Kindred Spirits takes us inside a remarkable network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe and the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. With meticulous attention to the complexity of real lives, Brenna Moore explores how this group sought a middle way anchored in "spiritual friendship"-religiously meaningful friendship understood as uniquely capable of facing social and political challenges.

For this group, spiritual friendship was inseparable from resistance to European xenophobia and nationalism, anti-racist activism in the United States, and solidarity with Muslims during the Algerian War. Friendship, they believed, was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. Some of the figures are still well known-philosopher Jacques Maritain, Nobel Prize laureate Gabriela Mistral, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon, poet of the Harlem renaissance Claude McKay-while others have unjustly faded from memory. Much more than an idealized portrait of a remarkable group of Catholic intellectuals from the past, Kindred Spirits is a compelling exploration of both the beauty and flaws of a vibrant social network worth remembering.

About the Author

Brenna Moore is associate professor of theology at Fordham University. She is the author of Sacred Dread: Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival.

Reviews
"Scholars of religion will benefit immensely from thinking with Kindred Spirits for its epistemological implications and they will see the twentieth century with new eyes because of its historiographical interventions. . . . In Moore's hands, spiritual friendship has implications for how we think of gender, race, ideas, and colonialism in the context of the modern." * Political Theology *
"An incredibly rich, insightful, and nuanced book. It's intellectual and political history, but also history of spirituality and of Catholic views on family, marriage, and sexuality, that opens a new chapter in the way we understand 20th-century Catholicism." * American Catholic Historical Association *
"Kindred Spirits, through an exploration of spiritual friendships and political activism within Catholicism during the tumultuous 1930s and 1940s, offers a rare glimpse into Catholic spirituality in the twentieth century. Drawing from the margins of the institutional church, Brenna Moore reveals the life-giving sustenance of Catholicity or
all-embracing universality. Abjuring Nazism and European colonialism, the men and women depicted in Kindred Spirits portray a more humane and multicultural world." * Journal of Contemporary History *
"Kindred Spirits offers a vivid and venturesome alternative to histories of Catholicism in modernity that are white, male, sexless, and European, even as it situates its readings, remarkably, within the same Catholicism: colonial, dominated by men, and recalcitrant on questions of sexuality. Beautiful and rich, this book will speak powerfully to those who wonder how in the world we were connected to one another before the internet, and what forms of intimacy we have lost from ceasing by and large to cultivate them." * Tracy Fessenden, Arizona State University *
"Passionate spiritual relationships have never been treated with the depth of insight, the warmth, or the empathy displayed in Kindred Spirits, a work that is attentive to both the profound joy and the "jealousies and grief" that sometimes "hovered around the edge of these bonds." Kindred Spirits is also rich in implications for better understanding personal relationships in contemporary spiritual practice." * James T. Fisher, Fordham University *
"Kindred Spirits recovers the lost world of 'spiritual friendships' that stimulated Catholic intellectual resistance to the horrors of the twentieth-century. It is a brilliant and brave book, beautifully researched, and a model for how to write the history of the emotions and the 'personal' without losing sight of the largest questions." * Ruth Harris, All Souls' College, Oxford *
"Kindred Spirits is a very fine work on 'Spiritual Friendship' in the life and thought of French Catholics in their encounter with the modern world. Moore demonstrates in a series of detailed and well researched studies the creative theological, cultural, and political endeavor of French Catholicism as a significant legacy of the twentieth century. However, Moore clearly signposts the abiding importance of this rich and complex contribution of French Catholicism to our own times and challenges." -- Anthony O'Mahony, University of Oxford
"This beautiful and important book resituates friendship in the mid-twentieth-century Catholic world where it has always belonged: in the very center." * Theological Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9780226787015
Author Brenna Moore
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 481g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 43mm