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Document Details :

Title: Is there a Future for Contemporary Church History?
Subtitle: Exploring Identities in the Long Twentieth Century through Travelling Religious Concepts
Author(s): BOSSCHAERT, Dries
Journal: Louvain Studies
Volume: 45    Issue: 2   Date: 2022   
Pages: 121-135
DOI: 10.2143/LS.45.2.3291399

Abstract :
Taking up the adage 'nova et vetera', put forward by the Leuven church historian Roger Aubert, this inaugural lecture offers some starting points for thinking about the future of contemporary church history and its role in contemporary identity debates. The historical study of contemporary religious identities and ideas is approached in three ways with a particular interest in examples from the long 1960s: First, by addressing bottom-up history, intersectionality, and hybridity, it discusses the ways in which religious identities in the past can be approached in new ways. Second, it will be pointed out how collective meaning-making processes in this identity formation can be mapped via intellectual sociability, travelling concepts and mythmaking. Finally, it is argued that classical text and archive study can be complemented with oral history and insights from the Digital Humanities, in particular historical network analysis, to facilitate this.

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