Alana Harris

Lourdes and holistic spirituality: Contemporary Catholicism, the therapeutic and religious thermalism

This article explores historical and sociological shifts in understandings of healing at the popular Marian pilgrimage site of Lourdes. Using extensive survey and fieldwork data, it moves away from existing pilgrimage studies which concentrate on the sick, contested medico-miraculous narratives and cures, to approach this space as a site for the exploration and negotiation of embodied, communal and holistic aspirations. It contends that modern pilgrims, both female and male, conceive of forms of suffering and the need for healing on a holistic spectrum and use a variety of devotional practices and a ‘therapeutic landscape’ to address physical, emotional and psychological concerns. Using a methodological approach centred on ‘belief’ and ‘lived religion’, it charts a well-observed shift in contemporary spirituality (within and outside religious affiliation), which prioritises self-realisation, connectivity and embodied well-being – a therapeutic spirituality augmented by newer forms of ‘religious thermalism’. As such, it contributes to the ongoing debate in the sociology of religion about the relationship between holistic spirituality, secularisation and ‘traditional’, institutional mainstream religiosity.

Building the docklands settlement: gender, gentility, and the gentry in east london, 1894–1939

ABSTRACT This article explores a little-examined but highly influential Church of England religious settlement, the Docklands Mission in Canning Town. Employing a methodology focused on the spatial materiality of the Settlement–its creation and renovation through the efforts of volunteers and the patronage of royalty and social elites–it argues that attention to the physicality of the Settlement also enables interrogation of the philosophies that underpinned the Missions late-Victorian foundation (and their rearticulation in the 1920s). Moreover, reconstructing the Settlements contemporaneous reputation, as an extension of Malvern Colleges civic initiatives and the efforts of its charismatic warden, Reginald Kennedy-Cox, enables better contextualization of Anglican urban mission and youth work initiatives after World War II. In the construction of these leisure spaces and their utilization by East End boys and girls, it is possible to interrogate the ways in which gender and class relations, “civilizing culture” and “active citizenship” were understood in the interwar period.

Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race, and place in London’s East End

From the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, there has been a prevailing tendency to orientalise the East End of London. The idioms have changed, but underlying distortions of perspective have remained, from ‘darkest London’ through myths of the Blitz to ‘the new East End’ (Dench et al., 2006; Gidley, 2000; Walkowitz, 1992). This orientalised east London has been framed through (and served as an icon for) two conventional narrative tropes in the history and social science of migration in Britain, one temporal and one spatial. Both narratives are embedded in often-unspoken assumptions about the exercise and practice of citizenship. In particular, east London histories privilege the trajectories of migrant minorities that arrive in London’s lower echelons and are rescued from the abyss through self-improvement and civic engagement. The stories of Huguenot refugees, the Jews of the East End, the Maltese, the Indians, and the Irish are all in some ways redemptively showcased as plot lines of model minority integration. This familiar chronological script is mapped onto an equally familiar cartography as migrants move up, move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs, and leave space for the next wave of settlement. In spatialised Chicago School geography, stories of invasion, succession, and neighbourhood change, as, in chronologies of ladder-climbing minorities, we tend to find cast lists that are relatively unblemished by the presence of traces of difference. The ethnic mosaic is the key metaphor here: it implies social worlds that pass each other by relatively untouched.

Canvassing the Faithful: Image, Agency and the Lived Religiosity of Devotion to the Divine Mercy

This chapter explores the controversial history and contemporary practice of an immensely popular devotion, sketching the charismatic role of its originator, Saint Faustina, and the various artistic representations of the Divine Mercy that have been created and circulated. It interrogates a highly influential contemporary form of Catholic spirituality as a socio-cultural as well as subjective, material and experiential form of belief and practice. Focused on an image arising out of a visionary experience by a simple girl, the framing narratives make explicit the association between this simplicity and the spirit of trust which lies at the heart of the devotion. The Divine Mercy images and prayers have achieved a striking global resonance through their scope for personal individuation and agency, whether clerical or lay. This very vitality has proved challenging and ultimately uncontainable. Keywords: Catholic spirituality; devotion; Divine Mercy images; Saint Faustina

‘A Galileo-Crisis Not a Luther Crisis’? English Catholics’ Attitudes to Contraception

This chapter explores the intimate, often poignant correspondence of English Catholic women and men to the Archbishop of Westminster, outlining their perspectives on responsible parenthood and contraceptive choices within the fluid sexual landscape of the 1960s. In focusing on the laity’s emotional and experiential reactions to Humanae Vitae, it explores transformed understandings of the sacrament of marriage and the place of marital love within it, alongside shifting attitudes to authority, conscience, gender and sexual relationships. In considering the distinctively English dimensions of this decade of apologetic ferment, the ecumenical landscape, concerns about the ‘new morality’, and the discursive hegemony of the media in framing and shaping the debate emerge as particularly salient dimensions of the English response.

Introduction: The Summer of ’68—Beyond the Secularization Thesis

The Introduction provides a number of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for the fourteen case studies within this volume. It sets the scene for the spiritual crisis of ’68 by explaining the nature of Vatican II and the Pontifical Commission, thereby contextualizing the expectations dashed by Paul VI’s rejection of the pill. The chapter situates the interventions made by the anthology within literatures relating to the 1960s, the history of modern sexuality, and debates about the nexus between secularization and the sexual revolution. It contends that these intertwined narratives of faith, gender and sexuality enable us to think beyond exhausted teleologies surrounding ‘modernity’, ‘secularization’ and ‘sexual liberation’ and open up new visitas in the history of modern sexuality and post-war political and religious change.

‘For Those with Hardened Hearts’: Female Mysticism, Masculine Piety and the Divine Mercy Devotion

This chapter explores the controversial history of the Divine Mercy devotion, including the highly charged and affective spiritual scripts surrounding the mystic visionary who established the cult, Saint Faustina. It analyses the lived religious experiences of a number of devotees, mapping the visual and material practices associated with these new prayers and rituals, as well as exploring parallels with the well-established seventeenth-century devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Through close attention to the spiritual narratives of men and women who have developed an intense relationship with the Divine Mercy, this chapter elucidates the embodied and gendered intercessory strategies employed within an important strand of contemporary Catholic spirituality worldwide.

‘‘They just dig St Antony, he’s right up their street, religious wise”: Transnational Flows and Inter-religious Encounters in an East London parish

This chapter examines the gendered, performed and embodied dimensions of devotion to St Antony in an inner city, London parish. It explores the ways in which institutional rituals and customs are transformed through the transnational flow of people, cultural practices and historic understandings, through an examination of the Tamil Catholics and Tamil Hindus worshipping together at the Tuesday Novena, alongside a diverse community from around the world which includes a large Irish Traveller contingent. As both of these case studies illustrate, contemporary migrant religious practice is redefining and enriching this pre-conciliar extra-liturgical sacramental, thereby enabling a ‘traditional’ Catholic devotional to function as an innovative space for prayer, communion and convivial, inter-religious encounter.

Patron Saint of Catholics and Hindus

Every Tuesday evening at 8 p.m. throughout the year, a Catholic church in Forest Gate, East London, is the scene of remarkable religious fervor.1 Most weeks at least two hundred people of diverse ages and ethnicities buy and light hundreds of candles, a knot of peoplegczther around a plaster statue of the Franciscan Antony of Padua (rubbing their hands along the folds of his brown habit), or they place slips of paper in a large wooden box marked “petitions.”2 Meanwhile, a number of men and women walk on their knees from the back of the church to the altar, silently praying with lips moving and a lit candle, while others embrace andgreet each other with kisses as they enter the church. This diverse congregation has come for the Novena of Saint Antony, but the two-hour-long devotion of intercessory prayers, hymns, scripture readings, relics veneration, and exposition of the Blessed Sacrament is unlike most encountered in other Catholic churches—it brings together people from highly diverse faith backgrounds, including a substantial number of self-identified (and publicly acknowledged) Hindus. As the longstanding and now recently deceased parish priest, Father Denis explained, “The Franciscans built this church … [and] when the Franciscans went to India, there was a great devotion to the saints with the Hindus anyway, and St. Anthony they all particularly liked, and the devotion spread into the Hindu community.

Love Divine and Love Sublime

On the eve of the invasion of Poland, under a dedication to the pacifist priest and Dean of Canterbury Cathedral Dick Sheppard, Herbert Gray wrote Love: The One Solution (1938). This Presbyterian pastor, widely acknowledged as the father of the modern marriage guidance movement,1 sought to show the overarching importance of love for ‘our time and our world’ and concluded: We say with conviction that ‘love is the one solution’ for all the problems of married life and home life. But it must be real love, and not merely physical passion. And when it is real love, it still needs to be informed and intelligent love. It cannot do its perfect work without perfect knowledge. Therefore the people who are working for harmonious marriages are not without vital relation to the people who are working for world peace. We must have peace in our homes, if we are to have peace in the State and in the international world.2