Holy Dissent

Brings together highly regarded scholars of Jewish and Christian mysticism in Eastern Europe to analyze the overlap of mysticism in the two religions.

Table of contents

Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire recounts the history of an exceptional ninth-century religious outlaw, Gottschalk of Orbais. Frankish Christianity required obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, voluntary participation in reform, and the belief that salvation was possible for all baptized believers. Yet Gottschalk-a mere priest-developed a controversial, Augustinian-based theology of predestination, claiming that only divine election through grace enabled eternal life. Gottschalk preached to Christians within the Frankish empire-including bishops-and non-Christians beyond its borders, scandalously demanding they confess his doctrine or be revealed as wicked reprobates. Even after his condemnations for heresy in the late 840s, Gottschalk continued his activities from prison thanks to monks who smuggled his pamphlets to a subterranean community of supporters. This study reconstructs the career of the Carolingian Empire's foremost religious dissenter in order to imagine that empire from the perspective of someone who worked to subvert its most fundamental beliefs. Examining the surviving evidence (including his own writings), Matthew Gillis analyzes Gottschalk's literary and spiritual self-representations, his modes of argument, his prophetic claims to martyrdom and miraculous powers, and his shocking defiance to bishops as strategies for influencing contemporaries in changing political circumstances. In the larger history of medieval heresy and dissent, Gottschalk's case reveals how the Carolingian Empire preserved order within the church through coercive reform. The hierarchy compelled Christians to accept correction of perceived sins and errors, while punishing as sources of spiritual corruption those rare dissenters who resisted its authority.

This timely collection of original papers explores the vital but largely unrecognized connections between leadership and dissent. In an era when leadership failures can mean homelessness and even death for countless flood victims, losses of life savings for employees of bankrupt corporations, civilian deaths and ravaged societies in the Middle East and incalculable suffering among refugees in central Africa, the studies presented here offer analysis and correctives based on new understandings of the dissent leadership relationship. The book examines how dissent is implicated in problems plaguing theory development in leadership studies. Topics explored within this framework include dissent in corporate discourses of control, real and manufactured crises, cross-generational perceptions, women leaders personal and work lives, the professionalization of journalism, religious institutions, activist public relations and fear-based cultures. It concludes with new proposals for legitimating dissent as a unique instrument for advancing social development and avoiding failures of leadership. Examining dissent as the critical factor that differentiates leadership failures and successes from interdisciplinary perspectives, this illuminating book will be of great interest to advanced students and teachers of leadership studies, as well as corporate executives, policymakers and other leaders aware of the need to improve leadership practices.

Considers dissent, its theological analysis, and place in Catholic life. +