- Why did Carducci write an ode in praise of Satan, and what was he really trying to provoke?
Religion and Culture
Religious institutions, movements, and their cultural role.
- Why did Sigrid Undset convert to Catholicism shortly after finishing the trilogy, and how does that inform the novel's themes?
- How did European churches justify supporting opposite sides during the First World War?
- What did Nathan Söderblom do during the war to try to bridge divided churches?
- What eventually grew out of Söderblom's ecumenical efforts in the decades after his death?
- What was the nature of Gide's long, unresolved conflict with the Catholic Church?
- What choices did T.S. Eliot make in 1927 to remake himself as English rather than American?
- How did Lagerkvist's upbringing in a devout Swedish Lutheran household shape his later writing about doubt?
- What distinguishes writing about the absence of faith from devotional literature or dismissal of it?
- What did the Swedish Academy's citation praise in Seferis's poetry?
- How does Canetti's novel Auto-da-Fé dramatize the destruction of a scholar isolated from ordinary human life?
- How did Desmond Tutu's position as an Anglican clergyman shield him from the same repression faced by other anti-apartheid leaders?
- Why did the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama try to mathematically estimate how many people would go to Heaven versus Hell?
- How many couples were married simultaneously at the 1995 Olympic Stadium mass wedding?
- How were couples matched for the Unification Church's mass weddings?
- How did the ceremony reach roughly 360,000 people blessed in a single day?
- Why did wealthy parishes in Europe and North America outsource Masses to priests in India?
- How did the theological principle that 'a Mass is a Mass wherever said' make this outsourcing possible?
- Why did the Norwegian Nobel Committee describe the joint award to Satyarthi and Yousafzai as not coincidental?