Rance, Eleanor and Snape, Michael (2021) 'Anglicans and Aviators: The First World War and the Forgotten Origins of Royal Air Force Chaplaincy.', Journal of Religious History, 45 (2). pp. 257-279.
Abstract
Nineteen-eighteen saw the formation of the world’s first independent air force, and the inauguration of the first independent chaplaincy organisation devoted to military aviation. However, the neglected creation of the Chaplains’ Branch of the Royal Air Force towards the end of the First World War represents far more than just a minor footnote in the institutional history of Britain’s armed forces. The circumstances of its creation, which occurred just as the German sociologist Max Weber was identifying scientific progress as driving the ineluctable ‘disenchantment of the world’, not only belied this famous sociological maxim in the highly technological and supremely modern context of aerial warfare but also demonstrated the competence of Anglican chaplaincy methods and the resilience of British ‘Christendom’ in the context of a war which is widely perceived as having exposed and exacerbated the weaknesses of both.
Item Type: | Article |
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Full text: | Publisher-imposed embargo (AM) Accepted Manuscript File format - PDF (256Kb) |
Full text: | (VoR) Version of Record Available under License - Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Download PDF (Advance online version) (198Kb) |
Status: | Peer-reviewed |
Publisher Web site: | https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9809.12731 |
Publisher statement: | © 2021 The Authors. Journal of Religious History published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Religious History Association. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Date accepted: | 02 November 2020 |
Date deposited: | 22 February 2021 |
Date of first online publication: | 06 May 2021 |
Date first made open access: | 20 May 2021 |
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