Bodies Love And Faith In The First World War

This book explores the courtship and marriage of Gwyneth Murray, an English woman, and a Canadian, Harry Logan, who wrote in the personae of their vagina (Dardanella) and penis (Peter) during World War I. Through an analysis of their extensive daily correspondence over nearly a decade, it uncovers the couple’s changing attitudes to the intersection of sexuality and religion, to marriage and childrearing, as they navigated the transition from Victorian to modern values. By focusing on first-person narratives, this book enriches our understanding of gender identities revealing how porous the boundaries remained between notions of 'heterosexual' and 'same-sex' friendships. This study offers an unprecedented perspective on one couple’s sexual practices, which included mutual masturbation and oral sex, and constitutes one of the most intensive examinations of female attitudes to sexual pleasure in an era of female emancipation.

The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events? Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

In this unique intervention in the study of queer culture, Dominic Janes highlights that, under the gaze of social conservatism, 'gay' life was hiding in plain sight. Indeed, he argues that the worlds of glamour, fashion, art and countercultural style provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle in London. Inspired by the legacies of Oscar Wilde, interwar and later 20th-century men such as Cecil Beaton expressed transgressive desires in forms inspired by those labelled 'freaks' and, thereby, made major contributions to the histories of art, design, fashion, sexuality, and celebrity. Janes reinterprets the origins of gay and queer cultures by charting the interactions between marginalized freaks and chic fashionistas. He establishes a new framework for future analyses of other cities and media, and of the roles of women and diverse identities.

The dramatic social, cultural, and political changes in the twentieth century posed challenges and opportunities to Christian believers in Britain and Ireland: many, whether in the churches or among the laity, sought to adapt their faith to what was seen as a new, “modern” world fundamentally different than the one in which Christianity had risen to a position of institutional and cultural dominance. Alongside the more long-term processes of industrialisation, urbanisation, and democratisation, the formative experiences of war and post-war reconstruction, confrontations with totalitarianism, changing relations between the sexes, and engagements with an increasingly assertive “secular” culture inspired many Christians not only to reconsider their faith but also to try to influence the emerging modernity. The chapters in this volume address various specific topics – from mass politics to sexuality – but are linked by a stress on how Christians played active roles in building “modern” life in twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. Tensions and ambiguities between “religious” and “secular” and between “modern” and “traditional” make understanding Christian encounters with modernity a valuable topic in the exploration of the complexities of twentieth-century cultural and intellectual history. This book will be of great value to students and scholars in the fields of history including modern British history, religion, and the intersectionality of gender and religion. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Contemporary British History.

“The inspiring stories of a number of very different characters who used their Christian faith to cope with their experiences of the First World War.” —Jacqueline Wadsworth, author of Letters from the Trenches While a toxic mixture of nationalism and militarism tore Europe and the wider world apart from 1914 to 1919, there was one factor that united millions of people across all nations: that of a Christian faith. People interpreted this faith in many different ways. Soldiers marched off to war with ringing endorsements from bishops that they were fighting a Godly crusade, others preached in churches and tribunal hearings that war was fundamentally against the teachings of Christ. Whether Church of England or Nonconformist, Catholic or Presbyterian, German Lutheran or the American Church of Christ in Christian Union, men and women across the globe conceptualized their war through the prism of their belief in a Christian God. This book brings together twenty-three individual and family case studies, some of well-known personalities, others whose stories have been neglected through the decades. Although divided by nation, social class, political outlook, and denomination, they were united in their desire to ‘Fight the Good Fight.’ “John Broom looks at such beliefs during the first world war—the Tommies were always fighting for God, the king and their country . . . a fascinating study.” —Books Monthly “A detailed study of a usually hidden aspect of wartime social history, the topic of Christian faith. Fight the Good Fight has been meticulously researched and includes a wealth of previously unpublished material.” —Come Step Back In Time

We live in a world full of challenges. The three graces can almost be seen as motors for Christian life in today's world, but the words faith, hope, and love have so many everyday uses that their technical, theological meanings are, for many, difficult to appreciate. Modern life also leaves many yearning for authenticity and meaning. Many religions have answered that need by calling to mind the image of a path. Always profound progressions, religious paths tend to be motivated either by practices (the act of walking the path) or focal points. Christianity has a focal point, an object, and it sees the three graces as distinctively content filled. The heart of this book is about helping people find the Christian path and their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual balance--an equilibrium that is sustained by a strong personal faith, an enduring hope for the future, and genuine love that will withstand the worst of times. It contributes to the category of Christian literature that provides a pattern for Christian living without surrendering the intellect to the more popular side of this genre.

Focussing on specific writers and texts, Writings of Persuasion and Dissonance in the Great War examines literary responses to the Great War. It underscores the futility of imposing a single perspective on such response and also enquires into the uncertainties of memory.

This is the first full biography of one of the greatest Roman Catholic theologians of the last century. Schillebeeckx is alive and still writing important work. He is a Dutch Dominican and theological genius whose influence on the Second Vatican Council was profound. He was regarded as the theological voice of progressive Catholicism. But in 1968 the Vatican Authorities started an investigation into his orthodoxy and a great many Catholics also felt that this was an attack on them. Borgman puts Schillebeeckx in his context, creating a new perspective on his ultimate significance for the church and for the development of theology.