Clerical frames for nursing practice: missionary nurses at Rehoboth This paper presents a discourse analysis of publications of the Christian Reformed Church regarding its Rehoboth Mission near Gallup, New Mexico, among the Navajo. All issues of The Banner, Acts of Synod of the Christian Reformed Church, the Rehoboth Hospital Bulletin, and the Annual Report of the Rehoboth Mission from 1880 to the present were reviewed for references to health‐care at Rehoboth from 1903 to 1943. Four religiously framed discourses were identified: (...) discourses justifying provision of health‐care at the mission, discourses of the Navajos as immature and potentially dangerous, needing to be civilized, discourses of cleanliness, and discourses of calling. This paper adds to a growing body of knowledge about religious frames within which nurses have practiced in North America. (shrink)

Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the ‘religious field’, this paper examines the roles available to Mauritanian clerics at different points in the country’s postcolonial history. The paper retraces the interaction between an imam, his students, and the postcolonial state. Buddāh Wuld al-Būṣayrī (1920–2009), the longtime official imam of Mauritania’s capital Nouakchott, had state backing for much of his career and was an interlocutor for heads of state. Yet he periodically wielded his symbolic capital to criticize state policies, and (...) he acted as a mentor to Salafīs, Islamists, and other activists, all without facing repression. His students and successors, however, faced an environment that was increasingly hostile to clerical dissent from the 1990s onward. Fiercer electoral competition, fragmentation within the religious field, and the advent of the Mauritanian iteration of the ‘Global War on Terror’ all undercut possibilities for clerical independence, as the state became more concerned about the constituencies for which individual clerics were perceived to speak. This case study sheds light on global dynamics in the Muslim world in an era where clerical independence is often constrained by expanding state power—including forms of ‘official Islam’ that seek to co-opt certain clerics while branding others as dissidents and troublemakers. (shrink)

Around 990, somewhere in Catalonia, a certain Julius was staying in the house of a certain Ramió. Unbeknownst to Ramió, Julius was stealing from him: mostly bread and wine, and perhaps other things as well. Eventually Ramió figured out what was going on, but instead of dragging Julius to the comital court, Ramió made a deal with him. As part of this deal, Ramió promised Julius not to involve the lawyers: neither he nor his descendants would get any count, viscount, (...) or advocate to prosecute the matter of the theft, under the heavy penalty of a pound of gold. How do we know about all this? Because Julius got Ramió to write up a document recording it: a scriptura securitate, which is currently preserved in the episcopal archive of Vic. This is the only such document that I have come across in Catalan sources, and it is absent from an influential tenth-century formula book from Catalonia. The scribe himself did not quite know how to handle the situation, as he began the document with the formula for a simple gift, as if Ramió were granting something tangible to Julius: “In nomine Domini. Ego Ramio donator …” Historians who do not work on Catalonia are no doubt tired of hearing those who do refer to the apparent mania for the written word in this society, but it is documents like this that lie behind such claims. If we may judge by the rarity of their names in contemporary documents from this region, Ramió and Julius are nobodies—a small-time landowner and a petty thief—but for some reason, in working out their dispute they decided that it was necessary to round up three witnesses and hire a scribe to put something down on parchment. (shrink)

This article examines state-church relations in Sweden by analysing clerical appointment processes in the latter part of the 16th century. The aim is to ascertain whether the king of Sweden could appoint pastors independently, and if not, with whom he was compelled to share the power. Earlier studies argue that the power of the king grew due to the reformation. First, this article examines the number of clerical appointments that were made in the period 1560-1611. The results reveal a remarkable (...) annual variation in the number of clerical appointments. Second, the timing and share of clerical appointments made by the king are studied. The number of appointments made by the king is viewed against the total number of clerical appointments so as to reveal the importance of appointments made by the crown. Third, the article examines the proportion of appointments made by other authorities. The results suggest that the crown’s role in clerical appointment processes varied, but more interestingly, it was not as ubiquitous as earlier researchers suggest. Thus article concludes that crown’s power over the church in 16th century Sweden was not as vast as it has previously been claimed. (shrink)

Neste artigo, inicialmente, discorremos sobre o contexto histórico que suscitou a 1ª fase do conflito em torno às relações de poder, entre Bonifácio VIII e Felipe IV de França, e as fundamentações teóricas em que o Papa e o Rei se apoiavam. A seguir, analisamos um dos opúsculos anónimos, escrito em defesa da política do Rei contra parte da clerezia franca, que não queria ser taxada em seus bens, e contra a bula papal Clericis laicos. Por último, apresentamos a tradução (...) do opúsculo Antequam essent clerici. We begin by discussing the historical context of the first phase of the power struggle between Boniface VIII and Philip IV of France, and the theoretical foundations upon which the Pope and the King supported their positions. We then consider one of the anonymous opuscula written in defense of the King's policy against the French clergy faction , and in opposition to the papal bull Clericis laicos. Finally, we present a translation of this opusculum. (shrink)

Both in his preoccupation with practical ethics and in the positions that he took, Thomas of Chobham generally resembled other theologians who studied in Paris at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century. On first consideration, however, his statements concerning married women appear quite eccentric. Thomas argued in his Manual for Confessors that women should employ persuasion, feminine enticements, and even deceit in their attempts to influence and correct the moral and economic behavior of their (...) husbands. (shrink)

This article provides Catholic authorities with a useful framework for forming prudent and just policies to minimize clerical child sexual abuse, exploiting the 2011 John Jay College report Causes and Context while not ignoring its shortcomings. The framework is St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of prudence, and a “profile” of the clerical perpetrators is developed that uses their narcissism as a middle term to explain why these men behaved the way they did. The author concludes by recommending a deterrent policy similar (...) to the policy advocated by St. Paul, which does not unrealistically aim at an angelic clergy but aims to deter those who would enter the priesthood for its benefits. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13.2 (Summer 2013): 299–311. (shrink)

Despite their regional, ethnic, and linguistic differences, the recent social and political upheavals of the Middle East have shared one basic concern. From the 2009 Green Movement in Iran to the 2011 Tunisian revolts which ignited the Arab Uprisings, and from the first Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt in 2012 to the protests in Turkey’s Taksim Square in 2013, a central issue has been how to establish a democratic state with a modern constitution while adhering to many shari’a rules and (...) regulations. This debate is not a new one in the Middle East and, as this article will demonstrate, it has been a central theme of Iranian politics ever since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. At the time of that first Iranian revolution, Iran was ruled by two sets of laws, shari’a religious law and ‘urf customary law. Shi’i clerics, with their elaborate institutional hierarchy, controlled shari’a law, which was considered the more important law of the land, whereas the monarch and local rulers were nominal guardians of ‘urf laws. Soon the novel discourses of the Constitutional Revolution would create a paradigm shift in Iranian society.1 Constitutionalist clerics had assumed that a new political order reformed ‘urf rulings, leaving shari’a laws more or less intact. They were stunned by the realization that a constitutional order revamped both legal systems and overturned sacrosanct social and religious hierarchies. Many clerics resisted these reforms. The result was a bifurcated set of laws that institutionalized clerical authority, while also placing limits on clerics in legislative and judicial branches of the government. (shrink)

Some clerics (ulama) in the Islamic world are of the view that practical politics is closely related to Islam, which regulates how an order of state is run. This view historically departs from Islamic constitutional jurisprudence texts that justify political Islam. Likewise, some Islamic boarding schools’ (pesantren) clerics, better known as kyai in Indonesia, are of the view that practical politics is not only a world affair but also an activity based on the application of Islamic legal principles (...) in achieving public welfare. This study aims to determine the academic basis of pesantren ulama in making decisions to be active in practical politics in Indonesia. Using a qualitative approach through interviews, the results of this study indicate that the political decisions of pesantren ulama are strictly based on the perspective of political Islam and fiqh principles that justify the involvement of ulama in politics. Furthermore, the conclusion leads to three perspectives in political motivations for pesantren’s ulama: to gain power, to preach Islamic values, and to demonstrate the existence of ulama in modern state administration.Contribution: The contribution of the study is to describe the permissibility of politics as an alternative to preaching and to show the existence and ability of ulama in state administration. (shrink)

Research on sexual harassment in the workplace has followed several trajectories: the extent of sexual harassment, labeling sexual harassment, responses to sexual harassment, and contributing factors to sexual harassment. Much of this research has been necessarily applied, leaving theoretical frameworks concerning sexual harassment underdeveloped. This research uses the case of the sexual harassment of temporary workers to develop grounded theory to provide a more structural understanding of sexual harassment. While temporary employment has increased dramatically in the past 15 years, researchers (...) have only recently begun to document the effects of this trend. This research is based on 68 in-depth interviews from two broader studies on clerical temporary work in Chicago and Los Angeles. The researchers find that the organization of temporary work fosters sexual harassment through the magnification of asymmetrical power relationships. (shrink)

This research provides a look at men doing gender in the highly feminized context of temporary clerical employment. Male clerical temporaries, as with other men who cross over into “women's work,” face institutionalized challenges to their sense of masculinity. In particular, male clerical temporary workers face gender assessment—highlighting their failure to live up to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. The resulting gender strategies these men adopt reveal how male clerical temporary workers “do masculinity”—often in a collaborative performance shaped by the (...) gendered expectations of their agencies, their clients, and even themselves—to reassert the feminine identification of the job while at the same time rejecting its application to them. Paradoxically, rather than disrupting the gender order, the gender strategies used by these male clerical temporaries help to reproduce and naturalize the gendered organization of work and reinvigorate hegemonic masculinity and its domination over women and subaltern men. (shrink)

This book reveals how the medieval papacy grew from modest beginnings into an impressive institution in the Middle Ages and deals with a wide field. It charts the history of the papacy and its relations to East and West from the 4 th to the 12 th centuries, embraces such varied subjects as law, finance, diplomacy, liturgy, and theology. The development of medieval symbolism is also discussed as are the view of eminent political scientists of the period. This re-issues reprints (...) the revised, 3rd edition of 1970. (shrink)

Travelling through the foothills of the Pyrenees, the episcopal visitor Guerau Caluet arrived in the parish of Sant Martí de la Vajol on an autumn day in 1314. As in so many parishes visited on his journey, the visitor found that the rector Berenguer kept a concubine, and in this case, was also known to celebrate mass with his grandson and young son. This was not, however, the only blatant violation of canon law and synodal statutes. Berenguer testified that one (...) day in May the sacrist Bernat, from the suffragan church of Agullana, had called on him to deliver the mass for the burial of a female parishioner. The rector recounted that while reciting the gospel for the funeral, he was in need of hosts and was unable to proceed with the mass “until Guillema, the concubine of the sacrist, sent the key to the sacristy where the hosts were.” As it happened, the priest Bernat was out of town and he had entrusted the sacristy keys not to his colleague Berenguer, but to his concubine. (shrink)

Are young men who will be entrusted with leadership in the church being given the skills and insight to face a future which recognises the equal call to discipleship of all the baptised?

What was probably the first collection of human skulls for purposes of study was established by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in Göttingen at the end of the 18th century. In subsequent years, the number of such collections increased, but their importance for scientific research remained modest. A breakthrough took place only in the 1850s when studies on the so-called cranial index by Karl Ernst von Baer and Anders Retzius gave skull collections a new lease on life, raising physical anthropology from a (...) solely descriptive science to an empirically based “biological anthropology” which used quantitative methods. As a result, Baer was among the first to distinguish between linguistic and morphologic criteria when systematising human populations. This article discusses the development of Baer's ideas concerning the aims and methods of physical anthropology during his career. It pays special attention to the role of scientific collections in moulding Baer's theories. (shrink)

Until recently, the church and culture in the confessional sense could not be equal and equal in size. The partnership of dichotomy church-culture was denied both first and second. The historic church tried to stand over culture, and culture tried to distance itself from the church. The idea of ​​culture was associated with church only with religious culture, which was defined as social reproductive or creative activity of people in the sphere of being and consciousness, which was associated with belief (...) in supernatural. Religious culture has always been denominationally differentiated and expressed the historically reached level of development of religious movements. Religious culture was distinguished by its features as material, and the spiritual one. (shrink)

O objectivo deste artigo é apresentar um conjunto de reflexões sobre o imaginário literário de Hidácio, bispo de Chaves, na conjuntura política da província hispânica da Galécia, durante o século V.