Organised Voluntarism in Ireland

Historically Irish society has had a long tradition of grass roots voluntary community work. However, with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, the Irish community and voluntary sector became increasingly subjected to government controls and restrictions. As a result, voluntary community work became more formally organised, centrally regulated and depoliticised. Such ‘organised voluntarism’ (Fye and Mulligan in Prog Hum Geogr 27:397–413, 2003) has since become part and parcel of contemporary community development initiatives in Ireland. While some UK research has explored the impact that this discursive and policy shift is having on volunteering, there is a dearth of Irish literature on this issue. This article presents an account of how and why this form of voluntarism took hold in contemporary Ireland. The establishment of Family Resource Centres in Ireland will be recalled and assessed to further illustrate the observations being made about organised voluntarism in Ireland.</p

La substitution des images aux reliques, et ses limites, dans la diffusion de la virtus des saints (Espace FranÇais, fin XIIIe-XVe S.)

After an earlier study regarding the Italian corpus, this article continues for the French territory an ample research started from the pioneering views of André Vauchez regarding the substitution of images for relics in the employment of the virtus of saints away from their tomb. - The article does not deal with images of the Virgin. - On the chronological level, the French corpus fits these views much better than the Italian, since the phenomenon is only really observed there from the 14th cent. In addition, a series of new data confirm that various images became “focal points” of the cult of saints far away from their tomb. But, as for the Italian corpus, in the texts studied it is more often contact relics and tiny first-class relics that appear as efficacious carriers of virtus. The last pages of the article underline how much the presentation, in spite of everything, only gives a very partial picture of a particularly complex reality.SCOPUS: re.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Catholic Sociology in Ireland in Comparative Perspective

This paper examines the relationship between the Catholic Church and Irish sociology within a comparative framework. Drawing on archival and documentary research, this linkage is investigated at an institutional and intellectual level, across three stages of the “career” of Irish Catholic sociology, and employing comparisons with Catholic sociology in France, Germany, and the United States. I discern important sources of variation between the four cases including major intellectuals, organisational hosts, and publishing outlets. Irish Catholic sociology’s quite sudden movement in the direction of secular sociology in the 1950s is explained as a result of normative pressure to jettison its value-driven orientation as a result of more frequent interaction with the mainstream discipline via scholarly collaboration, the reforms of Vatican II emphasising engagement with the modern world, the demise of the broader Catholic Action movement of which it was a part, and changes in the national higher education environment