My dissertation draws on a range of historical sources collected from 15 archives in 10 cities and 3 countries (France, USA, Israel) to analyze what motivated bishops’ original support for Vichy anti-Semitism, as well as their defections from this stance two years later. In turn, they delegitimized the Vichy regime and organized Catholic efforts to save Jews in France. However, two years later, in August 1942, a subset of bishops defected from this stance to protest on behalf of Jews. Paving the way for increasing discrimination, French bishops’ decisions helped legitimize Vichy for civilians who looked to their religious leaders as moral authorities.
In August 1940, the French Catholic Church decided to formally endorse the Vichy regime’s first anti-Semitic legislation, the Statut des Juifs.
My dissertation elucidates the social organization of apprenticeship in these seemingly personal practices, and examines the constitutive role of learning to practice in transmitting shared understandings of the self, of spirituality and of the ‘good life.’
In addition to their growing popularity, these organizations share a commitment to helping members acquire and maintain disciplined spiritual practices – Centering Prayer and Hatha Yoga, respectively. In this project, I examine the dialectical relationship between practice and identity between the process of acquisition and the process of becoming. To do so, I analyze the process spiritual formation in what Robert Wuthnow calls “practice-oriented spiritualities.” Despite a growing body of research documenting the deeply social nature of contemporary spirituality and spiritual practice, little has been written about processes socialization in this emerging field. My dissertation brings these processes into relief drawing on more than two years of fieldwork, forty-five in-depth interviews and participatory immersion in two spiritual communities: a Catholic prayer house and an Integral Yoga Institute.
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