Search Results (2)

Some of Spain’s greatest humanists—Juan Luis Vives, Antonio de Nebrija, Juan de Ávila, Luis de León, and Benito Arias Montano—were from a converso background. Recent scholarship suggests that two of the three most influential religious movements in sixteenth-century Spain—Juan de Ávila’s evangelical movement and Teresa of Ávila’s Barefoot Carmelites—were founded by conversos and presented converso membership, whose winds of religious innovation to tame Christian Orthodoxy and Counter-Reformation Spanish society, through the influence of Italian Humanism and reform, prioritized spiritual practice, social toleration, and religious concord. Indeed, Santa Teresa de Ávila, a major innovator within the Spanish Church, was herself from a converso family with Jewish ancestry. She became a key female theologist who transcended as an identity marker of the Spanish Baroque, conceived as quintessential of the Spanish Golden Age. Coopted in different periods, she “reappeared” in the 1930s as Patron of the Sección Femenina de la Falange y de las JONS, the women’s branch of the new radical right, turning into a role model of femininity for highly conservative religious women. Consecrated as “Santa de la Raza”, she became the undisputable womanized icon of the so-called “Spanish Crusade”, the slogan which General F. Franco implemented, with the approval of the Spanish Catholic Church, to re-cast in a pseudo-theological narrative the rebellion against the Spanish Second Republic in July 1936. This article examines different appropriations of the figure of Teresa de Ávila as a pillar of “Hispanidad”, in the last centuries within the changing sociopolitical contexts and theological debates in which this instrumentalization appeared. By highlighting the plasticity of this converso figure, the article suggests possible lines of research regarding the Jewish origins of some national icons in Spain. Full article

Music festivals are often high-risk settings associated with large numbers of visitors and high alcohol intoxication levels, which contribute to a number of public health-related problems. According to the Swedish Alcohol Act, servers are responsible for not overserving alcohol to obviously intoxicated patrons. The aim of the current study was to examine compliance to the Swedish Alcohol Act at music festivals by assessing the rate of alcohol overserving to festival-goers. We conducted a study at a large music festival in Sweden hosting approximately 50,000 visitors. Professional actors, i.e., pseudo-patrons, enacted a standardized scene in which a highly intoxicated festival-goer attempted to buy beer at licensed premises inside the festival. Observers monitored each attempt. A total of 52 purchase attempts were conducted. The rate of overserving was 26.9% and was not influenced by the server’s gender, the number of servers, or the level of crowdedness at the bar area. Overserving differed between server age groups, which was not statistically significant when controlling for other factors. Compliance to the Alcohol Act at the festival can be improved. Intoxication levels and related problems can be reduced by implementing a multicomponent intervention including staff training, policy work, and improved enforcement. Full article