2018/04/19 by Jon Kirwan · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #French Historical and Cultural Studies #European Political History Analysis #Modernity #Politics #Postmodernity #Narrative #French revolution #History #Avant garde #Humanities #Art history #Art #Political science #Literature #Law
paper · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198819226.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2018/04/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
This book offers a clearer understanding of the <italic>nouvelle théologie</italic>, an influential French reform movement that flourished during the 1930s and 1940s, championed ressourcement, or, a ‘return to the sources’, and hoped to build a certain rapprochement with modernity by appropriating the historical method, aspects of phenomenology, and social engagement. Comprised of theologians and philosophers from the Jesuit theologate Fourvière in Lyon and the Dominican house at Le Saulchoir in Belgium, they were led by such figures as Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Marie Dominique Chenu, and Yves Congar. After identifying a lacuna in the secondary literature, the book remedies certain historical deficiencies by constructing a history more sensitive to the wider intellectual, political, economic, and cultural milieu of the French interwar crisis, that establishes continuity with the Modernist crisis and the First World War. It examines the modern French avant-garde generations that shaped intellectual and political thought in France. The historical narrative examines various stages of older generational influence on the development of the <italic>nouveaux théologiens</italic>, including the influence of the Modernists as well as older generations of Jesuit and Dominican mentors. Moreover, the effects of the First World War are examined, as is their religious formation in the 1920s, the emergence of their wider generation during the crisis years of the 1930s, and their own participation in the wider intellectual thirst for revolution. It explores the 1940s, when the generation of 1930 rose to prominence and the global triumph of their thought during the 1960s.