Following the success of the journée d’étude ‘Engaging with Engagement: French Catholic Thought 1930-50’, held at Magdalen College in May 2010, this conference will continue and extend exploration of different types of French Catholic intellectual engagement during the mid-twentieth century, against the backdrop of the ‘crises’ of civilization of the interwar period through to the war years and beyond. The formation of Catholic identities, in their artistic, philosophical, theological and political manifestations, and the shifting norms and values of political and social commitments in relation to their cultural and theological fault lines, are central to our concerns.

PROGRAMME 

Friday 18 March, Magdalen College:

15.00-17:00

L’irréalisme du pays réel : Girardian ‘mythe’ and the ‘montée aux extrêmes’ in the late works of Georges Bernanos
Brian Sudlow, Reading

“To Entwine the Living and the Dead” : Women, French Catholicism, and the Wartime Turn to the Past (1940-1945)
Brenna Moore, Fordham

Saturday 19 March, Maison Française:

9.30-12.00

From mystique to théologique : Messiaen’s ‘ordre nouveau’, 1935-1939
Stephen Schloesser, Boston College

Jean Grenier and the Essai sur l’esprit d’orthodoxie (1938)
Toby Garfitt, Magdalen College, Oxford

Question Session

Charles Du Bos and his Politics of Sincerity
Katherine Davies, University of Manchester

Question Session

12.15

Round table (including follow-up discussion of last year’s journée d’étude) over lunch