'le christianisme est etrange' - Pascal, Pensees
Pascal's assertion that 'Christianity is strange', provides the theme for Richard Parish's exploration of Catholic particularity, as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals, catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic and spiritual autobiography. Parish examines a broad cross-section of this corpus with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language, discernment, polemics and...