Overview

In early twentieth-century France, a vast network of artists, writers, and religious seekers were drawn to Roman Catholicism's elaborate panoply of symbols centered on suffering. A preoccupation with affliction dominated the movement now known as the French Catholic revival, or the renouveau catholique-considered a watershed in the history of the modern Catholic Church and the ""golden age"" of French Catholicism. In Sacred Dread, Brenna Moore examines the life and writings of Raissa Maritain (1883-1960), one of the few women to contribute to this intellectual movement. Moore explores the reasons why Maritain, a nonpracticing Jew, was attracted to this suffering-centered theological imagination and how she and other advocates transformed it in the wake of the Holocaust. Sacred Dread offers readers a new understanding of a radical Catholic piety that was embraced by a wide range of pre-war intellectuals. By combining late-modern French intellectual and cultural history, Catholic theology, biography, and an analysis of Maritain's published and unpublished writings, Moore also identifies two major factors in this Catholic revival-gender and Judaism-that have not received adequate attention. Discourses of femininity and Judaism were central to the French Catholic articulation and idealization of suffering. Moore argues that Maritain, as a Jewish convert and one of the few women in this intellectual community, embodied symbolic associations of suffering, holiness, women, and Jews; indeed, for her husband, godfather, confessors, friends, and godchildren, Raissa Maritain was herself the articulation of this abject ideal. Caught as she was in a web of meaning, Raissa Maritain was an intellectual whose legacy deepens but also subverts the centrality of femininity and Judaism in French Catholic elaborations of suffering.

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Reviews

A great satisfaction of Sacred Dread is that it is about far more than its proximate subject of Raissa Maritain. Moore also confronts methodological issues challenging historians and scholars of religious history today, such as how agents negotiate the power and limits of discourses and available identity positions. --Journal of the American Academy of Religion Sacred Dread is both a historically informed and theologically acute account of Raissa Maritain's poetry, mysticism, and friendships . . . [and] an indispensable study of a luminous moment in the history of 20th-century Catholicism. --Theological Studies This elegant account of Raissa Maritain's contribution to the twentieth-century French Catholic revival helps to correct the imbalance in scholarly attention that has disproportionately favored her husband, often ignoring Raissa or treating her work as a mere extension of Jacques's project. Moore instead repositions Raissa's as a central voice in the turn-of-the-century revival that saw an unprecedented wave of French intellectuals convert to Catholicism at the very moment when the Republic was systematically dismantling the Church's legal privileges. --Modern Intellectual History Sacred Dread is an ambitious and learned book written by a theologian steeped in the most recent historical scholarship on French Catholicism and France in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in the current feminist historical scholarship on religion and gender. . . . Moore's historical sensitivity and her ability to evoke and illuminate key moments in twentieth-century French Catholic (and Jewish) history ought to make the book of considerable interest to historians of modern French Catholicism and twentieth-century France. --H-France Review Sacred Dread is a remarkable achievement, especially considering it is the author's first book. It weaves history, biography and theology together in a profoundly captivating narrative that is both interesting and inspiring . . . Though the theme of suffering may no longer exercise the same allure on spiritual practice and theological thinking, it remains a constitutive dimension of Christian identity. Moore's book and Maritain's life offer us a powerful reminder of this. --America Magazine

Sacred Dread is a remarkable achievement, especially considering it is the author's first book. It weaves history, biography and theology together in a profoundly captivating narrative that is both interesting and inspiring . . . Though the theme of suffering may no longer exercise the same allure on spiritual practice and theological thinking, it remains a constitutive dimension of Christian identity. Moore's book and Maritain's life offer us a powerful reminder of this. --America Magazine Sacred Dread is an ambitious and learned book written by a theologian steeped in the most recent historical scholarship on French Catholicism and France in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in the current feminist historical scholarship on religion and gender. . . . Moore's historical sensitivity and her ability to evoke and illuminate key moments in twentieth-century French Catholic (and Jewish) history ought to make the book of considerable interest to historians of modern French Catholicism and twentieth-century France. --H-France Review A great satisfaction of Sacred Dread is that it is about far more than its proximate subject of Ra�ssa Maritain. Moore also confronts methodological issues challenging historians and scholars of religious history today, such as how agents negotiate the power and limits of discourses and available identity positions. --Journal of the American Academy of Religion Sacred Dread is both a historically informed and theologically acute account of Ra�ssa Maritain's poetry, mysticism, and friendships . . . [and] an indispensable study of a luminous moment in the history of 20th-century Catholicism. --Theological Studies This elegant account of Ra�ssa Maritain's contribution to the twentieth-century French Catholic revival helps to correct the imbalance in scholarly attention that has disproportionately favored her husband, often ignoring Ra�ssa or treating her work as a mere extension of Jacques's project. Moore instead repositions Ra�ssa's as a central voice in the turn-of-the-century revival that saw an unprecedented wave of French intellectuals convert to Catholicism at the very moment when the Republic was systematically dismantling the Church's legal privileges. --Modern Intellectual History

This elegant account of Raissa Maritain's contribution to the twentieth-century French Catholic revival helps to correct the imbalance in scholarly attention that has disproportionately favored her husband, often ignoring Raissa or treating her work as a mere extension of Jacques's project. Moore instead repositions Raissa's as a central voice in the turn-of-the-century revival that saw an unprecedented wave of French intellectuals convert to Catholicism at the very moment when the Republic was systematically dismantling the Church's legal privileges. -- Modern Intellectual History Sacred Dread is both a historically informed and theologically acute account of Raissa Maritain's poetry, mysticism, and friendships . . . [and] an indispensable study of a luminous moment in the history of 20th-century Catholicism. -- Theological Studies Sacred Dread is an ambitious and learned book written by a theologian steeped in the most recent historical scholarship on French Catholicism and France in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in the current feminist historical scholarship on religion and gender. . . . Moore's historical sensitivity and her ability to evoke and illuminate key moments in twentieth-century French Catholic (and Jewish) history ought to make the book of considerable interest to historians of modern French Catholicism and twentieth-century France. -- H-France Review Sacred Dread is a remarkable achievement, especially considering it is the author's first book. It weaves history, biography and theology together in a profoundly captivating narrative that is both interesting and inspiring . . . Though the theme of suffering may no longer exercise the same allure on spiritual practice and theological thinking, it remains a constitutive dimension of Christian identity. Moore's book and Maritain's life offer us a powerful reminder of this. -- America Magazine A great satisfaction of Sacred Dread is that it is about far more than its proximate subject of Raissa Maritain. Moore also confronts methodological issues challenging historians and scholars of religious history today, such as how agents negotiate the power and limits of discourses and available identity positions. -- Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Sacred Dread is a remarkable achievement, especially considering it is the author's first book. It weaves history, biography and theology together in a profoundly captivating narrative that is both interesting and inspiring . . . Though the theme of suffering may no longer exercise the same allure on spiritual practice and theological thinking, it remains a constitutive dimension of Christian identity. Moore's book and Maritain's life offer us a powerful reminder of this. --America Magazine A great satisfaction of Sacred Dread is that it is about far more than its proximate subject of Raissa Maritain. Moore also confronts methodological issues challenging historians and scholars of religious history today, such as how agents negotiate the power and limits of discourses and available identity positions. --Journal of the American Academy of Religion Sacred Dread is an ambitious and learned book written by a theologian steeped in the most recent historical scholarship on French Catholicism and France in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as in the current feminist historical scholarship on religion and gender. . . . Moore's historical sensitivity and her ability to evoke and illuminate key moments in twentieth-century French Catholic (and Jewish) history ought to make the book of considerable interest to historians of modern French Catholicism and twentieth-century France. --H-France Review Sacred Dread is both a historically informed and theologically acute account of Raissa Maritain's poetry, mysticism, and friendships . . . [and] an indispensable study of a luminous moment in the history of 20th-century Catholicism. --Theological Studies This elegant account of Raissa Maritain's contribution to the twentieth-century French Catholic revival helps to correct the imbalance in scholarly attention that has disproportionately favored her husband, often ignoring Raissa or treating her work as a mere extension of Jacques's project. Moore instead repositions Raissa's as a central voice in the turn-of-the-century revival that saw an unprecedented wave of French intellectuals convert to Catholicism at the very moment when the Republic was systematically dismantling the Church's legal privileges. --Modern Intellectual History

Author Information

Brenna Moore is assistant professor of theology at Fordham University.

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