, Universalism and Liberation: Italian Catholic …
A nnika E lisabet F rieberg . Peace at All Costs: Catholic Intellectuals, Journalists, and Media in Postwar Polish-German Reconciliation
For about two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it looked as if Europe might truly become a light unto the world, pointing the way forward to a postnational, social-democratic future. This luster has dimmed considerably in recent years as a series of political, financial, and immigration crises have cast doubt on the wisdom and sustainability of the European experiment. This has led, in turn, to a historical reassessment of some of the m…
The Logic of Sanctuary: Towards a New Spatial Metaphor for the Study of Global Religion
Is Europe Christian? By Olivier Roy. Translated by Cynthia Schoch
In this short volume, the renowned French expert on religion, Olivier Roy, offers his insight into the changing shape of Christianity in Europe today. While it has its limitations, the book offers an interesting and valuable portrait of the dilemmas faced by Christians, and especially Catholics, in contemporary Europe. The book is a sweeping history, gathering the Peace of Westphalia and recent demonstrations against gay marriage into one concept…
Wrinkles in Time: Old Age, Gender and Temporality in Nineteenth‐Century Germany
This article explores one of the classic questions in the history of old age: what happened to the status of the elderly in the nineteenth century? How do we explain the emergence of the modern notion of an old age defined by ‘declines’ of every sort (cognitive, physical, financial)? The article focuses on Germany, then and now a global leader on this issue, and it focuses on women, whose ageing was more widely discussed than that of men. It show…
No Country for Old Age: America's War on Aging from Valley Forge to Silicon Valley By Mischa Honeck
Étienne Gilson: An Intellectual and Political Biography
Law (18 works) · Political science (18 works) · Politics (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · History (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements (8 works) · Economic history (8 works)