Faith and Fatherland: Catholicism, Modernity, and Poland
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.78 (564 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0195399056 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 496 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2013-10-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Brian Porter-Szûcsis Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of When Nationalism Began to Hate: Imagining Modern Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poland (OUP, 2000), which won the Oskar Halecki Award of the Polish Institute for Arts and Sciences in America and
Nonetheless, the Church's ongoing struggle to find a place within an increasingly secular European modernity made this ideological formation possible and gave many Poles a vocabulary for social criticism that helped make sense of grievances and injustices.. To fully contextualize the fusion between faith and fatherland, Brian Porter-cs-concepts like sin, the Church, the nation, and the Virgin Mary-ultimately showing how these ideas were assembled to create a powerful but hotly contested form of religious nationalism. Yet, on numerous occasions in the twentieth century, Catholics have established alliances with nationalist groups promoting ethnic exclusivity, anti-Semitism, and the use of any means necessary in an imagined "struggle for survival." While some might describe this as mere hypocrisy, Faith and Fatherland analyzes how Catholicism and nationalism have been blended together in Poland, from Nazi occupation and Communist rule to the election of Pope John Paul II and beyond. Jesus instructed his followers to "love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you" (Luke 6:27-28). By no means was this outcome inevitable, and it certainly did not constitute the only way of being Catholic in mode
While its relevance is most directly applicable to Polish studies or histories of Roman Catholicism, the book would be useful for scholars of other world religions, political movements, and religiously motivated groups. This is a history of Poland told through Catholicism that makes clear that neither can be understood independent of the other."-John Connelly, University of California, Berkeley"This is an ambitious monograph in Catholic intellectual history. Should east European history continue to build national frameworks, applying to them theoretical approaches familiar from west European history? Or should east European history address ev
Poland and Catholicism: A Lengthy and Superficial Analysis I give the book three stars because of the work that went into it, and because of the general information it provides about Catholicism in Poland. Unfortunately, the information is a mile wide and an inch deep. The author consistently oversimplifies the views with whom he disagrees, and fails to provide the reader with the kind of in-depth analysis needed to understand pr