Centre for European Studies

Research continues to show that the Christian religion is gradually disappearing from the public, cultural and social spheres in Western Europe. Even on the individual level, institutionalised religion is becoming increasingly marginalised. Some scholars, however, speak of a repositioning of the Christian churches in post-modern Europe, citing new forms of religious life and community.
This book focuses on the complex mutations the Christian churches in Western Europe have experienced since World War II. The authors offer a comparative exploration of the situations in several countries and describe the evolution (including the specific growth or decline) of the various Christian denominations.

Since the 1970s the feminization thesis has become a powerful trope in the rewriting of the social history of Christendom. However, this ‘thesis' has triggered some vehement debates, given that men have continued to dominate the churches, and the churches themselves have reacted to the association of religion and femininity, often formulated by their critics, by explicitly focusing their appeal to men. In this book the authors critically reflect upon the use of concepts like feminization and masculinization in relation to Christianity. By presenting case studies that adopt different gendered approaches with regard to Christian, mainly Catholic discourses and practices, the authors capture multiple ‘feminizations' and ‘masculinizations' in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries. In particular, it becomes clear that the idea that Christianity took on ‘charicteristically feminine' values and practices cannot withstand the conclusion that what is considered ‘manly' or ‘feminine' depends on time, place, and context, and on the reasons why gendered metaphors are used.

Christian ideas on family, religion, and the home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
The cult of domesticity has often been linked to the privatization of religion and the idealisation of the motherly ideal of the ‘angel in the house’. This book revisits the Christian home of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and sheds new light on the stereotypical distinction between the private and public spheres and their inhabitants. Emphasizing the importance of patriarchal domesticity during the period and the frequent blurring of boundaries between the Christian home and modern society, the case studies included in this volume call for a more nuanced understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Christian ideas on family, religion, and the home.

more info: http://upers.kuleuven.be/en/book/9789462700185

In 2012, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee conferred its most prestigious award to the EU. This book takes this prize as a starting point to review the association of Europe's quest for peace with plans and ideals about European unity, the oldest of which can be traced back as far back as the Middle Ages. But the call for unity was not only motivated by peace and prosperity. It was also, and surprisingly even up to the 1950s, grounded in a yearning to maintain Europe's colonial dominance in the world. Historical analysis additionally reveals a deep longing for homogeneity and an abhorrence of diversity, rooted in the early history of Western Christendom.

This book does not tell the usual story of a growing European self-consciousness. Instead, it offers a multifaceted history that takes in account the ambivalences and divergences of the European imagination in a global context.

In Formations of European Modernity, Gerard Delanty, one of the leading social theoreticians of Europe, offers a historical-sociological assessment of the idea of Europe as the development of modernity from a cosmopolitan perspective. With this book, based upon a broad and impressive discussion of sociological and historical literature, Delanty somewhat comes back from his earlier constructivist approach in favour of a theory that emphasizes the originality of Europe and assesses European history as the development of modernity, interpreted in a classical neo-Weberian sense. However, this approach sits uneasily with his ambition to present a cosmopolitan view on Europe, which emphasizes the interactions of Europe with the rest of the world, all the more so as the author largely ignores the postcolonial critiques of Eurocentric narratives as well as modernization theories. While Delanty is still quite successful in his assessment of historical diversities in Europe, "Formations of European Modernity" nevertheless disappoints. While the focus on global interactions is highly commendable, the lack of critical assessment and contextualization leads to a neglect of the fact that Europe often despised the (contribution of the) other. Hence his presentation of cosmopolitan Europe is flawed, and remains if not Eurocentric at least overly Europhile.