Articles varia
- BOLARD Laurent - L’ange passeur de seuil
- BAUBEROT Arnaud - De la vie sainte à la vie saine. Hygiène et sport dans les mouvements de jeunesse protestants (1890-1914)
- BOURDEAUX Pascal - Note sur une lettre inédite de HÔ CHI MINH à un pasteur français (8 septembre 1921) ou l’art de porter la contradiction à l’évangélisation
- BOURGINE Benoît - L’avenir d’une subversion. L’humanisme évangélique à l’heure de la modernité liquide
- SCHLUMBERGER Laurent - Témoins d’une confiance contagieuse
- SIEGWALT Gérard - Le défi du baptême. Une mise en perspective « œcuménique »
The threshold is a central spatial element of the Annunciation in fifteen century Italian painting. Specifically related to the angel Gabriel – as he is the one moving across – it appears to be at once unique and manifold. Laurent Bolard argues that it remains the major link between the two protagonists of the scene and that it shifts from space to time in the theology of the Annunciation.
From the late 1880s to World War I, protestant youth movements were deeply committed to the promotion of sports and social hygiene. Arnaud Baubérot shows how this new interest for the body was explicitly related to the religious agenda of these movements, the maintenance of a healthy body so partaking of one’s personal devotion. What motivated this commitment, however, was less a renewed attention to the body than a redefinition of the place it was to hold in religious life and in the economy of salvation.
During his stay in Paris (1919-1923) Nguyễn Ái Quốc overtly supported the struggle against colonization and looked for various strategic allies before drawing closer to the French Communist Party. In 1921 he heard from a group of French Protestants who hoped to undertake an exploratory mission in Indochina. In a letter addressed to Ulysse Soulier, the pastor pioneering the enterprise, Nguyễn Ái Quốc deemed the missionary project to be valuable in itself but warned the French clergyman that using evangelisation as an accomplice to colonisation would be at odds with his own religious principles. Pascal Bourdeaux shows how this letter – published as an appendix – highlights at once the intellectual development of the future Hồ Chí Minh, the various origins of Vietnamese Protestantism, and the French Protestant debates about colonization and evangelization.
In this essay Benoît Bourgine discusses Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Ellul’s accounts of the future of Christianity. Arguing that the contemporary propensity toward unsteadiness in social relationships hastens the fading away of hereditary or sociological forms of religious belonging in favor of reflexive acts of faith, he pleads for an evangelical humanism whose source he finds at the juncture of experience, intelligence and desire.
While secularised societies produce an increased variety of spiritual trajectories for individuals, they intensely challenge the instituting role that used to be commonly assigned to churches. In this essay, Laurent Schlumberger invites Christian communities to look at this situation as an opportunity to reappraise the biblical figure of the witness in the light of its religious and social significance.
Agreements on baptism between different churches do not always lead to their mutual recognition. As a means to overwhelm this situation, Gérard Siegwalt examines the theological issues at stake in recent ecumenical discussions about baptism and suggests that a higher level of discussion will be reached if baptism is approached in the light of its existential meaning and reality.