Fabricating Bernardin

How Not to Write About the Cardinal & His Time

Peter Steinfels May 9, 2011 - 10:23am

Few tools in the historian’s kit are as fundamental as periodization. By naming distinct stretches of time, historians give shape to history’s flow: the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Exploration (or, alternatively, of Colonization), the Age of Democratic Revolutions, the Age of Anxiety.

As those names suggest, periodization always carries interpretive, even ideological, baggage. One person’s Enlightenment is someone else’s Age of Absolutism. John W. O’...

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Topics: 
Priesthood
Priesthood
Religious Life
Sexual-abuse Crisis
Theology
U.S. Catholicism

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About the Author

Peter Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal, is co-director of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture. He wrote the "Beliefs" column for the New York Times from 1990 to 2010.

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