Browsing by Subject "Catholic Church"
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Item Open Access Challenging Social Inequality: The Landless Rural Workers(The Latin Americanist) Knoll, TravisItem Open Access "For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)(2013) Bird, Jonathan Bartholomew"For Better or Worse: Divorce and Annulment Lawsuits in Colonial Mexico (1544-1799)" uses petitions for divorce and annulment to explore how husbands and wives defined and contested their marital roles and manipulated legal procedure. Marital conflict provides an intimate window into the daily lives of colonial Mexicans, and the discourses developed in the course of divorce and annulment litigation show us what lawyers, litigants and judges understood to be appropriate behavior for husbands and wives. This dissertation maintains that wives often sued for divorce or annulment not as an end in itself, but rather as a means to quickly escape domestic violence by getting the authorities to place them in enclosure, away from abusive husbands. Many wives used a divorce or annulment lawsuit just to get placed in enclosure, without making a good faith effort to take the litigation to its final conclusion. "For Better or For Worse" also argues concepts of masculinity, rather than notions of honor, played a strong role in the ways that husbands negotiated their presence in divorce and annulment suits. This work thus suggests a new way to interpret the problem of marital conflict in Mexico, showing how wives ably manipulated procedural law to escape abuse and how men attempted to defend their masculine identities and their gendered roles as husbands in the course of divorce and annulment lawsuits.
Item Open Access Liberate, Inculturate, Educate! Brazilian Black Catholics, Racial Justice, and Affirmative Action from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia(2022) Knoll, Travis K.The poor and overwhelmingly non-white Baixada Fluminense, on Rio’s urban periphery, saw Black Catholic priests and lay people engage in religiously-informed activism and grassroots educational initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. Thus began the nationwide campaign that, by 2012, led to the adoption of racial and ethnic quotas in higher education admissions, the civil service, the diplomatic corps, and the military. As part of raising Black consciousness, they drew on a global theology of inculturation and joined others in pioneering a reform of the Catholic liturgy through “Afro Masses” that taught Catholics to respect Africa, its cultures, and its descendants. In doing so, these Catholic activists made common cause with ‘secular’ organizations ranging from trade unions, black movements, NGOs, and political parties that were often formed and led by Catholics. This dissertation suggests that post-Second Vatican Council Catholicism, especially threads that combined Latin American liberation and decolonial African and Asian theologies, is essential if we are to understand how Brazil came to adopt a bold quota system despite the vast under-representation of Blacks and the poor in the political system. Rather spouting class-only Marxism, liberation theology in its Brazilian heartland was a journey in pursuit of personal, spiritual, and collective liberation that contributed decisively to the country’s secular but nonetheless Catholic-informed legal and political culture in the 21st century.
Item Open Access Plus C’est Pareil, Plus Ça Change: The Influence of Cartesianism on the Internal Catholic Eucharistic Debate(2007-04) Glunt, ErinUltimately, this study will reveal a connection between Descartes and the Catholic Church that is largely ignored in scholarship both of the history of the Roman Church and Descartes himself. Descartes’ impact on the internal Catholic Eucharistic debate was inestimable, yet Descartes’ name rarely receives even a mere mention in books about Catholic theology or the Reformation. As has been explained, prior to the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the Church was able to attach its most hallowed sacrament to the natural philosophy of Aristotle and, in doing so, remain completely mainstream. Aristotle was the accepted voice regarding natural philosophy at the time and, prior to the Reformation, the Church faced no powerful, organized dissenting Christian groups. The Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, however, changed the context entirely and put the Church on the defensive, creating an environment out of which it would have been possible for the Church to consider real change both in theology and in the natural philosophy used to explain the theology. Such a “change,” however, would have actually kept the Church in the mainstream of Western European society. That is, as natural philosophy progressed, a “change” in the Church’s understanding of the philosophical underpinnings of the sacrament would actually have meant a keeping with the past—the concurrence of the Church with the conventional natural philosophy of the time. The Church’s decision, then, to reject Cartesianism and, instead, remain steadfast in its ancient employment of Aristotelianism, while it ostensibly demonstrated a lack of change, was a critical moment in the history of the Catholic Church. The Church’s resolution to continue to rely on ancient natural philosophy took the sacrament of the Eucharist out of the mainstream and, instead, made it archaic, mysterious, and essentially inexplicable in terms of natural philosophy. The fact that the Church could no longer explain one of its most elemental beliefs using mainstream science alienated the Church from the erudite members of European society and contributed to the isolation that characterized the Church during the Enlightenment.