Prospettive italiane sul Dizionario critico della Chiesa

The Dictionnaire critique de l’Église  is the result of a collective effort over several years that has brought together the forces active in the social sciences of religions that gravitate around the EHESS in Paris. In a hundred or so articles, constituting as many angles of approach, the authors have attempted to define this complex social object, very diverse in its chronological and geographical dispersion, which is the Church - not as a specific denomination but the Church as an all-encompassing social form. Well aware of the situated nature of their point of view, the authors aspire to dialogue with representatives of other historiographical traditions, in order to identify points of convergence and possible differences in approach, as they have shaped by the ways in which the field of religious sciences has been constituted in each area linguistic and cultural areas. From this point of view, Rome was an inevitable destination: which other city is more closely identified with the ecclesial phenomenon, not only because of the presence of the governing bodies of the Latin Church, but especially for the concentration of research institutions with strong theological, ecclesiological and critical identities? Discussing with Italian colleagues both the project overall design of the dictionary as well as some groups of articles organised around structuring themes, we would like to strengthen the conceptual exchange between theology and the social sciences, an exchange that will be all the more fruitful the more it is free of concessions.