R Forlenza
Biographic Data
| ID | 5065 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R Forlenza |
| GIVEN NAMES | R |
| FAMILY NAME | Forlenza |
| SIGNATURE | FORLENZA R |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2939-6654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 66 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Response to Brandon Bloch’s Review of Italy’s Christian Democracy: The Catholic Encounter with Political Modernity
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Thriving in modernity: Crisis and mimesis in the life-experiences of Padre Pio and Ernesto De Martino
This article examines the life experience of and the enduring devotion for Padre Pio (1887-1968) - a Capuchin friar and the most popular saint of twenty-first century Catholicism - through the work and conceptual toolkit of anthropologist Ernesto De Martino (1908-1965), one of the most talented intellectuals of twentieth century Italy. Southern Italian neighbours, De Martino conducted ethnographic research on magic and popular religiosity there j…
The end of fascism
When did fascism end? Did it end in July 1943, with the fall of Mussolini from power, or in April 1945, with Liberation Day? The argument of this article is that fascism was not simply a historical experience but a political form that attempted to transcend Italy’s social and political fractures with fantasies and unrealistic but nevertheless captivating expectations. Its hypnotic contagious power cast a mimetic spell that can be continuously rel…
The Italian Resistance: Historical junctures and new perspectives
This introduction to this special issue of Modern Italy explores how the emphasis on fascism in recent scholarship and public discourse risks its mythification and cultural rehabilitation, and urges a rebalancing of historiography to highlight the pivotal role of the Italian Resistance in shaping Italy’s democratic identity. Marking the eightieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation and the thirtieth anniversary of Modern Italy , the issue examines …
The Italian Resistance: 80 Years later – a roundtable reflection at Luiss
This article chronicles the roundtable held at LUISS University in Rome on 23 May 2025, marking the eightieth anniversary of the Italian Resistance. Organised alongside the launch of the special issue of Modern Italy titled ‘The Italian Resistance: Historical Junctures and New Perspectives’, the event gathered prominent scholars to revisit the legacy of the Resistance in contemporary historical, cultural and political discourse. Contributions hig…
Bodies politic: Burial and reburial in fascist Italy
This article examines the ‘necro-politics' or the fascist politics of death as it unfolded from the funerals of the squadristi - the members of the fascist paramilitary squads who carried out attacks and violence throughout Italy before Benito Mussolini came to power in the autumn of 1922 - to their exhumation and reburial in ‘shrines’ during the 1930s. Adopting an anthropological perspective, it considers the funerals, exhumations and reburials …
Rethinking the end of Christian Democracy
This article is about the seminar held at Luiss University in Rome on 17 June 2024. The seminar focused on ‘The End of Christian Democracy: A New Direction for Research’ and was the first milestone and official launch of the PRIN research project ‘The End of Christian Democracy: The Collapse of a Political Dream – Voices from the Margins’, led by a consortium of four universities: Luiss, Roma Tre, Bologna and Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples
Christian democracy as political spirituality: Transcendence as transformation—Italian politics, 1942–1953
This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 and the emergence of Christian Democracy as the dominant political party in the postwar years. It analyzes how Catholic politicians turned from reactionary critics of democracy to its champion. The article foregrounds a dimension that has not been given sufficient attention in scholarly works on political Catholicism and Christian Democracy, namely the …
The Globalization of Christian Democracy: Religious Entanglements in the Making of Modern Politics
This article throws light on a crucial, yet overlooked, aspect of global entanglements that significantly came to shape modern politics: the global spread of Catholic ideas that, from the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, became translated into various political platforms and, eventually, into Christian Democratic parties. The article will cover three broad periods where such global entanglements took shape: the mid-ninet…
Social dramas and memory formation. Resistance and the use of the Risorgimento in the Italian politics of memory, 1943–1948
This article analyses the case of Italy and how the memory of World War II came to provide the ground for political legitimacy and the ideological foundations of post-war democracy. It focuses on the topos of the Resistance against Fascism as a ‘second Risorgimento’, e.g. a national and patriotic war of liberation supported by the entire populace. The article argues that the process of memory formation of the Resistance as a ‘second Risorgimento’…
The Soviet Myth and the Making of Communist Lives in Italy, 1943–56
This article explores the emergence and consolidation of the Soviet myth, and the related myth of Stalin, within Italy's Communist culture, in the period between the upheavals of the Second World War and 1956. Countering the traditional top-down approaches, which have seen political myths as weapons in the political struggle and devices for deceiving ordinary people, it examines the Soviet myth as a narrative that encapsulated the meaning of the …
Europe’s Forgotten Unfinished Revolution: Peasant Power, Social Mobilization, and Communism in the Southern Italian Countryside, 1943–45
Between 1943 and 1945, groups of peasants took over dozens of villages and small towns in southern Italy and proclaimed the birth of independent republics. During their brief existence—sometimes just a few days—the peasant republics implemented revolutionary measures, including the redistribution of land and the establishment of people’s courts. This article draws attention to these forgotten episodes and suggests that they can best be understood…
Antonio Gramsci on religion
This article provides an introduction to Antonio Gramsci's understanding and analysis of religion. It shows that Gramsci's conceptual constellation and key terms - from hegemony to organic intellectuals, from moral and intellectual reform to common sense - were formulated precisely in his critique to religion, and specifically to Catholicism in Italy. Rejecting the determinism and reductionism of orthodox Marxism, Gramsci saw religion as an activ…
In Search of Order: Portrayal of Communists in Cold War Italy
This article analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War. Without denying the critical role of high politics or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the article places the home front at the center of its analysis, using a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on the rhetoric, remembrances, and visual propaganda produced by Communists and anti-Communists alike, the article shifts the focus of attenti…
Max Weber and the Late Modernization of Catholicism
While Max Weber wrote extensively on a range of religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and most extensively Protestantism—there is no fully developed sociology of Catholicism. This chapter attempts to construct Max Weber’s missing sociology of Catholicism from the various scattered comments across his works. While Weber saw Protestantism influencing the growth of capitalism (and more broadly modernization), his view of Catholicism was largel…
New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Catholicism
Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of …
Das Abendland: The politics of Europe’s religious borders
The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture th…
Conclusion
The Conclusion contrasts the dominant structuralist and functionalist approaches to democracy and democratization, with the concept of the passage to democracy as an endogenous process of historical and symbolic articulation, and as the symbolization of lived experiences that engender transformations in consciousness, meanings, and beliefs. Rather than assuming a universal and externally determined model for the democratic process, it makes use o…
Meanings of Democracy
This chapter analyzes the liminal time of the war as a critical interstice of creative pluralism, and explores the various meanings of democracy that emerged from the transformative experiences of Italians in the years 1943–5. The chapter criticizes the rationalist approaches that distinguish between beginning and end, between clear-cut positions either in terms of party allegiance, institutional affiliation, or ideological commitment. It examine…
The Liminal Origins of Italian Democracy
This chapter conceptualizes the end of Fascism and the beginning of the civil war, after the armistice of September 8, 1943, as the collapse of the markers of certainty and the beginning of a liminal period of chaos and political, as well as existential, uncertainty. It takes the reader for a ride in what was a confusing and bewildering scenario that followed the removal of the Duce, the collapse of the nation, the dissolution of the structure of…
America is Coming, America is Coming!
This chapter analyzes the importance of “America” (effectively synonymous with “the West”) as an idealized goal of the political, social, and individual imagination, and examines how the American model of democracy shaped the democratic aspirations of millions of Italians. The arrival of the American armies exerted a great fascination on Italians. However, the myth of America as land of freedom and plenty had been already introduced within the fa…
Democracy and the Power of Memory
This chapter focusses on the memory of the war experience, which developed through varying narrative reconstructions and played a formative role in the self-understanding and self-construction of the nation. Postwar Italy was characterized by selective memory regimes that produced new symbolic representations of the nation. The chapter inserts narratives of a new beginning (second Risorgimento) of post-fascist Italy as a democratic nation into th…
Monarchy or Republic?
This chapter examines the meanings of “monarchy” and “republic,” explores how these meanings were modified in the wake of critical events during the civil war, and gauges the range of expectations held by ordinary people and political actors that affected the outcome of the referendum of June 1946. By 1943, while the lofty memories of the Roman republic or the medieval city-states were limited to a small circle of enlightened elites, to the major…
Between East and West
This chapter deals with the growing influence of both Soviet and domestic Communism on the evolution of democracy and the political transformation of Italy. It inserts the political and existential choices of the fledgling democratic society into the overarching context of the time, which was the incipient Cold War. Italy was a microcosm of this global context, because the most important political forces, the Catholics and the Communists, operate…
On the Edge of Democracy: Italy, 1943-1948
This book links the emergence of democracy in Italy after World War II to human experiences and the symbolic formation of meaning in a time of political and existential uncertainty. Between 1943 and 1948 Italians experienced the most intense period of the war, with its hardship and violence, and the most intense period of social, economic, and political reconstruction, with its hopes and vitality. Unlike conventional accounts that focus on instit…
The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War
This article traces the deep cultural and experiential foundations that animated Christian Democratic Europeanism between the mid-1940s and the birth of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s. It shows how the language of Europeanness, generated in a period of multiple and intense crisis, congealed around symbolisms of Christianity and spirituality. More specifically, it connects the post-Second World War Christian Democratic vision of…
Antonio Gramsci on religion
This article provides an introduction to Antonio Gramsci's understanding and analysis of religion. It shows that Gramsci's conceptual constellation and key terms - from hegemony to organic intellectuals, from moral and intellectual reform to common sense - were formulated precisely in his critique to religion, and specifically to Catholicism in Italy. Rejecting the determinism and reductionism of orthodox Marxism, Gramsci saw religion as an activ…
Catholic Modernity and the Italian Constitution
This article analyzes the Catholic contribution to the Italian republican and democratic Constitution of 1948. It focuses on the specific way – inspired by Catholic social philosophy – in which the Italian citizen became symbolically coded as a ‘person’ and not as an ‘individual’. The Catholic project for the new Constitution had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics and on the building of a modern mass democracy and welfar…
A Party for the Mezzogiorno: The Christian Democratic Party, Agrarian Reform and the Government of Italy
In the 1950s the Christian Democratic party turned its attention to agrarian reform projects and development funding for southern Italy. Its social and economic objectives were the destruction of latifundia, the creation of a class of small landowners, industrial and commercial development and the reduction of territorial inequalities. The ultimate goal, however, was political: to gain loyalty, allegiance and electoral consensus. To manage the ec…
Re-narrating Italy, reinventing the nation: Assessing the presidency of Ciampi
Italian political and public debate since the ‘earthquake years’ 1992–1994 has to a very high degree focused on the country's identity, on the notion of ‘nation’ and how to interpret it, and on the country's historical past and how to link it meaningfully to the (political) present. It has been less recognized that the crisis of the party political system in the 1990s also gave a new role to play for Italian Presidents at both the institutional a…
Resurrections and rebirths: How the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics
The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Ri…
Europe’s Forgotten Unfinished Revolution: Peasant Power, Social Mobilization, and Communism in the Southern Italian Countryside, 1943–45
Between 1943 and 1945, groups of peasants took over dozens of villages and small towns in southern Italy and proclaimed the birth of independent republics. During their brief existence—sometimes just a few days—the peasant republics implemented revolutionary measures, including the redistribution of land and the establishment of people’s courts. This article draws attention to these forgotten episodes and suggests that they can best be understood…
New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Catholicism
Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of …
Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy
This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the twentieth century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic 'modernity,' bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy, and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is em…
The Globalization of Christian Democracy: Religious Entanglements in the Making of Modern Politics
This article throws light on a crucial, yet overlooked, aspect of global entanglements that significantly came to shape modern politics: the global spread of Catholic ideas that, from the late nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, became translated into various political platforms and, eventually, into Christian Democratic parties. The article will cover three broad periods where such global entanglements took shape: the mid-ninet…
In Search of Order: Portrayal of Communists in Cold War Italy
This article analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War. Without denying the critical role of high politics or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the article places the home front at the center of its analysis, using a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on the rhetoric, remembrances, and visual propaganda produced by Communists and anti-Communists alike, the article shifts the focus of attenti…
Das Abendland: The politics of Europe’s religious borders
The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture th…
Bodies politic: Burial and reburial in fascist Italy
This article examines the ‘necro-politics' or the fascist politics of death as it unfolded from the funerals of the squadristi - the members of the fascist paramilitary squads who carried out attacks and violence throughout Italy before Benito Mussolini came to power in the autumn of 1922 - to their exhumation and reburial in ‘shrines’ during the 1930s. Adopting an anthropological perspective, it considers the funerals, exhumations and reburials …
Christian democracy as political spirituality: Transcendence as transformation—Italian politics, 1942–1953
This article deals with the transformation of Catholic politics in Italy between 1942 and 1945 and the emergence of Christian Democracy as the dominant political party in the postwar years. It analyzes how Catholic politicians turned from reactionary critics of democracy to its champion. The article foregrounds a dimension that has not been given sufficient attention in scholarly works on political Catholicism and Christian Democracy, namely the …
The Soviet Myth and the Making of Communist Lives in Italy, 1943–56
This article explores the emergence and consolidation of the Soviet myth, and the related myth of Stalin, within Italy's Communist culture, in the period between the upheavals of the Second World War and 1956. Countering the traditional top-down approaches, which have seen political myths as weapons in the political struggle and devices for deceiving ordinary people, it examines the Soviet myth as a narrative that encapsulated the meaning of the …
Magic, religion, and the South: Notes on Ernesto De Martino
This article deals with the work of the Italian anthropologist, ethnographer, and historian of religions Ernesto De Martino (1908–1965) and, more specifically, with his ‘ethnographic expeditions’ in Southern Italy in the 1950s. Here, in some of the poorest regions of Italy, De Martino carefully examined the intermingling of popular religion, magic rituals, and official Catholicism. Beyond the specific context of post-World War II Southern Italy, …
The Enemy Within: Catholic Anti-Communism in Cold War Italy
The Italian Communist Party, local government and the Cold War
The Italian national elections of 18 April 1948 handed power to the Christian Democratic Party. The Italian Communist Party had, however, gained significant municipal control in the local elections of 1946. For the Communists, the local level became the testing ground where administrative practices, political initiatives, social alliances and economic projects were developed. The leaders and the intellectuals worked to outline the cultural framew…
A Party for the Mezzogiorno: The Christian Democratic Party, Agrarian Reform and the Government of Italy
In the 1950s the Christian Democratic party turned its attention to agrarian reform projects and development funding for southern Italy. Its social and economic objectives were the destruction of latifundia, the creation of a class of small landowners, industrial and commercial development and the reduction of territorial inequalities. The ultimate goal, however, was political: to gain loyalty, allegiance and electoral consensus. To manage the ec…
Re-narrating Italy, reinventing the nation: Assessing the presidency of Ciampi
Italian political and public debate since the ‘earthquake years’ 1992–1994 has to a very high degree focused on the country's identity, on the notion of ‘nation’ and how to interpret it, and on the country's historical past and how to link it meaningfully to the (political) present. It has been less recognized that the crisis of the party political system in the 1990s also gave a new role to play for Italian Presidents at both the institutional a…
Giuseppe Dossetti: L'avventura politica di un riformatore cristiano
Giuseppe Dossetti (1913–96) was a key figure in post-war Italian Catholic politics and culture, as well as one of the founding fathers of the Republic. But that is not all. He was a refined and ecl
The Next Wave of Italians Has Come to America’: Italian Investments and Business in the United States, 1980-2013
This article examines the economic and socio-cultural impact of Italian investments and business in the United Stated from the 1980s onwards. It investigates flows, networks and ideas that have cut national boundaries and politically-defined spaces. The article argues that the last three decades of Italian investments and business in the USA have re-defined the symbolic space held by Italy and Italians in the American imagination. It also argues …
Il professorino. Giuseppe Dossetti tra la crisi del fascismo e la costruzione della democrazia, 1940–1948
Il cattivo tedesco e il bravo italiano. La rimozione delle colpe nella seconda guerra mondiale
Italian Modernities: Competing Narratives of Nationhood
This book argues that Italy represents a privileged entry point into the comparative analysis of ideologies and experiences of modernity. The book compares how thinkers and politicians belonging to different ideological clusters - Liberalism, Communism, Fascism, Chistian Democracy - came to formulate multiple and often antagonistic visions of Italy's road to the modern. By revisiting Italian political history from the late nineteenth century unti…
Christianity and political thought: Augusto Del Noce and the ideology of Christian Democracy in post-war Italy
This article engages with the thought of Augusto Del Noce (1910-1989), the most important Italian Catholic philosopher and political thinker of the twentieth century. The focus is on how Del Noce came to elaborate a Catholic 'modernity,' bridging a positive encounter between Catholicism, democracy, and freedom. This philosophical project had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics. At the theoretical level, the argument is em…
Catholic Modernity and the Italian Constitution
This article analyzes the Catholic contribution to the Italian republican and democratic Constitution of 1948. It focuses on the specific way – inspired by Catholic social philosophy – in which the Italian citizen became symbolically coded as a ‘person’ and not as an ‘individual’. The Catholic project for the new Constitution had a considerable impact on modern Italian culture and politics and on the building of a modern mass democracy and welfar…
Resurrections and rebirths: How the Risorgimento shaped modern Italian politics
The Risorgimento was the process of independence and unification of the Italian nation between 1848 and 1860, and has remained a powerful symbol of Italian politics ever since. Elaborating on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory, the article discusses the Risorgimento at crucial moments in twentieth-century Italian politics: the 1911 anniversary of unification, the elaboration of the Risorgimento during fascism, the re-appropriation of the Ri…
The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War
This article traces the deep cultural and experiential foundations that animated Christian Democratic Europeanism between the mid-1940s and the birth of the European Economic Community in the late 1950s. It shows how the language of Europeanness, generated in a period of multiple and intense crisis, congealed around symbolisms of Christianity and spirituality. More specifically, it connects the post-Second World War Christian Democratic vision of…
The Enemy Within: Catholic Anti-Communism in Cold War Italy
Conclusion
The Conclusion contrasts the dominant structuralist and functionalist approaches to democracy and democratization, with the concept of the passage to democracy as an endogenous process of historical and symbolic articulation, and as the symbolization of lived experiences that engender transformations in consciousness, meanings, and beliefs. Rather than assuming a universal and externally determined model for the democratic process, it makes use o…
Meanings of Democracy
This chapter analyzes the liminal time of the war as a critical interstice of creative pluralism, and explores the various meanings of democracy that emerged from the transformative experiences of Italians in the years 1943–5. The chapter criticizes the rationalist approaches that distinguish between beginning and end, between clear-cut positions either in terms of party allegiance, institutional affiliation, or ideological commitment. It examine…
The Liminal Origins of Italian Democracy
This chapter conceptualizes the end of Fascism and the beginning of the civil war, after the armistice of September 8, 1943, as the collapse of the markers of certainty and the beginning of a liminal period of chaos and political, as well as existential, uncertainty. It takes the reader for a ride in what was a confusing and bewildering scenario that followed the removal of the Duce, the collapse of the nation, the dissolution of the structure of…
America is Coming, America is Coming!
This chapter analyzes the importance of “America” (effectively synonymous with “the West”) as an idealized goal of the political, social, and individual imagination, and examines how the American model of democracy shaped the democratic aspirations of millions of Italians. The arrival of the American armies exerted a great fascination on Italians. However, the myth of America as land of freedom and plenty had been already introduced within the fa…
Democracy and the Power of Memory
This chapter focusses on the memory of the war experience, which developed through varying narrative reconstructions and played a formative role in the self-understanding and self-construction of the nation. Postwar Italy was characterized by selective memory regimes that produced new symbolic representations of the nation. The chapter inserts narratives of a new beginning (second Risorgimento) of post-fascist Italy as a democratic nation into th…
Monarchy or Republic?
This chapter examines the meanings of “monarchy” and “republic,” explores how these meanings were modified in the wake of critical events during the civil war, and gauges the range of expectations held by ordinary people and political actors that affected the outcome of the referendum of June 1946. By 1943, while the lofty memories of the Roman republic or the medieval city-states were limited to a small circle of enlightened elites, to the major…
Between East and West
This chapter deals with the growing influence of both Soviet and domestic Communism on the evolution of democracy and the political transformation of Italy. It inserts the political and existential choices of the fledgling democratic society into the overarching context of the time, which was the incipient Cold War. Italy was a microcosm of this global context, because the most important political forces, the Catholics and the Communists, operate…
On the Edge of Democracy: Italy, 1943-1948
This book links the emergence of democracy in Italy after World War II to human experiences and the symbolic formation of meaning in a time of political and existential uncertainty. Between 1943 and 1948 Italians experienced the most intense period of the war, with its hardship and violence, and the most intense period of social, economic, and political reconstruction, with its hopes and vitality. Unlike conventional accounts that focus on instit…
Magic, religion, and the South: Notes on Ernesto De Martino
This article deals with the work of the Italian anthropologist, ethnographer, and historian of religions Ernesto De Martino (1908–1965) and, more specifically, with his ‘ethnographic expeditions’ in Southern Italy in the 1950s. Here, in some of the poorest regions of Italy, De Martino carefully examined the intermingling of popular religion, magic rituals, and official Catholicism. Beyond the specific context of post-World War II Southern Italy, …
Max Weber and the Late Modernization of Catholicism
While Max Weber wrote extensively on a range of religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and most extensively Protestantism—there is no fully developed sociology of Catholicism. This chapter attempts to construct Max Weber’s missing sociology of Catholicism from the various scattered comments across his works. While Weber saw Protestantism influencing the growth of capitalism (and more broadly modernization), his view of Catholicism was largel…
New Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Catholicism
Until the 1980s the history of the Roman Catholic Church and Catholicism in modern Europe was mostly the preserve of the theologically and confessionally defined field of ‘church history’ or ‘ecclesiastic history’. Catholic historiography was sealed off from mainstream (North American and British) historiography, with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholicism seemingly little more than a backward-looking footnote in the dominant narrative of …
Das Abendland: The politics of Europe’s religious borders
The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture th…
Political science (34 works) · Law (31 works) · Politics (30 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (29 works) · Sociology (27 works) · History (24 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Political economy (15 works) · Democracy (14 works) · Art (13 works)